Slashdot Mirror
US Trustee Asks To Send SCO Into Chapter 7
Several readers including Pop69 inform us that the US Trustee's office has asked to convert SCO's Chapter 11 bankruptcy to Chapter 7 — a.k.a. liquidation. Groklaw has the text of the filing: "...not only is there no reasonable chance of 'rehabilitation' in these cases, the Debtors have tried — and failed — to liquidate their business in chapter 11."
Don't be so mean: SCO has an iPhone App! and an e-postcard service! That would have been worth, like, a billion dollars in VC play money back before the bubble burst...
...where would SCO be today if it hadn't started filing lawsuits? Sure, it wouldn't have had that cash infusion from Microsoft, but what was the state of that company and where was it headed prior to the suits? Would SCO still be a respected Unix vendor?
I don't understand, their reality distortion field has got to be worth millions in it's own right. Nice thing about chapter 7 is they have to auction /everything/. I wonder if you can buy their data and load up their servers to see what they were really thinking. Perhaps someone can buy whatever rights they thought they had and donate everything to the FSF.
"Perhaps someone can buy whatever rights they thought they had and donate everything to the FSF."
Where is Bruce? More importantly, where is his checkbook? He likes to buy stuff.
Seems like the office supplies, the inventory of their soda machine, and the desk chairs might the most valuable assets the company has. DIAF, SCO.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Hey, didn't judge kimball have novell's money set aside in a constructive trust?
I hope someone at SCO gets nailed for contempt.
Novell has probably got to be mega POed right now.
Let's not forget to archive the materials they have published (mostly as Caldera). There is some useful information there.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I wonder...where would SCO be today if it hadn't started filing lawsuits?
Same place, chapter 7.
They knew they were tanking and that's why they did this hail mary "let's sue IBM" nonsense. Their UN*X product was not spectacular. They didn't really offer anything unique or give any compelling reasons to do any business with them.
People do this sort of thing all the time. There is something nearly universal in the human psyche that says that it makes sense to spend your last five bucks to buy a lottery ticket.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
... when they started suing everybody who did anything SONET (including our company) over potential infringements of their patents. (I got dragged in because a chip I had co-architected included a SONET-like framer and some other telecom carrier framer stuff.)
When the company is sinking and the management is grabbing any floating debris that might keep their heads above water, the patent portfolio that USED to be just for protection against suits from others suddenly becomes a potential cash cow. (Or an inflatable life raft to continue the previous metaphor.) And a technology company starts taking on the appearance of a patent troll operation.
Of course in SCO's case it looks like the patent trolls bought into the sinking company so they could use it for trolling...
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Ironically, Yes. The Zales corporation...yes, the jewelry company, still uses an SCO system for their in-store terminal system. Maybe this will force them to update their systems to something more advanced than the current Circa 1989 software they're running.
Warning: Corny karma killing post above.
fuck that, make it a goatse mirror! ;)
the funny thing is..... SCO is like a zombie. Just when you think it's dead, a hand reaches from under the bed and grabs your leg.
It'll take a shotgun to the face to get rid of SCO. (a.k.a buy the trademark and all SCO's IP and release it all under creative commons / GPL / public domain....)
While I'm certainly no fan of SCO, in The Real World you use what works. If it still works, there's no need to replace it. Here's the thing about IMS about related systems: they solve what's largely understood to be a "known domain" of problems. You can still use third-party systems to link the central DBs to more modern systems if your business rules change, but the basics of managing inventory and keeping sales records haven't changed since pencil-and-paper ledgers.
Short version: If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Seriously. What assets do they have left that are worth selling? Patents? Software?
The way this works is that the Bankruptcy Trustee brings in an auction house. Assets like intellectual property and lawsuits are usually handled directly by the Trustee. The auction house handles the physical assets.
There's a whole food chain in Silicon Valley for disposing of defunct companies. Action Computer buys up many of the old PCs, the ones that work. Weird Stuff Warehouse buys up old networking gear and miscellaneous electronics. Consolidated Office Distributors buys much of the furniture (Their warehouse in San Jose looks like the one from Raiders of the Lost Ark, only bigger. That's where many of the Aeron chairs from the dot-com boom ended up.) There's a place in San Jose that buys steel shelving. Quickly, the office buildings and factories are cleaned out, cleaned up, and put on the market.
To hell with Zales' POS systems. McDonalds is a MAJOR user of SCO Unix, and they just keep growing.
Maybe they'll buy-up the IP rights for in-house development, or spin-off a small company to maintain it for their own needs and make a bit of money off selling to others at the same time...
Or maybe their contract works out better if they go out of business, then McD gets the software, with full source code, and unlimited rights, automatically. Who knows?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I wonder when they will come banging on the door of senior SCO managers who performed insider trading. Also, it wouldn't amaze me if they follow the cash donation (that $500.000.000 they got from Microsoft) back to the source and start asking some very nasty questions over there.
SEC's arguments: competition fraud, misleading shareholders, inciting forgery of papers, inciting abuse of the judicial system.
When will that RICO act be invoked against Microsoft by the SEC?
In the real world it's also incredibly fun to watch the scramble when some ancient system nobody knows, supports or maintains goes postal, if you're not responsible for fixing it. Maybe it's nothing more than the inventory hitting more than MAX_INT items or whatever, but the day production is down and keeps going down every time you bring it up someone will wish they had a vendor to scream at.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
My grandfather's business, a steel yard in West Virginia, uses a Unix server that runs SCO. I've told him about the law suit, but they'll probably continue to run it until it's no longer supported.
There's probably a number of small businesses like his, that started using SCO back in the day, and never bothered to learn about their comparatively recent legal troubles.
Service contracts and customer lists. There are a stack of fiscal and paperwork handling companies that used OpenServer for relatively inexpensive x86 based servers, for years, and wrote very important in-house toolkits on which their companies are founded. I had a long chat with a corporate partner 3 years ago about exactly this, because SCO hardware compatibility seriously lagged anything that wasn't in bankruptcy. They chose to stay with their existing software environment rather than do a complete database migration in a ruch, and have been engaged in a very careful and cautious code cleanup, to get their toolchain under source control and virtualization, so that they can retain access to old data and old environments, while they build a new environment. With that careful toolchain migration and cleanup, they're _much_ better off than they would have been migrating in one giant leap 3 years ago, and are ready to select their next major OS, whether that be OpenServer or Solaris or any other OS that's obviously about to go out of business.
OK, I'm kidding, but they remain unconvinced that any Linux OS is stable enough. And they've got a point with Linux's eagerness to embrace new toolkits and utilities. For companies with 30 year mortgages, database stability rules over database performance and new features.
There is apparently some actual compoetent open source work for SCO systems, over at http://aplawrence.com/cgi-bin/indexget.pl?OSR5. This site was an important resource for their cleanup work, especially the notes on VMware and on getting open source tools like gcc and SSH and HTTPD to work properly. Mr. Lawrence is real open source and freeware champion doing very difficult work and deserves all the paying work and support we can send his way. (I had a harsh argument with my corporate partner friend, saying that he should be cutting Mr. Lawrence a _big_ check.)
Yeah, raise the price of everything to 20-40% over market value, so it can be offered at a 10-20% discount off the "original price".
The job of the liquidators is to get as much as possible as quickly as possible for the stock being liquidated. Not to build a good reputation with customers.
So if such slimy tactics are legal in your region IMO it would be negligent of the liquidators not to use them.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register