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."

28 of 259 comments (clear)

  1. Ahem. Ahem. by symbolset · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.
  2. Liquify what? by LoRdTAW · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Liquify what? by Culture20 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Liquify what?

      Their lawyers? Chief Officers? A company might be able to make some soylent green and make a profit.

    2. Re:Liquify what? by nairnr · · Score: 5, Informative
      Everything! Furniture, chairs, computers, bookcases. You name it, it goes. This is not so anyone can reorganize it into anything meaningful, this is so creditors get every last stinking dime out of them.

      If you have ever been to a liquidation of a store, after they sell you what is left on the racks, they sell you the racks,display cases, lights, left over toilet paper...

    3. Re:Liquify what? by Devout_IPUite · · Score: 4, Funny

      Sell the patents to another patent troll company. Duh.

    4. Re:Liquify what? by Animats · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    5. Re:Liquify what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      And guess who is going to buy all the chairs...

  3. Where's Darl now? by ZosX · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Where's Darl now? by lgftsa · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It is kind of sad that it took them this long to finally burn through all their cash on lawyers.

      That would be Novell's money you smell burning...

    2. Re:Where's Darl now? by evilviper · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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
    3. Re:Where's Darl now? by dbIII · · Score: 4, Informative

      An important thing to remember is that Darl McBride's brother was one of those lawyers getting truckloads of cash. I still see it as a two man scam where the company was deliberately driven into the brick wall of IBM and then the repair work contracted out to the driver's brother.

    4. Re:Where's Darl now? by Kjella · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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
  4. I wonder... by erroneus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...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?

    1. Re:I wonder... by countach · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Sure they were a respected UNIX vendor. They were the only serious choice at one time for Intel, and then they "owned" (sort of) the original UNIX rights. Doesn't mean they were the best or most wonderful or impressive vendor, but they were a serious vendor.

    2. Re:I wonder... by PCM2 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      ...and it had customers. Even if SCO's products and services were worthless, its customer base alone would still have been valuable enough for some other Unix vendor (say, HP) to buy it out.

      --
      Breakfast served all day!
    3. Re:I wonder... by Lorien_the_first_one · · Score: 4, Informative

      Your points are well taken. But discovery, months of discovery, showed that there was no stolen code. There were also some other trigger events that eventually released IBM from the partnership (I can't remember all the details, but they include change of ownership, expiration dates, etc.). In the end, there was really no evidence of wrong-doing on the part of IBM. In fact, well before the lawsuits, IBM made many statements of its intentions and followed through with no objection from SCO.

      This is all very well documented at www.groklaw.net and available for your reading.

      --
      The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
  5. I dont understand by onyxruby · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:Taking bets by hedwards · · Score: 4, Funny

    That's too big to fail, but SCO's too fail to bail.

    Totally different.

  7. Don't forget... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...to pay your $699 licensing fee you cock smoking teabaggers!

  8. Today's top story by Anenome · · Score: 4, Funny

    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"
  9. Save Their Publications by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  10. Same place, most likely by Weaselmancer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  11. Just like I knew Nortel was in trouble ... by Ungrounded+Lightning · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ... 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
  12. Re:How long has it really been? by uvajed_ekil · · Score: 4, Funny
    The wicked witch may not be dead yet, but she has pneumonia, gangrene, a wicked case of uncontrolled syphilis, and a lazy eye. And H1N1 influenza. And no health insurance or VA benefits. Medicare has its limits. And her good eye is infected from pickin' at it...

    ...but I think she's more like the Annoying Witch really, as she was too inefective and irrelevant to ever really be all that wicked.

    --
    This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
  13. One more thing... by Timbotronic · · Score: 4, Funny

    I think a sharpened wooden stake is called for at this point.

    --

    One of these days I'm moving to Theory - everything works there

  14. I miss the old SCO by LostMyBeaver · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

  15. Re:Ahem. Ahem. by Opportunist · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.
  16. Re:Ahem. Ahem. by Grishnakh · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.