SCO bags $100m to fight another day It's Alive! SCO is bouncing back from Chapter 11 and taking itself private, thanks to the munificence of a private equity firm. The company that thinks it owns some lines of code in Linux - and that anyone who uses Linux owes it a living - fled to Chapter 11 last September, after fighting legal battles against world+dog - to …
Oh come on. SCO gets $100M!? for what exactly? they're a worthless husk now. By the time IBM and Novell finish with them, the 'crown jewels' of UNIX will belong to either IBM or Novell. This fellow and his backers are nuts, all they are doing is bankrolling a losing concern which is in it up to it's neck with legal troubles of it's own making. If they inject any significant funding into SCO, it will simply be frittered away with more pointless jockeying for position in court, followed by any and all assets of SCO being forfeit as damages to both Novell and IBM.
No one throws good money after bad, so why throw good money into a fire-pit? Something doesn't add up here. If SCO has persuaded someone to give them this amount of money, either some great big lies were told to someone, or Boise has a cunning plan for escaping the legal 'shitstorm' they started with zero consequences.
Good grief, I have to go over to Groklaw and see what the great unwashed of the Linux world have to say about this.
Gagh! Where's the biohazard icon when you need it?
Dropped the price to a consumer level - and rode the unix interest that Linux was generating.
People would still have bought Xenix, and as RedHat has shown there is some value in being the support guys.
Unfortunately all their tech has gone - and yeah this is just going to drag out the lawsuits, not that anyone really cares anymore.
For years we in the tech industry have been following this as a real story.
But we should come clean and admit to ourselves that it's not.
The evidence: very little has happened since the writer's strike has a happened. Groklaw has been re-hashing old story lines. We have many more guest interviews.
But the day after the writer's strike ends, our soap opera suddenly sprouts a new twist. Veronica, who we learned died in a plane crash, is back after sudden recovery from amnesia triggered by a blood transfusion from a eskimo. But it's complicated because Brad has remarried, but is having an affair with Marsha, who is secretly plotting to...
Oh, wait, wrong channel. But the day after the writer's strike ends, SCOX rises from its deathbed, stronger than ever. The doctor pronounces them fit as a fiddle, with "up to 80 more years to live".
I am not yet dead, I can sue and I can sing,
I am not yet dead, i can do that lawsuit thing,
I am not yet dead, Dont sell my assets yet, Keep investing all your money cos I'm not yet dead.
(excuse me a monent, I have a phone call, Hello, Eric Idle? Wow, a big name celeb.... What? Cease and Decist? Too much like Spamalot? Bad Taste? Intelectual Property? Okay, Okay, I'll stop.)
I think this is great news...Hopefully the company will start paying SCO, SCO will be required to send it all over to Novell, since SCO owes them $30 million in licensing fees SCO has not paid them yet.. and the firm will realize they are sending money into a big money sink. Then Novell is paid the money they are owed, that SCO tried to weasel out of paying, and SCO is still broke.
"No one throws good money after bad, so why throw good money into a fire-pit? Something doesn't add up here."
I was just thinking that they backed George Bush to lose lots of money long before he had dreams of empire and being the Mad Monk ey.
Then I saw that someone else had linked the firm to the Chimp and the people that paid him to bag Iraq and incidentally stop him producing oil there (the only job he has ever been any good at)
"This is top-drawer coin-of-the-realm kind of money put together from the deep-pockets of the Middle East by Stephen Norris, the co-founder and former president of the ultra-posh Carlyle Group, the guy who had Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal Al Saud salvage Citibank on a cold call and turn a $15 billion profit on mere $590 million equity investment."
http://dotnet.sys-con.com/read/502009.htm
In Firefox you have to disable Javascript. (They seem to have the impression if they block you with a giant advert from seeing the screen, you will be really tempted to join up.)
Is this the one where Paris Hilton enters a flying saucer? And SCO sues IBM and Saudi Arabia ends up owning All American Hi Tech.
Well it is the land of opportunity after all but it won't be the land of the freeware for much longer. Here is to interesting times. And interminable soap operas.
How the hell did I get hooked on this shit?
Things were a lot easier when Errol Flynn rode into the rescue and killed all the original inhabitants and everyone else lived happily ever after. And it was all over in an hour or two, too!
That was the best bit. You still had time to go and be Errol Flynn for a few hours before bedtime. Who wants to be a Chimpanzee, FFS?
SCO to the Carlyle Partners is only an instrument. A means to and ends. This isn't about saving SCO. This is about CONTROL. If you can take control by claiming ownership to Linux code you can dictate terms of it's use. Linux is the last stand against DRM and call home monitoring software being put into all computers. Those who call the shots on a global scale are not happy with a truly free unmonitored OS in the wild for people to go to.
I don't know whether anyone has gotten this idea as well, but I'll spell it out what I just thought about them getting this extra cash
ITS A FANTASTIC TURN OF EVENTS
right now, free software is facing an uncertain victory, right now, we all know free software is victorious and never had anything to prove, or defend against, we know all this because we're not stupid, we don't read press releases like some people read the newspaper "Wow, did you know that Free Software developers don't feed their children for up one week a month? Thats interesting honey, pass the marmalade"
Some people out there believe every little lie that SCO tell them and everytime they read in the newspaper about a judge kicking them down, they understand a little bit more than they did before.
WE NEED THEM TO CONTINUE, SO THEY CAN FAIL AND THE WHOLE WORLD CAN'T SAY IT WASN'T TRUE.
We need SCO to continue, we need that judgement to be passed down and their asses kicked, we need a judgement, in black and white, SCO didnt own a thing, couldnt sue for anything and free sofware is vindicated. I know that a lot of people will still argue black is white, regardless of what proof you tell them, but for the other 80% the final day of this case, will make them wake up and then nobody can deny what we've known all along.
Sometimes the continuation of painful process, in the long run, is a good thing, lets enjoy the show!
If it wasnt for SCO, I'd do a whole lot more work during the day and a whole lot less reading groklaw, without SCO, I might have to find another pursuit to prevent me from doing things too quickly :D
Enjoy
If they can show the SCO's case is worthless and he funds more of the same doesn't that expose him to direct lawsuits?
Something like tortuous interference in business?
IBM and Novell may yet get a big wad of cash from this SCO thing, by way of extracting it from Norris directly.
The register, in ALL its glory, as the single, level headed, realistic news source in the world, has just launched a campaign to reduce the world carbon emissions by 10% over the next 15 minutes.
In a press announcement released by the affectionately named el-reg it was said "It seems people just don't want to buy oil if the money goes to sco, and because the oil industry is so distributed its difficult to know when you're funding them... oil revenue funding sco is the leading cause of insurgency in secondlife, being attributed to no less than 60% of so-called nix bashing incidents."
Elreg, more effectively combating climate change than hippies since 2008
No, please no. Not Xenix. Horrible, horrible, HORRIBLE pile of pants. How Microsoft thought Unix should work. Xenix should be paraded to all Linux fanboiz as an Awful Warning of what could happen if Redmond ever tries to "embrace" [sic(k)] Linux.
SCO Unix OTOH was a very nice operating system. Back in 1994 my Internet connection was installed on an elderly 386 (ask yer parents, young 'uns) running it. And it worked very well indeed.
It would appear that if this aggreement is signed as is then Norris' lot get first pick of the carcass.
So they dont actually have to loan SCO any money but they get priority over current creditors.
It would appear that all SCO want to do is to prevent Novell/IBM getting the money they are due. And are prepared to sacrifice the company to that end.
Don't you see? This is that "cyber terrorism" they have been talking about. The middle east funds SCO, allowing them to continue to terrorize us with their idiocy! Now congress will have to allocate more billions of $$ to keep the crack counter cyber terrorist team outfitted with the latest PIII equipment and 15 inch CRTs!
Seems to me that the department of homeland security might want to block this deal, as the "middle eastern" investor hasn't actually been identified and it could well be Bin Laden himself. It also appears that this deal is a direct attempt by SCO to avoid paying Novell the damages awarded to them. Wasn't there already a final judgment detailing that SCO owes Novell money because they don't own the rights to Linux Code? Can't Novell sue SCO for fraud and God knows what else? Can we just be done with SCO??
Who really has a vested interest in SCO winning this case other than SCO? VOLE, of course. LOL...
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