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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.
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.
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?
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