SCO Blames Linux For Bankruptcy Filing

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.""

got to change with the times...

[mytrip]

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?

[mhollis]

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.

I would be led to beleive...

[dexomn]

It was the public debacle, wild accusations, circular logic, legal threats, loss of face, change of business model from products and services to litigation based, etc. that caused this. Not to mention an outrageously overpriced and stale product line. Call me a dreamer...

Magnificently flawed business model

[Flying pig]

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.

Note to Darl...

[Ang31us]

Darl, YOU who chose to get rid of the Caldera Linux distribution after you were hired in late June 2002 [wikipedia.org]. Then, you spit in the face of the community that made your company rich and took on the Nazgul. [slashdot.org]

You, not your competitors, are the reason why SCO is the joke of the IT industry.

Ice storms in Texas

[Dan667]

When there are ice storms in South Texas (a very rare event), me and a couple of buddies like to get some lawn chairs and a cooler and go sit at the end of an off-ramp of a freeway and watch people freakout while going >5mph and skidding uncontrollably. Everyone knows they are not suppose to be out, but there they are wrecking their cars anyway. To bad there is nothing like that for the SCO board room.

Re:So when...

[thatskinnyguy]

Question: Could Caldera/SCOG sue McBride for his inept leadership? And causing them to lose market due to his governance, deceptions, etc? He is liable for the company as an executive officer, especially as CEO.

If by "Caldera/SCOG" you mean "shareholders in Caldera/SCOG", then yes. See Enron for more details.

Re:He will blame...

[Cheesey]

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...

If only Darl had positioned SCO differently...

[Infonaut]

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].

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[LWATCDR]

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.

Failure to adapt.

[jellomizer]

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:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[WindBourne]

After all, how much space is there really for commercial support in the Linux space.

Hmmmm. At the time that they pulled this shit, basically, it was Redhat, Suse, and Caldera as the big players. Now, it is redhat, Suse/Novell, Ubuntu's company, Oracle, IBM, HP, SGI, Mandriva, etc. It would appear that the market is really expanding with a large amount of support. OTH, the support for Unix is shrinking.

But then again, I do not believe that they ever intended to expand the Unix market. I think taht they intended to do what MS/Sun paid them to do; fight Linux in the courts. That almost certainly made them a GREAT deal more money that reselling Unix ever could.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[TheRaven64]

I'm not saying sell DOS, I'm saying sell Linux with a DR DOS-based runtime environment, which can run Windows 3.11 in a window in X. It would have been a nice migration path for a lot of companies.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[GooberToo]

They were a Linux distributor.

But before that happened, IIRC, SCO's entire VAR channel gave them the finger because SCO refused to do anything to help them remain loyal. As a result, almost everyone one of them went to IBM or Linux; mostly to Linux. Long story short, SCO decided they would not support their sales, support, and consulting channel...and are now surprised they have no business as a result. SCO has no one to blame but SCO.

Hell, SCO's Nonstop Clustering (NSC) product sucks...it doesn't work worth crap. A single node failure can result in wiping/crashing the ENTIRE cluster. After which a re-installation on every node in the cluster is required. I think Compaq/HP got tired of dealing with this loser technology and started distancing themselves from it. I don't recall who actually did the development on that product, Compaq/HP or SCO.

To make matters worse, SCO is a real nightmare to support. AIX, OSF (Dec Unix), HPUX, Linux, so on, are all so easy in comparison. All together, it's almost impossible to have anything good as a result of using SCO (no support (lost their VARs), limited applications (people stopped developing on SCO because the platform sucks for developers), no real cluster solution (NSC) , contrary to best efforts by marketing. So what's left? Only a dope wouldn't move on to a better platform.

Re:Caldera to SCO: Backing the wrong source

[ultranova]

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..."