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SCO Blames Linux For Bankruptcy Filing

Posted by Zonk on Tue Sep 18, 2007 01:22 PM
from the comment-write-themselves dept.
Stony Stevenson writes "SCO Group CEO Darl McBride is now claiming that competition from Linux was behind the company's filing of Chapter 11 bankruptcy. 'In a court filing in support of SCO's bankruptcy petition, McBride noted that SCO's sales of Unix-based products "have been declining over the past several years." The slump, McBride said, "has been primarily attributable to significant competition from alternative operating systems, including Linux." McBride listed IBM, Red Hat, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems as distributors of Linux or other software that is "aggressively taking market share away from Unix.""

Related Stories

[+] SCO Files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy 421 comments
Can you say "the SCO, the" in German? writes "Trading of SCO's stock has been halted on news that SCO has filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy. This move just so happens to fall on the eve of SCO's trial with Novell. One would think that their prior boasts were mostly bluster, that they believe they have almost no chance of prevailing at trial, and that they're now desperate to protect their executives from SCO's creditors while seeking yet another delay. From the release: 'The SCO Group intends to maintain all normal business operations throughout the bankruptcy proceedings. Subject to court approval, SCO and its subsidiaries will use the cash flow from their consolidated operations to meet their capital needs during the reorganization process. "We want to assure our customers and partners that they can continue to rely on SCO products, support and services for their business critical operations," said Darl McBride, President and CEO, The SCO Group. "Chapter 11 reorganization provides the Company with an opportunity to protect its assets during this time while focusing on building our future plans."'"
[+] Novell to SCO - Pay Up 151 comments
gosherm writes with word that, now that the dust is beginning to settle on the long-running SCO case, Novell wants to get paid. Now. They're requesting that the customary stay on SCO's finances (as a result of their bankruptcy) be lifted so that Novell can begin recouping some of its losses from the protracted legal battle. "'We need to adjudicate if this is money owed to Novell or if it is Novell's property,' said Bruce Lowry, spokesman for Novell. That could determine how quickly Novell can recover those funds. And time is of the essence since there's a possibility SCO 'may run low or even completely out of cash during the process of trying to reorganize,' Novell said in court documents filed Thursday. Novell is also trying to protect royalties SCO collects from Unix and Unixware software licensees and remits annually to the software developer. SCO is required to continue to remit between $500,000 and $800,000 annually to Novell -- the next payment is due Nov. 14. SCO remitted $696,413 to Novell between the third quarter of 2006 and the second quarter of this year."
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  • by Kelson (129150) * on Tuesday September 18, @01:23PM (#20656733) Homepage Journal
    Okay, I'll grant that competition from Linux distributors probably has taken business away from their Unix offerings. (Not that there's a problem with that, it's just the way markets work.) Of course, I'm sure their "we'll sue our customers!" antics didn't help, as the distributors behind such Unix varieties as Solaris, AIX, HP-UX etc. don't seem to be in quite such dire straits.

    But let's not forget that a few years back, this SCO was known as Caldera. They were a Linux distributor. They were a founding partner in UnitedLinux [unitedlinux.com]. Then they bought Unix -- well, they bought something -- and changed their name to sound like the old SCO (Santa Cruz Operation), and refocused their business on Unix and lawsuits.

    Anyone want to bet that if they'd stuck with Caldera Linux as their primary business, they'd be doing a lot better today?

    To pull out an old analogy, it's like they started out as an automobile company, and then decided to switch to the buggy-whip business -- and now they're blaming the automobile companies for their business failures.
    • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 18, @01:31PM (#20656917)

      I don't know that if they'd stuck with the Caldera name and business model that they would have succeeded. After all, how much space is there really for commercial support in the Linux space. Maybe they'd have succeeded, maybe not - but their legal antics and operatic press releases made them look like maniacs. And that is entirely their own fault.

      [ Parent ]
      • by Monchanger (637670) on Tuesday September 18, @02:41PM (#20658221) Homepage Journal
        As has been mentioned over and over, the SCO business model of recent seems less about product development and more about legal + accounting maneuvering.

        The SCO strategy has been fairly consistent: call themselves as a victim and look for someone to pity them. Fortunately, few bought the act, and most have recognized the cheap trick for what it is. Hopefully, this new tantrum won't yield better results for them.

        McBride, there's no crying in business.
        [ Parent ]
    • Anyone want to bet that if they'd stuck with Caldera Linux as their primary business, they'd be doing a lot better today?

      The old line about polishing a turd comes to mind. Caldera was one of the poorest distributions around.

      [ Parent ]
      • by LWATCDR (28044) on Tuesday September 18, @02:00PM (#20657493) Homepage Journal
        When Caldera first came out it was actually pretty interesting. It just died on the vine over time. Heck I really thought Red Hat was over rated and it has managed to do well. I think Caldera could have been a big hit if they had managed it correctly. They had DR-DOS so they could have bundled a Dos runtime environment. While by 96 DOS was pretty dead that would have been a nice feature for some users.They could have been a contender but failed to find any focus.
        [ Parent ]
            • by ultranova (717540) on Wednesday September 19, @03:11AM (#20664889)

              Notice I said pretty dead which means a little bit alive.

              It is not dead which can prettily lie, and with strange aeons, only the ugly die ?-) Or were you referring to the undead ? Hmm... Seeing how I've seen japanese OS-tan porn, I'd say it's only a matter of time before someone there makes an erotic DOS-zombie flick.

              "Conventional memory! Must eat conventional memoryyyy..."

              [ Parent ]
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        I don't know. Maybe I'm just looking at the past with nostalgia, but I used Caldera for a while and it certainly wasn't too bad. I remember the install being rather easy and it was very easy to get Wordperfect working on it.

        In contrast, the first distro
        • by Curtman (556920) on Tuesday September 18, @03:18PM (#20659063)

          I used Caldera for a while and it certainly wasn't too bad. I remember the install being rather easy

          Yeah, and it let you play pacman while you waited for it to install. That was the most innovative thing Caldera ever did as far as I'm concerned.
          [ Parent ]
      • by sjames (1099) on Tuesday September 18, @04:49PM (#20660589) Homepage

        The old line about polishing a turd comes to mind. Caldera was one of the poorest distributions around.

        I was at an enthusiasts meeting once and a rep from Caldera was there. That was the first and only time I've ever seen anyone unable to GIVE copies of any Linux distro away.

        Their big idea at the time seemed to be recreating the "great" idea of the Windows registry as a combined config file in /etc. IIRC, the distro itself looked very much like the previous version of RedHat with the logos changed (perfectly legal) and nothing added but extra support for mounting a Novell server.

        [ Parent ]
        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          They would at least have the cash that they used on the lawyers.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      Anyone want to bet that if they'd stuck with Caldera Linux as their primary business, they'd be doing a lot better today?

      Yes.

      "Ransom Love, the immediate successor to Sparks, engaged in a famous spat with Richard Stallman, after Love had announced tha
    • Another point they missed (Score:4, Informative)

      by Weaselmancer (533834) on Tuesday September 18, @03:38PM (#20659433)

      SCO (originally, anyways) was in the business of selling UNIX systems - which is a niche market. And that niche is pretty well defined. People like us /.ers fill that niche. Ideally, we're the people The Suits ask whenever they say "we need a solution to this problem."

      By attacking Linux, they offended pretty much their entire target market. Nobody here would recommend SCO for anything, and last I checked our user ID numbers were over a million.

      That is some seriously monstrous bad PR to try to get over.

      Of course, all this assumes that Darl actually wanted to run a software company in the first place. Maybe he doesn't care about SCO at all, and just makes these noises in the press because that's his job. It's equally likely that he's a paid assassin out to tarnish the reputation of open source, or even better yet put an end to open source in the business sector. See the Halloween X document for clarification. Link 1. [wikipedia.org] Link 2. [catb.org]

      [ Parent ]
  • Tough noogies (Score:5, Funny)

    by RollingThunder (88952) on Tuesday September 18, @01:23PM (#20656741)
    I fail to see the part of law where he's guaranteed to have a business model that works no matter what may compete with him.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      I fail to see the part of law where he's guaranteed to have a business model that works no matter what may compete with him.

      I fail to see where he's claiming that he's guaranteed one. All he's describing in the bankruptcy filing is why SCO failed.
    • I fail to see the part of law where he's guaranteed to have a business model that works no matter what may compete with him.

      The folks in the music and movie industries have done a pretty good job of making the law work that way [wikipedia.org].

    • by KWTm (808824) on Tuesday September 18, @02:20PM (#20657881) Journal

      The slump, McBride said, "has been primarily attributable to significant competition from alternative operating systems, including Linux." McBride listed IBM, Red Hat, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems as distributors of Linux or other software that is "aggressively taking market share away from Unix."

      Furthermore, McBride also noted, "These alternate distributors neglect to sue their customers, a service which we provide for our own customers, and thus they are able to undercut our price of $699 per customer. Despite making a concerted effort to protect our intellectual property through the legal system, IBM has failed to buy us out, so the expected funds did not materialize which had been earmarked for expansion plans for my summer cottage --I mean, er, corporate conference facilities.

      "We expect our recovery to be delayed somewhat while we initiate the appeals procedure. At that point, we anticipate a healthy rebound, as our business partner tells one of those investment firms to give us more money.

      "Even though shares of our stock cost less than an order of French fries at McDonald's, we want to allay any concerns about being delisted for having a low price. Our accountants have said ... er, I mean ... our accountant has said that we can simply do a stock merge, to have fewer shares, each of which cost more. As the price drops further and we merge more shares, we anticipate that it will be at least one week before all the shares are merged into a single share that costs $1.30. By that time, we should have identified another customer whom we can sue. It should not take too long to identify since we don't have a very long list to look through."
      [ Parent ]
      • Re:Tough noogies (Score:5, Insightful)

        by mhall119 (1035984) on Tuesday September 18, @01:45PM (#20657211) Homepage Journal

        And "we got outcompeted by X, Y and Z" is a pretty damn common reason.
        Sure sounds better than "We abandoned product X to sell product Y. Then other companies proved that selling product X was more profitable than selling product Y. We then spent a whole bunch of money suing those companies for selling product X and our own customers for using product X without paying us for our product Y, only to be told we didn't actually own product Y, and owed ass-loads of money to Company Z."
        [ Parent ]
        • Re:Tough noogies (Score:5, Insightful)

          by gowen (141411) <gwowen@gmail.com> on Tuesday September 18, @01:54PM (#20657369) Homepage Journal
          Oh, I agree. Bankruptcy filings get written by the soon-to-be-outgoing board. Unsuprisingly, they rarely say "This company folded because the outgoing board is almost completely incompetent and abandoned its core business in order to give all the company's assets to its lawyers."

          Funny, that.
          [ Parent ]
        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          Granted, that's all proven totally false, but there is some consistency to his hallucinations.

          That is not quite accurate. McBride's allegations have neither been proven nor disproven. In fact they appear to fall into the category of 'not even wrong' as

  • He will blame... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by AltGrendel (175092) <ag-slashdot AT exit0 DOT us> on Tuesday September 18, @01:24PM (#20656759) Homepage
    ...everyone but himself. What an ego.
    • Re:He will blame... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Cheesey (70139) on Tuesday September 18, @01:53PM (#20657359)
      I'm impressed to hear him speaking the truth for a change. Paraphrasing: "we're out of business because Linux does what we did, but for less money, and more flexibly."

      But I still think he's a dick for trying to solve that problem by suing. Adapting to Linux would surely have been cheaper than all this legal action. They might even have made a profit...
      [ Parent ]
  • Microsoft distributing Linux? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by querist (97166) on Tuesday September 18, @01:24PM (#20656765) Homepage
    Since when have Microsoft been distributing Linux? I suspect that Mr. McBride is mistaken or perhaps this is simply a despirate grab at anyone who has money. (Note he did not go after Ubuntu, etc. - only "deep pockets")
    • Re:Microsoft distributing Linux? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Kelson (129150) * on Tuesday September 18, @01:27PM (#20656837) Homepage Journal
      I did a double-take too, but if you look at it more closely, he doesn't say Microsoft distributes Linux. What he says is that other OSes including Linux took away their marketshare. Then he lists a bunch of companies that provide OSes, including Microsoft. So he's talking about Windows in that case.
      [ Parent ]
  • "Staying the course" eh ? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by unity100 (970058) <unity100 AT gmail DOT com> on Tuesday September 18, @01:24PM (#20656769) Homepage Journal
    STILL stiff neck and scheming up until the end.

    lawyers of this company should be hanged in order to prevent more exploits in u.s. legal system.
  • oh yeah? (Score:4, Funny)

    by zsouthboy (1136757) on Tuesday September 18, @01:24PM (#20656777)
    I, horse-and-buggy manufacturer, am being put out of business by those damn dirty car manufacturers!
      • Re:oh yeah? (Score:5, Funny)

        by Duhavid (677874) on Tuesday September 18, @03:16PM (#20659019)
        They self-manufacture. All you need are two of them.
        Not just any two, though, curiously enough.
        We have not figured that part out yet.

        We will stay on it, so to speak, till we do.
        [ Parent ]
  • Competition killed SCO. (Score:5, Funny)

    by khasim (1285) <brandioch.conner@gmail.com> on Tuesday September 18, @01:25PM (#20656779)

    McBride listed IBM, Red Hat, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems as distributors of Linux or other software that is "aggressively taking market share away from Unix."

    So ..... McBride is blaming competition?
    • Stop complaining! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mce (509) on Tuesday September 18, @01:49PM (#20657283) Homepage Journal

      Indeed. And what's wrong with that? They filed for chapter 11, so now they naturally have to explain why. Competition that they cannot beat is the reason. The real one. What's wrong with little Darl saying that, other than that it probably is the first accurate business related statement coming out of his mouth in years and that he should have said it a long time ago?

      I truely don't understand why you guys are screaming so much about this one. What McBride said is true amd he has to say it: Linux is the thing that ruined their business. It was doing that back in 2003 already. The fact that SCO used the dirty method they did to try to escape from the inevitable, does not change the basic facts. Get over it. You should all be happy, for $YOUR_DEITY_HERE's sake! So stop wasting time on such blahblah and get back to work, making Linux even better. SCO is history.

      [ Parent ]
  • Damn Microsoft (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 18, @01:25PM (#20656781)
    Damn Microsoft and their support of Linux!
  • Excuse me... (Score:3, Funny)

    by curmudgeous (710771) on Tuesday September 18, @01:25PM (#20656787)
    ...while I laugh maniacally.
  • Oh that Darl McBride! (Score:3, Informative)

    by ackthpt (218170) * on Tuesday September 18, @01:25PM (#20656791) Homepage Journal

    McBride noted that SCO's sales of Unix-based products "have been declining over the past several years."

    I suppose that's why they pay the Darl McBride the big bucks -- nothing gets by him.

    The incredible Darl in action! [vi411.org] Does anyone worry his next job will be working for their company?

    The slump, McBride said, "has been primarily attributable to significant competition from alternative operating systems, including Linux." McBride listed IBM, Red Hat, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems as distributors of Linux or other software that is "aggressively taking market share away from Unix.""

    Seems the logical approach would be for them to develop Unix and market it aggressively in return, rather than count on hitting the jackpot through the Lawsuit Lottery.

    Seems they should have learned something from this example [wikipedia.org], but it does seem to strike everyone that there really never was an interest in growing the Unix market. It was all about suing IBM and other Linux distro makers.

    In Other News: Br'er Rabbit informs us he's certain he can defeat the Tar-Baby if he could just get one foot free long enough to take another kick at it.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 18, @01:25PM (#20656795)
    corporate cop-out speak:

    McBride listed IBM, Red Hat, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems as distributors of Linux or other software that is "aggressively taking market share away from Unix."


    We would like to blame other entities for our inability to make a quality product that can compete in a competative marketplace. Simple put they are responsible for our incompetance.
  • got to change with the times... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mytrip (940886) on Tuesday September 18, @01:28PM (#20656841) Homepage Journal
    This is as stupid as horse drawn buggy makers blaming automobile makers for going out of business. SGI didnt adjust. They went poof. IBM adjusted well to linux and is reaping benefits are oracle and other companies. SCO could have done well with linux by shifting an existing customer base and applications over a long time ago.
  • SCO's reason for lawsuits? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mhollis (727905) on Tuesday September 18, @01:28PM (#20656849) Journal

    Wasn't the reason why SCO started suing everyone who was using Linux due to their assertion that the code in Linux was "stolen" from SCO Unix? So now they're claiming that competition from Linux (now that the courts see that the code was not, after all, stolen from them) is forcing them into Chapter Eleven?

    And their assertions of this poverty are not due to the enormous amounts they have paid lawyers to prosecute ostensibly innocent companies?!

    From now on, when I think of the term "pinhead" I'll think of the people at the soon-to-become-defunct SCO.

    • Re:SCO's reason for lawsuits? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by MightyMartian (840721) on Tuesday September 18, @01:45PM (#20657205) Journal
      To be fair to them, SCO Unix was heading towards extinction, largely because of the competition from Linux, all the BSDs and Microsoft. Heck, IBM knew this and that's why they started putting so much effort into Linux and moving away from their own *nix operating system (AIX). That being said, guys like Sun seem to be doing alright, so it really comes down to business model, period. Caldera/SCO got taken over by a rather litigous bastard who altered the business model from "produce, maintain and sell support of operating system" to "try to extort licensing fees from IBM, or even better, simply get bought out so we can all get out of this mess".

      I'll wager SCO was finished with or without the lawsuit. Without the lawsuit they may have a few more years, but SCO Unix died the death that some operating systems do; better and/or cheaper alternatives.
      [ Parent ]
  • Sun sells Unix (Score:3, Insightful)

    by khb (266593) on Tuesday September 18, @01:30PM (#20656879)
    As best I can tell, and it's certified http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/802-1953/6i5uv2sif [sun.com]. I'll bet HP-UX and AIX are too. So is Daryl's claim t that his Unix isn't as marketable as other people's Unixes??
  • Other choice quotes (Score:5, Informative)

    by Just Some Guy (3352) <kirk+slashdot@strauser.com> on Tuesday September 18, @01:32PM (#20656935) Homepage Journal

    My favorites:

    As a result of both the Court's August 10, 2007 ruling and our entry into Chapter 11, there is substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern.

    and:

    Revenue from the UNIX business decreased by $2,704,000, or 37%, for the three months ended July 31, 2007 compared to the three months ended July 31, 2006 and revenue from the UNIX business decreased by $5,103,000, or 23%, for the nine months ended July 31, 2007 compared to the nine months ended July 31, 2006.

    and:

    Revenue from our SCOsource business decreased from $31,000 for the three months ended July 31, 2006 to $0 for the three months ended July 31, 2007. Revenue also decreased from $95,000 for the nine months ended July 31, 2006 to $23,000 for the nine months ended July 31, 2007.

    Ouch. To their credit (heh, I are teh funny), they managed to only lose $4.6M during that 9-month period, down from $12.9M a year earlier. Unfortunately, it looks like they're also out of things to cut.

  • Magnificently flawed business model (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Flying pig (925874) on Tuesday September 18, @01:38PM (#20657039)
    Assuming for the moment that the whole thing wasn't simply a Microsoft sock puppet, Darl McBride would seem to have failed very basic economics. SCO's competition was not Sun, HP, Red Hat etc. It was Microsoft. If he had actually wanted to grow the business, he would have known that when a type of product has relatively low market share, increasing the number of suppliers tends to increase that market share. If it's perceived that "everybody is doing Linux these days", cio and ceo are more likely to buy Linux.

    So, reverting to the original argument, I suspect that McBride is not stupid, and that the whole thing is indeed a sock puppet. However, as a scam it is probably too arcane to be explained in a fraud trial. Expect McBride to turn up in a Microsoft advert before too long, explaining that it is the fate of all Linux companies to go bankrupt, so best stick with Windows.

  • So, let me get this straight.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by downix (84795) on Tuesday September 18, @01:41PM (#20657125) Homepage
    You dropped your Linux support, now you're complaining that Linux is beating you? Would that not be akin to trading your ticket from a steam transport for a luxury suite on the Titanic?
  • Gambling as a Business Model (Score:4, Insightful)

    by HexaByte (817350) on Tuesday September 18, @02:10PM (#20657699)
    Too bad nobody ever told Darl that Gambling isn't a good business model.

    He gambled that, by suing for their "stolen code" that was in Linux, he would either get someone to buck up or get IBM, Novel, etc. to buy them up. Maybe he was even hoping Bill Gates would make an offer, so that he could kill Linux.

    The only problem was, no one rolled over and played dead, depriving Darl of a buyout and golden parachute, or a "Linux Lottery Lawsuit Goldmine". (TM)

    Maybe, Darl, you'd have better luck taking your paycheck out to the local riverboat.....

  • SCO is solvent (Score:5, Informative)

    by darkonc (47285) <stephen_samuel@bcgreen . c om> on Tuesday September 18, @02:19PM (#20657853) Homepage Journal
    SCO is solvent -- unless you include the money that they {claim that they don't,} owe to Novell. . . but even if they end up owing half of the $24M that Novell claims they owe, that would be more than enough to put them into the red.

    Thus, . . . even if you accept that competition from Linux has hurt them, what really cooked their goose was suing Novell and, thus, forcing Novell to counter-sue. (Once SCO sued Novell, if Novell hadn't countered with the demand for payment of owed royalties, they might have been permanently barred from suing SCO for that $20M at a later date).

    Of course, in their bankruptcy filings, SCO doesn't acknowledge that they owe Novell anything ... presumably under the premise that nothing is owing until the judge declares so in the trial (that is now being held in limbo by the Chapter 11 request). The problem that SCO may have, however, is that -- until, and unless Novell's royalties are declared (or acknowledged) owing, SCO is actually solvent, which means that the bankruptcy court may actually deny their request to go into chapter 11.

    On the other hand, admitting that they owe all of this money to SCO would defeat the probable purpose of the filing -- which appears to be keeping Novell off of the list of top creditors. (I'm not going to link to groklaw, here, because their servers are SOOO snowed under by all this sudden attention -- and that just after they upgraded!).

    The reason why SCO probably fears Novell being on their list of top creditors is that Novell would then lead a board of creditors which would have an incredibly wide-ranging ability to look into the recent actions of SCO from the inside -- and given how much SCO has been dancing to prevent certain disclosures in court, I expect that they'll be very unhappy to see Novell lawyers walking into the office to pull that very same information out of SCO's files in person.
    And then there's the question of how much 'encouragement' Microsoft provided for the lawsuit against Linux in the first place.

    Yeppers. I expect that there's gonna be a whole lot of hand-wringing in Utah over the next week or so... possibly even for over the next couple of years.

  • Fine then (Score:3, Insightful)

    by nuzak (959558) on Tuesday September 18, @02:30PM (#20658049)
    Maybe you're dead because you sued your own partners and customers. Who cares? In your fantasy world, you're dead because you couldn't compete. Fine.

    Just stay dead. The world doesn't even owe you a eulogy.

  • It's not going to work for SCO (Score:5, Informative)

    by Animats (122034) on Tuesday September 18, @02:46PM (#20658333) Homepage

    Novell already sent five heavy-hitters from Morrison and Foerster, the leading bankruptcy law firm, to Delaware to present their side of the SCO bankruptcy. SCO originally wanted to keep paying their lawyers for their various pre-existing lawsuits during bankruptcy. But they didn't even try to convince the bankruptcy judge of that in court today. So that legal money drain stops. Novell indicated they're going to file a motion to restart their lawsuit (it's just stayed temporarily after the bankruptcy filing), and on October 5, Novell gets to argue that their financial claim preempts most of the other creditors. SCO was just supposed to pass royalties through to Novell, not keep them. Judge Kimball agreed, and put that in his summary judgment order last month, so Novell will probably win that one.

    Meanwhile, SCO stock is now at $0.18, down 99% from the peak after SCO sued IBM.

  • by superwiz (655733) on Tuesday September 18, @03:03PM (#20658737) Journal

    He did, in fact, claim that SCO's downfall was due to the natural market forces and the company's inability to compete with other Unix vendors. His claim, actually, doesn't seem to make too much of a boogy man of the competition... he didn't say they sold child porn... he just said they were provding alternative which the market place prefered.

    The reason he is being this (almost) honest is that he now needs to downplay the fact that SCO completely lost their ability to gain new business because of the lawsuits. Without even mentioning whether the lawsuit has merit, the rule of the market place is if you can compete you compete, if you can't compete you go away or sue (see Sun Tzu's "...if the enemy is weaker than you fight him; if he is equally matched, irritate him; if he is stronger evade him..."). Suing, of course, is meant to be the irritating distraction.

    So the market place came to see the company as admitting defeat because of the lawsuits. This is what he trying to divert attention from. And everyone here seems to be playing his hand.

  • Failure to adapt. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jellomizer (103300) * on Tuesday September 18, @03:25PM (#20659207) Homepage
    Linux was a competitor But SCO failed to Adapt in time to face the competition they just tried to kill it. This is often the effect when someone first sees a threat they try to get rid of it. Linux by its very nature is much harder to get rid of then other competitors because it wasn't centralized. Attacking Linux is also attacking potential future customers. If SCO did nothing they may still be alive today like Sun and HP. They could have made tons of money from Linux Fallout. Those companies that tried Linux and realized it didn't fit their company (Yes they do exist Linux is not the perfect do all for everything OS). They could have competed more with Sun and HP for business. A Fully Commercially Supported Unix that Runs on your platform. And is not treated like the ugly step child like Solaris X86. There wireless technology they just started getting involved into. They had potential but it wasn't Linux that killed SCO. Is was SCO that killed SCO they abused future customers, they sued potential allies, welcomed other competitors, Lied to the public, wasted Taxpayer money, picked on the biggest strongest company it could find. In short they did everything wrong, a perfect example on what not to do.
      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        HP-UX and Solaris comply with the Single UNIX Specification and are thusly properly called Unix.