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."

Comments

I wonder...

[erroneus]

...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 dont understand

[onyxruby]

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.

Save Their Publications

[RAMMS EIN]

Let's not forget to archive the materials they have published (mostly as Caldera). There is some useful information there.

Same place, most likely

[Weaselmancer]

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.

Just like I knew Nortel was in trouble ...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

... 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...

Re:Liquify what?

[Animats]

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.

Re:Where's Darl now?

[evilviper]

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?

Re:Where's Darl now?

[Kjella]

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.