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Chapter 11 Trustee Appointed For SCO
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The judge overseeing the SCO Chapter 11 bankruptcy case has issued an order appointing a chapter 11 trustee to oversee SCO's operations. However, the judge's reasoning is far from clear. While the judge believes that SCO has 'abandoned rehabilitation' to bet its future on litigation, he doesn't think it appropriate to convert their case to Chapter 7 liquidation. So SCO's management hasn't been fired yet, but they're no longer fully in charge either. It's not clear why the bankruptcy judge opted for this solution, when even the US Trustee was pushing to fire SCO's management and convert the case to Chapter 7. In short, SCO is still only mostly dead, rather than all dead, and in desperate search of a miracle worker."
Please, whoever ends up acquiring SCO and their IP, set UnixWare and OpenServer free! Release the source code to both under a very liberal open source license. I hope Novell or whoever else has rights to the code could agree to that.
"Did you say to blathe? Well as everyone knows, to blathe means to bluff."
SCO bluffed, and got caught. Miracle Max only works for True Love, not To Blathe
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
...unless you're a lawyer. Look at the RIAA, SCO, et al. Their 'businesses' are all suffering while the lawyers laugh all the way to the bank.
It's a damn shame that the trial lawyer lobby is so strong.
"desperate search of a miracle worker." Well, we know who the 'miracle worker' would be; Ballmer. The question is, does he come to SCO's aid again?
Best regards.
3D Realms has announced post-reorganization merger plans with SCO Group. SCO shares were up $0.02/share for a gain of 10000% on the news that they would be suing themselves for non-performance.
You've been "mostly dead" all day...
Thank you for playing SCO.
please insert credits to continue........
Good people go to bed earlier.
They are... too big to fail... And thus the undead will always walk among you, feasting upon your virgin flesh, forever hungry.. MUHaHaHa
However, the judge's reasoning is far from clear.
Maybe this is the judge's way of putting a watchdog on 'em to make sure they don't run out the door with or (further) destroy the value of some of the remaining assets before things get settled?
(Not only am I NAL but I'm especially NA bankruptcy L.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
to keep that SCOkenstein (SCO Frankenstein) ventilated.
If he thinks the company is beyond rehabilitation, then if the effer is brain or lung dead (mostly dead, not fully dead per submitter?), pull the plug. Why keep SCOkenstein writhing or huckin' and buckin' on 5 amps and 200 volts when the skull-cracked hodge-podge needs (or wants) to neck-suckle on 40 amps and 50,000 volts. It's just keeping open doors to the court and a drain on public resources. (Tell them to go find a power transmission tower, bite it, & blacken their asses like toast. Maybe SCO should get into the energy deliver business?) What's SCO anyway these days? Seems like a twig or tumbleweed blowing around trying to snag something, or an alien husk awaiting seminal insemination to resurrection. Right now, they've got their damned terminals reversed.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I'm not a lawyer and by no means an expert on bankruptcy but as I understand it bankruptcy judges are generally very hesitant about converting Chapter 11 to Chapter 7 bankruptcies unless pretty much everyone thinks they should. The general attitude of the American bankruptcy system is that companies should generally be given pretty close to every opportunity to get out to the wholes they've gotten into and that we shouldn't start filling the dirt in over them unless we've got really good reasons. Note also that this doesn't mean that SCO won't go through chapter 7. It just means it isn't going through chapter 7 right now. It could still convert later if things show no sign of improvement.
Looks like that might be it.
According to the Wikipedia article on chapter 11, chapter 11 lets the company run either under a court-appointed trustee or the "debtor in posession", i.e. the original management acting as a trustee and operating under the same rules, behind the shield of the bankruptcy process. And:
Looks like the judge is saying that, while it isn't clear yet whether SCO will be able to emerge from chapter 11 as a viable business or will have to be liquidated under chapter 7, the current management is either grossly mismanaging the company or at least making it appear that they aren't doing as well for the interests of the creditors and stockholders as a trustee would.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
SCO "Cooooode.............I want to own your COOOOODE!!"
... Follow the money!
UBS in Switzerland.
I think the first point about bankruptcy court is that the debtors are given time to reorganize and to become viable and the creditors are given an opportunity to get some of the money they are owed paid back.
The Judge is saying the guys who were running SCO were not taking bankruptcy seriously. The Judge called them out for bleeding cash, wasting time, requesting and missing multiple extensions on the deadline for them to produce a reorganizing plan, and coming up with the half-baked sales agreements all predicated on, after the particular assets are sold, creditors paid off, and attorneys funded, if, the big vaporous if, there's litigation proceeds, then SCO's owners and managers do very well. When he referenced "Waiting for Godot" and SCO's management "waiting for the dough" and betting the company on litigation, I think he chose the Chapter 11 Trustee plan so that when the appeals in Novell are decided (it is suggested that that will be by Aug. 31) someone with a clear eye can look at that decision and decide if there's truly money for the estate in pursuit of the litigation or whether it's time to turn out the lights. In the decision he repeats SCO's assertion that customers will miss them and I think he does that not as an endorsement of SCO's position but to signal that there is a profitable going concern in the server products and somebody will be glad to be in that business, i.e., there will be a serious buyer.
Between the lines, I think he does not like what SCO's management has done by following the litigation business model and I further think he sees that the only way for the smaller creditors to get their money back is to put less sue-happy people in charge. I'm sure the judge was not pleased with the way some bills got paid by subsidiaries and how Darl McBride paid for one suitor/rainmaker out of his own pocket. SCO was racing the clock and the clock ran out.
As a resident of Santa Cruz, I would expect any authentic "Santa Cruz Operation" to involve growing plants.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The trustee has to investigate SCO's business. The trustee can decide that SCO's whole 'thing' is a fraud and has no chance of success. The trustee can settle all the cases out of court and on the terms that Novell and IBM dictate. That would put a quick end to the whole thing and Darl and company couldn't appeal the decision.
If SCO's assets were sold in chapter 7, there is a chance that the litigation would go on for years.
So, chapter 11 with a trustee might be better than chapter 7.
This particular SCO outfit has been smoking plants, not growing them.
Who?
Most people aren't thought about after they're gone. "I wonder where Rob got the plutonium" is better than most get.
SCO is not the Santa Cruz Operation.
The Santa Cruz Operation (aka oldSCO or Santa Cruz) sold their OS business to Caldera in 2001. Caldera then changed its name to "The SCO Group" (aka newSCO or the SCOundrels) allegedly to take advantage of the goodwill, but later events (the lawsuit) seem to indicate it was to sow confusion as to their identity.
Santa Cruz renamed itself to Tarantella after the sale. Tarantella was sold to Sun for $25M in July 2005.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
incentivized? WTF? What language do you normally speak? Martian?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
"Waiting for SCOdot"
SCO petitioned at the last minute for an administrator, with less power than a real trustee, to handle only selected parts of a full Chapter 11 proceeding. That's what they liked best. From Groklaw, no one seems to know if such an arrangement was even a legal option.
A chapter 7 with appointed trustee is what they would like least. That presumes there's no chance of the company ever reorganizing, and the goal is instead to pay off as many of the creditors as possible.
The judge gave them something in the middle - a standard chapter 11 ,which means he is holding out the chance that some purchase offer might be legitimate and SCO just might rise again.
If I'm ever facing 20 years in maximum security, I plan to claim house arrest with an ankle bracelet is quite reasonable and customary for whatever I did, and see if the judge will split the difference and give me 5 in minimum security. Who knows, it could work.
Who is John Cabal?
You cock-smoking tea-baggers!
It goes on and on my friends. Darl started it seven years ago, how it stops noone will ever know because ... (Repeat)
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Pretty much all of the creditors, as well as the US Trustee, were asking for Chapter 7. The judge said they had no viable business and the deals they've come out with were a sham.
So, basically, the judge's logic doesn't make any sense in this case. He realizes that they're betting the farm on litigation, which he says he's not competent to judge the viability of... so he hands that off to a trustee.
Hopefully, the trustee has some clue, but God only knows what will happen at this point. This is SCO. They have to be nuked from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Some Germans may be relieved another boogie man is taking the roll of "safe to ridicule and attack". I expect to see Darl and company show up as targets in many FPS games in the future. Even in the world of PC, blowing out the brainz of SCO executives and lawyers will be acceptable if not glorified.
Advert: Amazing enemies SCO throws at you next as they bring their dark fantasies to life.
"thousands of lines of stolen code in Linux..." *budda budda boom*
You can kill it, but as long as there is even a remote chace that money can be made it will be back in a sequel.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
I'm willing to give them a legit purchase offer. $100 for the whole thing. $200 if I can punch Darl in the face at closing.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
However, the judge's reasoning is far from clear.
My impression is that on the one hand he has SCO telling that they could win billions and billions of dollars from their lawsuits if the judge will just give them a chance, and on the other hand he has IBM, Novell and the US Trustee telling him "let's stick a fork in this turkey and call it done." And he knows neither side is impartial.
He probably thinks that, unless he wants to research the merits of SCO's case against IBM, Novell and the rest of the world, he can't make a reasonable evaluation of SCO's chances, nor is that his responsibility.
Therefore he chose the middle road. Leave SCO in Chapter 11, but assign a Trustee to run the business and evaluate SCO's business and legal prospects in their lawsuits.
Of course we know any tech-savvy Trustee will laugh at SCO's lawsuit lottery and recommend conversion to Chapter 7, and indeed the current US Trustee recommended just that.
And in strange aeons, even death may die.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
" It's not clear why the bankruptcy judge opted for this solution..."
A great many of the gyrations of the case since the crack legal team that defended them came on board, as well as many to come, will make much more sense if you remember one salient point: the deal with the lawyers was that if SCO won, they'd get a cut of the winnings, but if SCO lost, they'd get a cut of the corpse.
What judge is going to order that his fellow court officers' income for a job well done get cut out of their deal? As long as it has the appearance of restructuring they can drain the coffers dry and force SCO to keep filling them as long as it has blood to let.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
You focus on the purchase price.
I got you covered for the extra $100
Even if you can't purchase SCO the $100 is still yours for the punch.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
SCO on the rocks
Aint no surprise
Gave them some cash
And they made up some lies
Had nothing to lose
So they just litigated all the time
Gave them my cash
For a Linux licence
They left me alone here
With nothing to hold
Vista went wrong
Now all I want is a trial
First, they say they want you
How they really need you
Suddenly you find you're out there
Throwing chairs in the storm
When they know they have you
Then they really have you
Nothing you can do or say
You've got to leave, just get away
We all know the song
Once SCO is finally dead and buried, the whole saga is going to make a cracking book up there with the Enron one (and film). I'd like to think it would be a warning to future CEO's on how not to look like a total idiot but I suspect that just goes with the job these days.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
"Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. There is an idea: The idea that open-source is free for the taking for any company that wishes to steal it and has deep enough pockets for litigating."
It's gavel-proof.
is to behead the entire management team and principal stock owners and then drive a stake through their hearts, and bury them at a crossroads under a full moon. Seriously it couldn't hurt.
"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff."
Oh, well, have you looked for the word? Why is it that you get to use your dislike for the world to mod two people off topic? Are you a "player hater"? Or, are you a pro-sco person hiding behind the lazy slashdot code that allows hit-and-run modding?
Looking at sco's conduct, and splaying their ass up in the air for microsoft to do ms' bidding, sco is (after ms) the LAST company topic for which boo-hoo off-topic-modding should be tolerated. Downward-trending scoring, maybe, but a slam-dunk off-topic? HELL NO.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"