Chapter 11 Trustee Appointed For SCO 89
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."
Free UnixWare and OpenServer! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Free UnixWare and OpenServer! (Score:4, Insightful)
Suing people is *not* a valid business model... (Score:5, Insightful)
...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.
My Read (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Free UnixWare and OpenServer! (Score:4, Insightful)
incentivized (Score:2, Insightful)
incentivized? WTF? What language do you normally speak? Martian?
Re:My Read (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Free UnixWare and OpenServer! (Score:2, Insightful)
I can't see WHY the Judge is erring so far on the side of caution here- there won't be any appealing a 7 conversion at this point as SCO's clearly not restructuring to be profitable again. They're still hoping for the **BIG** litigation score- which will never happen as they didn't have a case in that regard to begin with.
Possibly this: Either way the company will run into the ground and the judge knows that. If the judge ordered Chap. 7 Darl would spend the rest of his life telling everyone how he was cheated out of his litigation fortune and chance to save the company, and it would all be the judge's fault. By letting them carry on, the case will be lost or more likely SCO will run out of money (surely a matter of weeks now). Same result, but this way he can't complain that the court didn't let SCO give it their best shot.