SCO Blames Linux For Bankruptcy Filing 321
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.""
Oh that Darl McBride! (Score:3, Informative)
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?
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.
Re:Microsoft distributing Linux? (Score:5, Informative)
Other choice quotes (Score:5, Informative)
My favorites:
and:
and:
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.
Re:Other choice quotes (Score:4, Informative)
Oops! At first glance I thought the article was linking to their 10-Q filing [yahoo.com] that I'd just finished reading. Those quotes and numbers are taking from that form, not from the article.
Re:Sun? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source (Score:0, Informative)
In one of their court cases, the court order SCO to release SCO's code to the court so the court could compare it to the Linux code, ect..., SCO claimed that Unix was propietary, and that they couldn't release it to the court without hurting themselves, so they withheld their code, and the case was thrown out. I think everyone knows that SCO is a big joke, that is looking to make money from nothing. I know a few years ago, when they were making money, it was from their stock, and people getting into the hype. I'm sure the SCO execs all the majority of the ppl who bought the stock, and they probably sold it already while it was high a few years back.
From above, I forget who Caldera was, I am too lazy to look it up. I wrote a paper two years back on this, I can probably find it and upload some of it when I get home from work.
Just my two cents...and a little clarification about a few thing.
SCO is solvent (Score:5, Informative)
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.
It's not going to work for SCO (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Another point they missed (Score:4, Informative)
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]
Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source (Score:3, Informative)
Re:So, let me get this straight.... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source (Score:2, Informative)