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SCO files for bankruptcy
Author: Phil CogarPublished: 17th September 2007
SCO is going...going...almost gone!
Filing for bankruptcy doesn't spell the end of SCO though, as it just gives the company protection from creditors while it restructures in order to turn things around.
Back when the court ruled in favor of Novell, SCO vowed to continue its efforts to gain the copyright to UNIX but with the recent filing, it is unlikely the company will survive long enough in order to do so. Part of the settlement that the judge ruled on was that SCO had to pay Novell all licensing fees that it had collected from Sun Microsystems and Microsoft which could amount to around £12.4 million.
While £12.4 million might not sound like a large sum of money for a corporation, SCO listed having only £7.4 million in asset with over £3.7 in debt. The potential payout is far greater then the amount that SCO has in its war chest.
At the end of the trading day on Friday, SCO's stock was going for 37 cents a share on the US stock market. If the company had any future in it, I'd recommend "BUY! BUY! BUY!" but you better stick your money somewhere else now.
Any final thoughts or farewells for SCO? Leave your condolences for the family over in the forums or in the comment section below.
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Comments (20)
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Its was all a scam from the start to make a lot of money for lawyers, SCO directors and a few key shareholders, and also to have a speculative pop at Open-Source to see how the community would respond.. It was still a dumb doomed-to-failure idea, but some people got rich and to them, that's all that matters..
Im sure this company has been around for years, probably older than me.
How come you guys dont seem to like this company!
Perhaps I dont know the full "history/facts" of this company.
You're fairly close, except it had a bit of a chance when it started. Not much, mind you, but it was possible that they could have won.
But yes, it wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that it was a money-grab by someone or another.
/dances on grave with steveo_mcg
@MilkMan5:
The SCO group licensed UNIX under a fairly ambiguous agreement from IBM, way back in the day. They produced their own flavor of UNIX, and quietly slipped under the radar, just like a lot of other UNIX-like OS distributors did. However, unlike the others, rather than quietly closing their doors when they couldn't keep going, they sued IBM for breach of copyright when IBM donated a lot of UNIX source to the Open Source movement. The licensing agreement was ambiguous enough that it wasn't clear who owned the source.
IBM said "Sorry, we sold our UNIX team out to Novell, they're the folks you want", so SCO dropped the case with IBM, and sued Novell instead.
It is interesting to note that the only time in the SCO group's history that they turned a profit was the year they sued IBM and Novell, as Microsoft made a substantial donation/contract. (I'm not sure what the details were, but it involved tens of millions of dollars.)
So, the SCO group was, in effect, claiming that code in Novell's SuSE distribution (and by extension, most other Linuxes and BSDs) violated their copyright. They proceeded to play the FUD for all they could, didn't produce anything in the way of hard evidence, and generally were fairly serious jerks about the deal.
Anyway, the courts smacked down the case, and now SCO is declaring bankruptcy. Open Source has won.
/dance on grave
W00T!
/sings "i'm dancing on the grave, i'm dancing on the grave, what a wonderful feeling, and i'm happy again......."
current builds of linux have very few of the unix code....... and novel is cool.
/sings "the roof, the roof, the roof is on fire......"
we dont need no ...
Oh wait... it said SCO.... Woooohooo!
The only sad thing here is that some smart ass f**** lawyers made a lot of money from this whole ordeal.
Now if only MS will take their SCO stock and STFU about the Open Source society stealing their IP.
SCO lost the battle MS. Now please surrender or die. :)
Little history to help people out with the story.
Way back in the dim and distance past (almost pre-history for computer nerds...) AT&T had a little product called UNIX. They gave away the source code to many many people under some very lax licensing terms. The University of California (I think) also made and marketed a version of this UNIX system and suddenly AT&T decided that they didn't want UCL to sell BSD UNIX. So they sued. Eventually, there was a sealed agreement that they would go their separate ways and publish UNIX in their own way (hence the BSD UNIX variants and the UNIX System V Release X variants).
Now, AT&T sold UNIX to Novell (I think anyway), who made a number of very profitable systems on the UNIX System V code base. They eventually decided to sell some of the rights to a company called The Santa Cruz Organisation (OldSCO). Now, OldSCO couldn't pony up the funds for the complete source code base, so Novell said that they could have what rights they needed to sell the OS and develop the code a bitr further. So, OldSCO got the rights to sell UNIX, develop it and then forward 100% of the monies to Novell, who would then reimburse OldSCO 5% of this money.
OldSCO then changed their name to Tarantella who then split up (this is where things get murky) into two divisions, one of which went it's own separate way (Tarantyella), and the other was bought by the Canopy Group who then changed the name from Caldera back to SCO (or, NewSCO as we call them). Now, SCO had a good solid UNIX distribution called SCO OpenServer. It was good and stable, if not very advanced. OldSCO also used to sell Caldera Linux. They were very active on the coding front and contributed quite a bit to the linux kernel.
With the buyout and name change came Darl McBride. He saw the failing UNIX business and thought that he could rattle a few cages and get a nice little lump sum for the directors if he accused a number of big players of copyright infringement and IP theft. So they sued Daimler Chrysler, and IBM. They sent the papers to the wrong address for Daimler and thought that IBM would buy them out to keep them quiet. Novell stepped in and said that NewSCO don't own the copyrights and have no grounds to sue IBM who have a perpetual and irrevocable licence, which SCO tried to revoke :) So SCO sued them.
To cut a long story short, SCO saw its share price shoot up to $20 per share on the back of the announcement of the IBM lawsuit and since then has shown nothing but smoke and mirrors when asked/told/demanded to by the court. The judge is "astonished" by the lack of evidence and has ruled against NewSCO such that NewSCO may owe Novell more than they actually have in the bank. Hence the Bankrupcy filing. Oh, and the share price is now 21c per share. Nice return if you invested at $20 per share don't you think...
An interesting sideline to this is that they have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which is designed to allow a period of restructuring to occur to get the company on an even keel and back to profit. However, the bankruptcy court may look at the court cases, listen to Novell and decide to wind up SCO and place it in Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Which basically means that SCO is toast! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
If you want a timeline of the saga, go to Groklaw and click on any of the Timeline links at the top of the page. Also look here for a timeline of UNIX.
Andy
We can only hope I also hope that their fine example will deter other equally inept companies from trying this kind of baseless lawsuits just to make money.