Slashdot Mirror
SCO Assets Going To October Auction
An anonymous reader noted that the SCO Group is having a
bankruptcy auction in October. The article says 'After bankruptcy in September 2007, SCO and an affiliate filed schedules listing combined assets of $14.2 million and debt totaling $5.2 million.' I wonder if we could all chip in and buy something as a sort of 'Thanks for being a pimple on the face of humanity' present.
$50 for Darl McBride's greased Yoda doll!
Trolling is a art,
Who would of knew suing people is not a viable business model, I mean it works for all those other patent trolls.
But sco.com and redirect it to goat.cx (or whatever they call it)?
I think you meant "ass".
-- The Brory Stool Co.: We accidentally the best stools from behind seven proxies, since 2009.
Darl McBride's new corporation, OCS, will buy all of the assets at auction for a fraction of the original cost, and continue exactly where he left off with the lawsuits, only this time with a brand new credit rating and no debt to bog him down.
Some sort of a phallus along with a note that says "Thanks for all your hard work guys. For that we are giving you this award! Turn this note over to find out where you can shove it!"
Once upon a time there was a practice known as the "penny auction".
Forget diamonds, copyright is forever.
Well I work about 5 minutes from their old HQ (in fact I'm going to a meeting in that office park tomorrow)...anyone in the /. community want me to pick up something nice?
This space for rent...
...on the condition that Darl McBride puts a .45 in his mouth and blows his empty fucking skull into orbit.
The bankruptcy judge called for a Chapter 11 trustee in August 2009, about one month before the U.S. Court of Appeals in Denver ruled in the company’s favor after six years of litigation with Waltham, Massachusetts-based Novell Inc. The case went back to the district court, where the judge and jury further clarified SCO’s rights in certain Unix software incorporated in software for network systems.
Reading that section, it would seem that SCO won their case against Novell. But that's not the case. SCO won certain points in the bankruptcy case like receiving Chapter 11 designation instead of Chapter 7 which Novell and U.S. Trustee's Office wanted. But it had to accept a trustee in place of management handling the bankruptcy. It definitely lost the Novell case.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
For the shrunken head of Darl McBride.
Beware any auction lots with printouts labeled "Unix Source Code"
Let's all chip in, buy the whole mess, release anything of value to the public domain, then burn the rest.
I'll kick in $20 for that. Heck, I might be persuaded to donate a Bennie.
Are they going to auction off their rights to Linux? Because those might well turn out to be a goldmine if someone decided to sue some Linux vendors with them.
(I'll be here all week!)
For $10
So I can start a small litigious company to aggressively defend Linux and pursue proprietary "Windows" OS vendor(s) whose names start with "M".
As to "I wonder if...," no, we really shouldn't give those attention whores any further reward. The best thing to do from here is to ignore the bastards.
They essentially know who's going to bid.
Any bets on who? My money is on Yarro.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Let this be a lesson for all those whose greed surpasses a normal man's measure... ... for all those who want power over others' knowledge... ... who want to leverage the State to oppress the weaker... ... who think they can sit on previous conquests and not work anymore... ... who think they can stop mankind evolution... ... who think they or their country is above the others... ... who think first of their friends instead of humanity as a whole... ... who try to take what they cannot ever return.
This is a spaceship which we cannot control, but one we can destroy.
Let this be the beginning of our awakening.
That's a rather delicate way of putting it. I confess to having a lower opinion.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
and if everyone else just chipped in and bought those $699 Loonix licenses they were selling, SCO wouldn't be in this mess to begin with.
Actually, I'll buy the rights to "/*" and "*/" and proceed to sue anyone that uses those symbols for IP violations. Maybe Microsoft will buy a license from me for a few mil so I can go after those freeloading Free Software programmers. Or maybe they can convince a canadian bank to invest in me so it doesn't look like they're the ones funding my litigation.
Then I can get the folks from Yank & Grope to echo my FUD so I can ride the credibility of MMORPGara and Diiddo. Nah, I wouldn't want Pb&J after me.
Oh yeah...
?
Profit!
I'll analyze it to discover the secret of immortality.
Yes!!! Anyone have change for a dollar? It's biddin' time!
load "$",8,1
Sounds like a small price for Google to buy them up, make all the patents public for anyone who is not interested in imposing patents against Google, and thereby returning or continuing (however you see it) their plan to "don't be evil."
Is it Dead yet?
Why wait? I'll sell you several boxes full of SCO licenses, manuals and disks! ODT 3.0 on! Great for your Labor Day bonfire!
I'd buy any computers and hard drives I could find, then check to see if any data is left on them. If it appeared the drives were wiped, I'd go over them with data recovery software. You never know what interesting tidbits one might find on those things.
At worst, you'd get some hardware. At best, you might find some extremely incriminating evidence. It likely wouldn't hold up in a court of law, but can you imagine the PR damage it could do to certain companies if it ended up online?
And even if all you end up with is a bunch of random data, save it as an image file and post it online for people to download and try to decipher. It could provide countless hours of entertainment for years to come.
Doing this might also provide a bit of insurance against any vultures buying the contested IP and carrying on with this shakedown scheme. No matter what might be on those drives, they could never know for sure how damaging the info might be, so it may give them pause, lest some bombshell appear at some point down the road. They'd essentially have a big black box floating around out there that contains either nothing at all or information that could prove disastrous to them, and that black box is constantly being picked at by folks trying to unlock it. Would you want to risk a bunch of money pursuing shaky legal claims with that uncertainty out there?
I believe my share is supposed to be $699 per CPU.
Better put me down for several thousand dollars. I have installed Linux quite a few times
vi +
After bankruptcy in September 2007, SCO and an affiliate filed schedules listing combined assets of $14.2 million and debt totaling $5.2 million
After almost three years of depreciation, I'm sure their assets are worth a lot. I have a few three-year old computers around, I'll happily sell them for cheese.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
mantle, perhaps snuggled between a couple of Emperor Penguin statues.
It could be fun to buy the filing cabinet's in which SCO's version of Novel's letters were found and put it in a 'haunted house' tableau for geeks. Maybe any pens embossed with the name of Boies's law firm. Of course any paper stock certificates. How about any left over servers, tape backups, CDs, DVDs etc. that, they might have laying about? I hope they still have more CDs sets of those 'scanned' in source code pages they tried to foist on IBM as satisfying discovery for the SCO source code. Those might make a heck of a mobile or chandelier.
I do hope the OS software developers get a chance to take home any memento they might want.
GOOD FUCKING RIDDANCE.
I mean, sure, this is the final phase of beating a dead horse. But dear LORD, this took for ever. Finally -- finally! -- SCO and AdTI are both "yesterday's news."
"I'd also like to be there when they cut off Darl McBride's head and stick it on a pike as a warning to the next ten generations of intellectual property lawyers that for some favors, even $600 is too high a price. I would look up into his lifeless eyes and wave, like this. *smileywave*. Can you the United States Trustees arrange that for me, Judge Stewart?"
The thing is, Vir, if you're saying that Darl is just the front man for a Shadowy evil, then what are we in store for next?
coding is life
You can bid on Darl's house on September 14:
Go here Select Utah, then Salt Lake, then Look down the page for "VINTAGE OAK"
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Are all the millions of lines of infringing code they barked about being auctioned too ?
But the lawsuits will continue!
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake
I'd like to be in the viewing audience when they liquidate Darl.
Okay,
Assumptions (mostly from wikipedia):
Given these numbers, how many kg of gunpowder would you need to shove into a .45 cartridge (warning: may not be physically possible) to get Darl's skull into LEO and into HEO?
coding is life
This begs for a "SCO is dying" post.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
Make that "an open boil on the Anus of society" and I'm in.
Couldn't the slashdot community buy the brand? If everybody donates a few bucks and we bid that sum for the brand and then use it to release FOSS, print cool t-shirts and use the sco website to make fun and jokes about MS, Mc Bride or whatever the f*ck his name is and his entourage. Wouldn't that be worth it? Ever since they did the caldera back-and-forth and then switched to pissing of the entire nix community the brand is dead anyway. It can't be that expensive, no?
We could also release a debian rebrand as 'SCO Unix 2010' for 200$ a pop and donate the proceeds to EFF, FSF and any other organisation that goes against patent and IP trolls. That would actually be usefull, no?
Just an idea.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Is there some way to flash mob the auction and coordinate things so that nobody pays more than 25 fucking cents for anything? Or nothing? The trash can just be dropped in a dumpster. Gah! The wicked witch is (very nearly, almost, but like a zombie, not quite) dead. Can I get a pic of the wooden stake? I'd bid on that.
Disco STU is gonna do some GRAVE DANCIN'
Oh Yeah!
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
The trustee's sale of the aforedescribed real property will be made without warranty as to title, possession, or encumbrances.
Sounds like selling a pig in a poke.
1 they will be defeated in the IBM case by something called THE TRUTH
2 they have been roasted in court by NOVELL (and what a long slow roast it has been)
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
I'd drop $5 for a shot to dunk Darl. Any trustees wanna go for it?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I have got a few hundred dollars. The name and logo should be worth at least that. Perhaps I could build a Linux distro...
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
a nice big box of "Fuck you, Darl."?
What is bid for a Darl swirly in the Goatse guys Arse?
Bidding starts at $100.
There's a rumor that Natalie Portman is warming hot grits in Soviet Russia at the thought of posted photos... :)
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Or a chancre.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I hate to bust your bubble, but it ain't over. It could be years yet before the shambling hulk is chopped to bits, burned and its ashes scattered. At least twice there have been property transfers that could resurrect the case once that's done.
This one could be with us for a long while yet. Dammit.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
They have two things that would be good for open source. One is the old "Documenter's Workbench". It was a proofing tool that had lots of good AI stuff from Bell Labs. The other useful thing they might have as the old Toolchest selection of software. I figure either would be worth $100 or so just to release into the public domain. The spell checker in the DW had some interesting stuff like knowing how you make typos and it also had some ideas about reducing vocabulary so the wrong synonym was less likely to end up in your technical document.
Ok, let's see if I have the story right:
1. Caldera sells OpenLinux.
2. Caldera sells company to a group of stupid, evil or evil & stupid investors.
3. SCO seeing Linux eating up their microcomputer Unix biz sells it to Caldera.
4 Caldera rebrands as SCO and the real SCO changes in to Tarantella.
6. SCO tries to get everyone who has linux to give them some money for a promise not to sue or something because they own Unix.
7. SCO decides that IBM and AutoZone are good targets for a bizarre lawsuit, despite both firms having at least as much money as God.
8. Somewhere along the line someone points out that SCO does not actually own the copyrights to Unix, and they distributed Linux under the GPL for a long time. And bragged to the public about it.
9. SCO sues Novel hoping that the judge will have a bad day and just give the copyrights to Unix to them and break a contract that they accidentally bought from SCO.
10 SCO sees that the judge is not going to have a bad day, and files for bankruptcy to get another judge, who may have a bad day and make SCO's fantasy reality.
11. Bankruptcy judge does not have a bad day.
12. SCO tries to appeal, but appears to have ran out of gas.
-- $G
I'll give them $12 for their SCOSource business. Maybe I can write it off on my taxes and make a profit.
It is just a Java patent, and a non troll patent company is going to buy it, so SCO is still a company if you were hoping to dance at SCO's funeral pyre no such luck. here is the story at GrokLaw
http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20100329223904478
To err is to be human, to really screw up takes a computer and a human.
Lol,
If good guys got stuff for 1 penny.... but I'm guessing that the guys who are getting rich of this deal would bid 2 cents... because then they'd be able to keep the junk and the money.
We don't need these guys to get anything.
(
It might be more productive if we could chip in to a single non-profit company that would buy up the absurd patents or the entire company that holds them.
The company could put them into the public domain, or just blanket-license them for members at low cost.
Anyone know the starting bid on Linux licenses?
is available.
Thank you for Caldera Network Desktop, which made online package repositories work well. It was a groundbreaking product that could have been the dominant distribution today if you hadn't given in to the dark side of the force. Caldera Network Desktop was a wonderful Linux distro - for the time it was a well-polished distribution that worked, and was a lot less work to configure than Slackware or even Red Hat Linux.
Sadly, you let scumbags like Darl McBride steer you wrong. You became greedy and tried to reneg on the GPL, i.e., the code that you contributed to Linux kernel. You tried to steal UNIX from Novell and engaged in pump&dump schemes, ripping off your shareholders and your customers alike. By 2000, Redhat had long passed you by, because you lost your way, and by the time 2005 rolled around, every other distro grew in popularity and have been earning good returns for the respective disributions' sponsors and for integrators alike.
We will take the good - the code you released under the GPL, and leave the bad - that is, your total bullshit and your douchebag manner of doing business the last 10 years. Although you contributed a lot to Linux in your pre-McBride years, you will not be missed. I hope Darl McBride and any board and senior staff members who endorsed his pump & dump schemes are indicted for securities fraud and malfeasance, because through your actions it is self-evident that you ultimately did not have your shareholders' concerns at heart, but only extracting as much as you could into your own pockets. For that, and for trying to monopolize Linux and UNIX alike and contributing to Microsoft's FUD campaign which encouraged enterprises to avoid *nix and stick with the Windows malaise, fuck you very much.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
And then erect a great bonfire with everything they've bought; Perhaps even driving a wooden stake through a boxed copy of whatever SCO was still selling, after sprinkling it with holy water first. And at the end, the ashes could be scattered in the wind or buried underneath a crossroads...
IBM already made an example of them. This would be a nice way to end the saga.
In the blurb, it said "'Thanks for being a pimple on the face of humanity' present." What I really think they meant to say is: "Thanks for being a pimple on the butt of humanity' present."
Surely SCO still has some paying customers. Is there any part of the company worth buying? Is SCO Unix going to be auctioned or not? It would be nice to throw everything into the open-source pool, but that's not necessary. Simply buying the company and turning it back into an ordinary software business should make many people very happy.
And where would I go to bid? Or at least watch and point and laugh? TFA contained no details.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
Heh. So Daryl lived in a tract McMansion. Zestimate of $1.1 M. Pics here:
http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1799-Vintage-Oak-Ln-Salt-Lake-City-UT-84121/12870753_zpid/
You've got to wonder how he managed to screw up and lose it.
This news is better than it sounds. SCO's contract with its landsharks specified that, win or lose, they'd get a chunk of the company. Since there's no buyer as yet (per TFA) they must not want their pound of McBride-flesh. Meaning there ain't squat left from which anyone might try to rebuild this Tinker Toy tyranasaur into a viable enterprise. Go ahead and bury it and don't mind the twitches. Those are just press releases making it appear as if its still alive. Oh no, they say he's got to go, oh no Darlzilla.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Unfortunately, Darl McBride's head is listed among SCO's liabilities rather than their assets.
It's like the WMD - if they actually had them they would have used them.
SCO's shareholders do have some assets left: A legitimate claim to sue the idiot CEO and lawyers who flew this once iconic company into a hillside.
And as tarnished as SCO's brand name is, it would still be an improvement for Xe nee Blackwater, Accenture nee Arthur Andersen, Monsanto, Goldman Sachs, Enron and BP.
I never posted this, so maybe I should now I still have the chance :).
Just before old SCO was bought by Caldera a friend of mine worked there in pre-sales. He did a lot of stuff with both of their UNIXes and Tarantella. He also had a lot of contact (we live in Holland) with the UK division of SCO. There they did a lot of stuff with Linux, sold support, and there were even rumours that they were working on their own distro of Linux.
On some fairs they even sold Linux T-shirts. I posted some pics of one here:
http://www.chaosmongers.org/sco.php
The company is all turned to shit now, but the Linux-history of old SCO is quite interesting I think. But ofcourse there's also the situation that new SCO is actually Caldera, a straight Linux company.
Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
No, that means DMcB gets 10dollars he wouldn't have had otherwise.
No matter how insulting the pay offer, it still pays DMcB and that's far more insulting to the person paying.
Do you mean you didn't know?
"The bankruptcy judge called for a Chapter 11 trustee in August 2009, about one month before the U.S. Court of Appeals in Denver ruled in the company's favor after six years of litigation with Waltham, Massachusetts-based Novell Inc. The case went back to the district court, where the judge and jury further clarified SCO's rights in certain Unix software incorporated in software for network systems.
All this time I thought that Novell had won the court case and proved that SCO didn't have any Unix "rights". How could the bankruptcy judge get it so wrong?
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
I would be happy to pay $3 each for SCO snakes if purchase would include right to kill them by various slow methods. Price could be higher, if not for expense of hazardous waste disposal.
Wonder if a trash to power plant would accept the carcases?