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."
That's the fat lady clearing her throat.
Strangely enough, now I want to hear from Enderle and D'Idiot. I want to hear them whine about the unfainess of it all, how these saints were ridden out of town on a rail when their cause was just. I want to hear them tell the tale of the briefcase with millions of lines of copied code was pilfered from SCO's case in the thick of night.
And then I want them to vanish into ignominy.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Yep. It'll be fascinating to see how O'Gara twists this into an SCO victory, and helps further their appeal.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Seriously. What assets do they have left that are worth selling? Patents? Software? I am sure there are still SCO shops around so there might be some interest in Unix Ware, Open Server etc. But how profitable will it be after everyone jumps the SCO ship to other platforms that aren't in danger of becoming unsupported?
All in all, good riddance.
"Strangely enough, now I want to hear from Enderle and D'Idiot. I want to hear them whine about the unfainess of it all, how these Latter Day Saints were ridden out of town on a rail when their cause was just. I want to hear them tell the tale of the briefcase with millions of lines of copied code was pilfered from SCO's case in the thick of night."
They'll probably have to drive a stake through the corporate charter to make SCO stay dead.
Don't worry. The SCO execs still made their money and are most likely very comfortable. Shame they never got investigated for insider trading when they started dumping their own stock, while filing waves of lawsuits, or is that legal? IP was the last leg their company had to stand on, and that was a shaky one at best. It is kind of sad that it took them this long to finally burn through all their cash on lawyers. Couldn't they have just called it a day and given the money to charity or something or maybe tried to reinvest in a new venture? Clearly they didn't see any sort of long term future for SCO. Does any still even actively license their craptacular "Unix" from them?
zosxavius photography
Allow me to say, it's about damn time.
One year, four months since I submitted this frontpaged Slashdot article about SCO being delisted from NASDAQ: http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/27/1438204
I must ask again... is the wicked witch finally dead, YET?!
(Captcha: Circus. How. Very. Appropriate.)
...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.
That's too big to fail, but SCO's too fail to bail.
Totally different.
...to pay your $699 licensing fee you cock smoking teabaggers!
Seriously. What assets do they have left that are worth selling? Patents? Software?
Well, sometimes you have to consider that the 'best' return on your investment is to 'render that horse' into dog food and glue. SCO has seemingly passed up both of those viable options in the hope of a MS type miracle, and failed.
Haul that dead horse to the rendering plant, and finally put it out of 'all of our miseries'!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Today's top story: In a bid to stave off bankruptcy, SCO Inc. has decided to sue everyone. That's right, everyone. SCO spokesman Seth Tuller says that 'everyone' will be served with court papers during lunch-time tomorrow. Tuller is quoting as saying, "Everyone owes us money, and everyone must pay." Stockholders are up in arms over this last minute bid to serve the entire world with a reverse class-action lawsuit, saying that the estimated $100 billion cost of doing so is just the latest in a long line of terrible decisions by company management.
In other news, the dancing penguin video has become the latest sensation to hit the web...
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
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
I think a sharpened wooden stake is called for at this point.
One of these days I'm moving to Theory - everything works there
There was a point in time when there was an SCO (probably prior to 7 buy outs and name transfers) that actually focused on technology. I remember when their product, in my opinion was the best UNIX desktop if for no other reason, but they had a control panel while everyone else still used configuration files. It was a dream being able to change screen resolution without having to restart X.
They also made some products in their Tarentella line which was a port of the Microsoft SMB stack and therefore was a MUCH MUCH better solution than the Samba of the time. In fact, management-wise, it might still be better. After all, when you can spend less time reverse engineering and hacking with compatibility problems you can spend more time on usability.
I guess that company is long gone and what's going bankrupt now is just some predators who attempted to capitalize off the accomplishments of the old SCO.
But Goodbye SCO. I miss you
But be honest, you KNOW this hand comes, don't you? I mean, how many zombie movies have you seen? You're actually pissed when it doesn't come. It's like sex without an orgasm when you're sitting there, the hero has his love interest in his arms and that fuckin' zombie stays just DEAD. "C'mon! Move!", you scream at the screen, "how can you let him get away with this without a last, feeble attempt to claw at him!"
I'd feel cheated if zombie Darl didn't at least try to move and lift four fingers to make that chapter 7 an 11 again.
I feel there's a 7-Eleven joke in there somewhere, if someone finds it, please inform me. Thanks.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
While we've been worrying about a small company trying to make money by patent trolling large ones, the Masters of the Universe held whole governments to ransom. Bernie Madoff's petty cash fund is probably bigger than the entire SCO case.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I'm sorry, but the question was if anyone still actively goes and buys a license.
E.g., given the state of IP in Russia or China, I can't possibly imagine that the Bank Of Russia (or for that matter the China Post) actually bought full price licenses for those 22,000 branches. Most likely they had copied it lots, and if they even have a license in the meantime, they probably got some _massively_ discounted blanket license as most companies sell for Russia, China, etc. That or it was some scam in which it was imported through the CEO's brother's ghost company and it was just a way to siphon some money into their private pockets.
E.g., those BMW service centres or the Deutsche Bahn, I don't imagine they still pay anything for that SCO Unix or designing new systems around it. Most likely they still have some legacy stuff from the 80's or early 90's, and it stays there just because nobody can be arsed to replace it with something newer. Or maybe it's the same I'll get to for McDonald.
Running McDonald restaurants? Now that really gets me thinking. It's not like a McDonald restaurant has its own computing centre at all. If they're that big on SCO Unix, why only in restaurants? And why not in all restaurants? Does McDonald have anything against a homogenous and easy to administrate network?
What this last one gets me to suspect is that it's really more along the lines of "whatever embedded OS came with those cashier machines." Roll that around in your head a bit.
What that really tells me is that McDonald doesn't actually give a flying fuck about SCO Unix as such. They just have a bunch of cashier machines which incidentally came with SCO on them. But they wouldn't give a rat's arse about whether it's SCO or Linux or some embedded version of Windows or some refurbished thing based on OS/2, as long as it still talks the same protocols to the rest of their network.
And they probably won't shed one tear for SCO. Whoever manufactures those terminals will just switch to something else and McDonald won't even notice, nor care.
And it makes me wonder how many others on that list are essentially the same misleading claim. E.g., pharmacies? I don't imagine many either (A) actually implementing any meaningful computer centre in the back, or (B) actually choosing SCO for that. Most likely, again, it was whatever embedded crap came with their cashier machines. They'll keep them happily untilt they stop working at all, then replace them with some other machine that talks to the same protocol, and probably don't even know they run SCO at all.
Same for probably a lot of other retailers, since SCO seems to hype that.
I'm sorry, but that doesn't equal "actively licensing their craptacular Unix." In reality the only ones who actually actively licensed SCO there were the one or maybe two manufacturers of those cashier machines, and even those probably just because they got some old 16 bit version for peanuts.
And I'd be surprised if any of those would _still_ go and license SCO for a new machine, since the word "still" was in the GP's question too. Most likely it's something they licensed a decade or two ago, and never thought about it ever since.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
SCO had the lead in Unix on x86 hardware and apparently were used widely in certain sectors.
No, they most certainly did not.
Santa Cruz Operation had the lead in Unix on x86 hardware.
"The SCO Group", which is the company we're talking about, was a failed Linux vendor who called itself "SCO" after they decided to file baseless lawsuits.
The sad thing is that once upon a time, they provided a Unix variant (Xenix),
No, they didn't. That was the Santa Cruz Operation, or SCO, of Santa Cruz California, which did that. They are now named "Tarantella", and are still in business as far as I know.
The company in this article is "The SCO Group", of Linden, Utah, formerly named "Caldera" (of Linux fame).
Caldera bought some assets from old-SCO, renamed themselves "The SCO Group", and that's who they are now. They have never been the same company as the one that made Xenix, or had any of the same people.