so why is this a mystery to them -- they bet the farm on suing everying like Americans do and then whinge and complain when they've lost. bloody typical Yanks, bet their lawyers get paid either way. they should count themselves lucky to not have a ton of summary judgements against them for lack of etherial common sense.

good riddance!

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAAAAAAA

I can't have been the only person to parse "...and it makes grim reading." as "it makes you grin reading"

I can imagine the violins playing outside SCO headquarters now...

Not even Paris runs SCO these days.

why am I not all broken up about SCOs death? Oh wait -- I'm NOT.

Let this be a lesson to the next greedy outfit who wants to 'own' the information age.

Was anyone else amazed by how much unix business they still appear to have? OK, so it's only $20m, but does anybody know anybody who actually paid SCO money last year?

I'm waiting for the BeOS style auction to appear soon as SCO takes its rightful place - in history.

When supping with the Devil (you know who !) use a long spoon. HA HA. I think the violins may be playing by a cardboard box soon :)

So let's suppose a charging white horse with an M$ft tattoo charges over the horizon, and buys the remains of the business including the Intellectual Property.

And then suppose the IP licensing and the litigation does not go away as hoped for but hangs around like a bad smell.

How much to buy SCO - chump change now I would allege.

Let SCO's case be a lesson to all patent trolls everywhere... "cashing in" does not necessarily have to be cashing in ON something...

The pythonesque tale of SCO is now in the "Not dead yet" scene from Holy grail... How long until it moves into the dead parrot sketch?

My power over the US lawyers is diminishing. (or maybe not)

I will hide behind my mate in company resting on some old fried tarts!

Boise, their solicitor or whatever, has booked up to go the course for 40,000 shares as far as I know. These are worth some $0.045 per share cents according to http://messages.finance.yahoo.com/Stocks_%28A_to_Z%29/Stocks_S/threadview?m=tm&bn=2942&tid=450831&mid=450831&tof=-1&rt=2&frt=2&off=1 (Which didn't stop someone selling a bunch of them just before news of the French bank scandal broke recently.

And at $1800.oo, makes the firm one of the most grossly overpaid luxuries going.

Which leaves this misdirection:

"The revenue from our UNIX business has been declining over the last several years primarily as a result of continued competition from alternative operating systems, particularly Linux and from the negative publicity of the SCO Litigation."

It's not as if they made money -even when they were honest. That "revenue" was at a nett loss.

the original SCO product was used in many retail environments, as it was very stable and reliable, and required modest hardware. if SCO continued to sell and support that very consistent UNIX product, they would probably be doing well enough right now.

i personally know of at least one server running SCO, that is still standing.

they chose to take a huge, risky gamble, and lost. Darl and the other vultures will probably get jobs elsewhere, because among C-level officers, it's not what you know, but who.

sad to see a good little company go to waste because of greed and stupidity.

if GWBush's business record is anything to go by, Darl will probably be elected president of something rather critical in the future (much to the detriment of the rest of us), because s*it floats.

...and it's playing your song, SCO

> but does anybody know anybody who actually paid SCO money last year?

And. at least as important a question: WHY?

Or just dissolve and go away.

History will likely remember SCO as an acronym for "Sued Customers Offendingly."

Lay charges against the Executive.

Send em' all to prison for 20 years, that will make a corporation think twice before trying anything like this again.

One less patent troll....one less FOSS obstacle.....one less bunch of wankers to deal with.....

Now if only someone could deal with Microsoft we'd all be set.

The usual result, for any asset of a company undergoing liquidation type bankruptcy, is that the assets are dissolved by the court, with the proceeds being distributed to the debtors by the court. This may take the form of a private sale, or it may take the form of an auction. That should apply whether the asset is a physical asset (e.g., tables, chairs, computers, buildings, etc.), or whether it's a "soft" asset, such as intellectual property.

Of course, that only applies for a liquidation type bankruptcy, and there are several different forms of bankruptcy, such as liquidation, reorganization, etc., usually denoted by the "chapter number" of the bankruptcy filing. Of course, it's possible for the bankruptcy court to change the type of bankruptcy.

To further confuse matters, since SCO is (err, was?) an American company, the US federal bankruptcy laws apply. However, the federal bankruptcy laws are different for different states. And, it's not too unusual for a company with dealings in several different states to pick the one with conditions most favourable for it's filing.

Dave

P.S. IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer), but the company my significant other used to work for went through this, so I got to watch it all happen in slow motion.

... other than to echo the prevailing sentiment: good riddance.

I feel for SCO's employees and its clients but it's a little more difficult to feel too sorry for its shareholders who were either unaware of the company's conduct (in which case they can't claim to have *earned* any dividends anyway) or were comfortable with it.

@David

that's exactly what the Novell case was about ..

Novell never sold the copyrights and IP to SCO for the

part they sold to SCO .. Groklaw has plenty on the matter.

So .. SCO don't hold the copyrights . therefore a great deal of it

they cant sell cause it's not theirs .. See the rulings from the judge.

An extremely interresting case to say the least.

Ric

At first I thought SCO had lapsed into honesty--but they are only blaming the bad publicity, not admitting to their own incompetence in inviting the bad publicity.

I think I'm going to miss the entertainment value of the story, but it's time to bring down the final curtain.

I wanted an icon with "IP?", or something really confusing. What's the iconic picture for a liar? Dubya Bush? No, wait. Can't lie if you don't know (or care) about the truth. How about the Dick Cheney? I can't say Darl McBride of SCO, since I have no idea what he looks like. He never reached icon status.

@Captain DaFt

...from the pen of Linus Torvalds no less, the Smoking Crack Organization.

Oh, to see Darl's severed head on a pole....

And I would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for those pesky kids!

Seriously, SCO was just a minor conflict-sideshow in the war between Microsoft and everything that isn't Microsoft (think Loas or Cambodia).

Attacking it with lawyers is like trying to kill a swarm of mosquitoes with a machine gun.

And SCO going after IBM is like trying to kill an elephant with a fly swat.

Ha ha hah, ha ha ha ha, ha-ha ha ha ha!!

ha ha hah, ha ha ha ha, HA HA HA HA HO!

Serves you right for trying to kill linux.

I seem to remember back in the 90's they had a reasonable range of high availability embedded OSs aimed at telecomms market (in partnership with Tandem). We made a few products for terrestrial and mobile markets on that platform and it worked pretty well, so I guess the likes of my old company and others will still be paying for licenses for kit that still does what it says on TFM...

Darl McBride is still drawing a massive director's salary from what's left of SCO and is spinning it out for every penny.

Then when the time comes he'll probably march into another highly paid top management post or three.

I hated Darl McBride and Chris Sontag when we were at Novell, long before any of you hated them. So you all owe me a fee for hating them. Got a meeting with my lawyer next week to determine just how much...

Oh, and Chris - I still have Dawn's unmentionables she left in my car one night.

Good day, CHRISTOPHER STALLINGS SONTAG.