Quote:Jan. 22, 2008
On April 29, SCO will finally have its day in court, but not exactly in the way the Unix and Linux litigation company had planned. If things had gone the way SCO wanted, it would be facing IBM to see how much money it would get for IBM using Unix code in Linux. Instead of that fantasy coming true, SCO will be trying to hang on to what's left of its assets from Novell.
U.S. District Court Judge Dale Kimball has already ruled on the heart of the issue. On Aug. 10, 2007, Kimball ruled that Novell, not SCO, owned Unix's IP (intellectual property). With that key card taken away, SCO's never-very-steady card house of lawsuits began falling.
Novell immediately moved to stop SCO in its tracks and collect the money SCO owed it from its Unix IP sales. SCO then tried for the relatively safe haven of bankruptcy.
SCO had hoped that, even in this extremity, York Capital would buy it out of bankruptcy and into private ownership. Once there, it could still continue to make its claims against Linux and try to battle it out with Novell and IBM. The York deal fell through, and that appears to have been SCO's last shot at finding anyone willing to invest in its lawsuits.
With this final financial blow, and several other problems, SCO was delisted from Nasdaq on Dec. 27.
Even before that, bankruptcy proved not to be a safe harbor for SCO. The Delaware bankruptcy court decided that Novell's action against SCO had to be completed before it could make a ruling. So it was that SCO now faces a four-day trial in Salt Lake City to determine how much it owes Novell.
Novell could be awarded as much as $37 million. With at most $13 million in current assets--and that includes the furniture, computers and kitchen sink--and millions in other liabilities, SCO could emerge from Judge Kimball's court without even a shirt to cover its back.
Bahahaha! That's great news! God gave us SCO so we'd have an organization to hate more than RIAA!
With SCO's
stock trading at a whopping $0.08, I wonder why IBM doesn't just buy them out and send Darl McBride packing. Of course, Darl probably owns a pretty significant chunk of SCO stock, and IBM/Novell doesn't want to inflate the value of his stock.
This is really too bad because SCO UNIX was a fairly solid operating system. Sure, it's not AIX, but hey - we can't all be winners.
-b0b
(...will dance on SCO's grave.)