UnXis Group To Acquire SCO

Evil-G writes "In an email on Friday, SCO informed its partners that UnXis Inc. was chosen as the successful bidder for SCO's Unix software business on 26 January. The slightly convoluted phrasing is probably due to SCO's current reorganization under Chapter 11. On 16 February, the transaction is to be submitted for approval to the bankruptcy court where SCO's case is pending."

Comments

SCO has a software business?

[fish waffle]

I thought they were just patent trolls.

Re:SCO has a software business?

[Insanity Defense]

That's because you are an ignorant cunt. They owned unix and linux you know.

They claimed that Linux has substantial amounts of Unix in it which gave them "control" of Linux in their fantasy world. The problems with this were threefold. 1/ that they never proved the presence of Unix code in Linux and 2/ They have repeatedly been ruled in court not to own the required copyrights to back up those claims 3/ The moment the claimed code was identified it would begin to be removed. The legal owner of those copyrights says Linux doesn't violate them.

So no ownership of Unix or of Linux. All they are really trying to sell is the Unixware and Openserver businesses right now. Last time UnXis tried to buy it the bankruptcy judge said no deal, they need to get his agreement. Also Novell claims the right to veto such a sale and last time said they would.

Re:SCO has a software business?

[Penguinisto]

Slight pedancy... they were copyright trolls. Nothing really to do with patents (if they were squabbling over patents, they might have had half a chance).

But yeah - they (as sibling pointed out) used to have some halfway decent products. I think it was around the time they sued a couple of their biggest customers (Chrysler and AutoZone) that their other customers began phasing out (with extreme prejudice) UnixWare, OpenLinux/OpenServer, and damned near everything else that SCO owned and/or sold.

By 2006 or so, about the only folks left giving any money to SCO was Microsoft (by proxy, and directly) and I think Sun Microsystems (licensing SysV bits for Solaris), though I think Sun did that last back in 2004 and pretty much stopped after that.

Re:SCO has a software business?

[Ritchie70]

I think you will find that there is still a large installed base of SCO products in the various vertical markets. It's hard to change that sometimes.

None of that, of course, means that anyone is still paying for support...

Re:SCO has a software business?

[hairyfeet]

You know what I find hilarious? The fact that Linux guys as a group are fricking obsessed with getting "the big bad MSFT" and completely missing the real enemy about to seriously hurt them. It reminds me of "Pirates of Silicon Valley" where Jobs was completely obsessed over IBM and Gates quietly snuck in and stomped his ass. It is like the sheep laughing at the old toothless tiger while leaning up against his bestest buddy the BB Wolf.

Who is the hidden enemy you might ask? :Let me put it this way: Notice anything...funny...about Android? Like the fact that there is not a spot of GPL V3 code to be found? Why do you think that is? I'll tell you, because thanks to "the TiVo trick" GPL V2 is about as worthless as can be. Hell you might as well release it all as BSD, because that is what's gonna happen anyway. That is why RMS had to come up with GPL V3 in the first place, because thanks to the TiVo trick the four freedoms mean squat as long as they stick with GPL V2, and Google hasn't touched a single drop of GPL V3.

So you might want to be looking closer at who is guarding the henhouse instead of caring about the old grudges. MSFT is the past, sure they'll keep the desktop and office but just like the mainframe was once the center of computing so too will the office PC end up with a niche that frankly doesn't really grow. PCs have gotten "good enough" for the vast majority and people don't just upgrade everytime MSFT does a new OS anymore. They are the past and mobile is the future and if you don't watch it Linux will end up winning the battle but losing the war. After all what good is Linux being everywhere if there is no more freedom than any proprietary OS thanks to the corps simply using GPL V2 and the TiVo trick?

As for TFA, just let them fricking die already. Hell it isn't even any fun making fun of them anymore, McBride has lost everything and the company is a corpse. It's like going to laugh at your asshole neighbor for old times sake now that he is sleeping in his car by the 7/11. Sure McBride was a douche and the company went from being an actual company with actual products (I kinda liked DR-DOS back in the day myself) to yet another worthless troll,but its over. Now more drama, no more McBride crazy talk, the fat lady is down the street having a sandwich. What's next /. gonna have an article when they sell the office furniture?

Re:SCO has a software business?

[kwark]

"Notice anything...funny...about Android? Like the fact that there is not a spot of GPL V3 code to be found? Why do you think that is?"

Because it's not (any version of) GPL. Except the kernel it runs on (which is GPLv2), it is mostly Apache.:
"The preferred license for the Android Open Source Project is the Apache Software License, 2.0 ("Apache 2.0"), and the majority of the Android software is licensed with Apache 2.0. While the project will strive to adhere to the preferred license, there may be exceptions which will be handled on a case-by-case basis. For example, the Linux kernel patches are under the GPLv2 license with system exceptions, which can be found on kernel.org. "
source: http://source.android.com/source/licenses.html

Re:SCO has a software business?

[jimicus]

The rot set in long before then. IIRC this started to blow up circa 2002, and by mid-2003 I was meeting people who'd never even used Unix professionally and had independently reached the conclusion that SCO were doing some very odd things.

IMV suing your customers is generally considered to be a Very Bad Idea. Suing your customers and then announcing this fact proudly to the press is... well, it's mind-boggling. Seriously, I cannot for the life of me figure out why anyone running a business would authorise a press release which essentially said "We're suing our customers". The only rational explanation is that there was something else - unrelated to SCOs continued business as an OS vendor - that was pushing Darl to do this.

I generally shy away from conspiracy theories because they almost inevitably end up with some absurdly convoluted idea that includes Elvis still being alive and in cahoots with Dracula - but it's really hard to avoid here.

So all SCO has left is lawsuits?

[grapeape]

Wow looks like all that is left of SCO are lawsuits, debt and a pending appeal. You have to wonder why in the world anyone would want to buy the business division, considering the SCO name is poison to just about anyone who knows anything about Unix. My guess is they will do anything in their power to distance themselves from the SCO name.

Re:So all SCO has left is lawsuits?

[WrongSizeGlass]

You have to wonder why in the world anyone would want to buy the business division, considering the SCO name is poison to just about anyone who knows anything about Unix.

Maybe because they have a 3-letter domain name? Probably their most valuable asset ;-)

Re:So all SCO has left is lawsuits?

[petermgreen]

Because they do still have customers who want/need support, updates (at least enough to keep it running on new hardware as their old hardware dies) licenses etc. That buisness is clearly worth something. How much is debatable but it's almost certainly not zero.

Re:So all SCO has left is lawsuits?

[jnelson4765]

I'm in that situation - we've got a proprietary point of sale system that a lot of our customers run, that was written for SCO OpenServer. To move to Linux would cost $7,000 - $15,000 in license fees for the license transfer, so they're staying on SCO. An SCO OpenServer 6 license is a lot cheaper than the Thoroughbred software stack it's written in.

It's not a bad system - the problem with SCO was never their technical abilities. I really can't complain about its stability either - that damn things just keep running, and the most we have to do is replace tape drives and fans every once in a blue moon...

Re:So all SCO has left is lawsuits?

[Ritchie70]

I know of a large SCO customer who is running OpenServer 1.6 in a VM rather than pay for upgrading the thousands of systems to a version that can support modern hardware like sat a and USB.

Re:So all SCO has left is lawsuits?

[symbolset]

No, they have a netblock. That may be worth more than the rest of the company in two weeks.

All of this has happened before...

[Mark19960]

And will happen again.

They tried once before and the judge blew their ship out of the water.
What makes their chances any better this time?

Just who is "UnXis Inc."?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can anybody shed any light on just who "UnXis Inc." actually is? What is going on here?

Re:Just who is "UnXis Inc."?

[happymellon]

Back in 2009 Unxis and SCO seemed to be the same company.

http://techrights.org/2009/07/14/sco-and-unxis/

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090711015440158

http://www.unxis.ca/
http://www.unxis.co.uk/
http://www.unxis.com/

So I would say it all seems like a scam to avoid having to do anything legal.

UnXis is a shell company owned by SCO?

[Aryeh Goretsky]

Hello, Groklaw seems to imply a relationship between the two: http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20090711015440158 Regards, Aryeh Goretsky

Re:UnXis is a shell company owned by SCO?

[Insanity Defense]

http://www.peertopatent.org/video/pj/pj.png

Re:UnXis is a shell company owned by SCO?

[MightyMartian]

That still doesn't make it relevant. SCO's case was garbage, PJ, whether a human being, the IBM legal team or Jesus Fucking Christ, did a considerable amount of analysis, and backed the analysis of experts in Unix, who said that McBride was nothing more than a common thug trying to use what his company did not possess to extort licensing fees from companies using Unix-like operating systems.

At the end of the day, SCO failed because it had been taken over by dishonest and dishonorable scamsters.

Re:UnXis is a shell company owned by SCO?

[MightyMartian]

Then don't go there. I haven't visited Groklaw in a helluva long time. But there seem to be a lot of people who somehow think they're being clever by kicking PJ's name and reputation around, and that bothers me. She provided an incredible important purpose, and deserves better than some stupid fucking AC on Slashdot mouthing off.

Re:UnXis is a shell company owned by SCO?

[MightyMartian]

Be that as it may, the fact is that SCO failed because they did not own what they claimed to own, and Groklaw played a part in that, at least so far as keeping the case out there even as the courts gave McBride and his legal team way too much rope. IBM can be a major asshole, but we were all on the same team at that point, and I'm damned glad that IBM didn't simply do the normal thing a large corporation would do and buy off the smaller company making the claims

And, as I said, PJ's identity is irrelevant to all of this anyways. The only people who seemed obsessed with it were the crooks at SCO and a few incredibly dishonorable "journalists".

Hooray!

[dexomn]

Ding! Dong! The witch is ... Wait what? OH DAMN IT!!!

Re:What is UnXis?

[WrongSizeGlass]

Does anybody know what UnXis is?

I think UnXis is the plural of Unix.

Re:UnXis is a shell company owned by SCO!

[redwhine]

I think Groklaw got it right... The UnXis URL http://unxis.co.uk/ takes you to a SCO page with the title "unXis - The future of UNIX is here"

Re:What is UnXis?

[Anonymous Coward]

That domain is just some guy in North York, ON that does consulting (do a whois and look yourself).

It's not related to this, so don't call the guy up and give him shit.

The real domain, unxis.co.uk, as stated above, belongs to SCO since it redirects to SCO.

The question is, does the guy in North York have a beef with SCO now?

--
BMO

Not a good start given the new name

[paiute]

I read UnXis as "unctuous":

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/unctuous

Adjective
unctuous
1. Oily or greasy.
2. Rich, lush, intense, with layers of concentrated, soft, velvety flavor.
3. Profusely polite, especially unpleasantly so and insincerely earnest.

Sounds about right

[rsilvergun]

it looks like SCO is trying to split off their still profitable software business from the dead and deader lawsuit business so when the whole thing gets dissolved by bankruptcy their creditors are left holding and empty bag.