SCO's Linux litigation architect angles for SCO's mobile biz Desperate to fund its seemingly-endless legal battle for Unix copyrights against Novell and others, SCO Group has found someone willing to buy the bankrupt company's mobile assets - and it's none other than Darl McBride, the former SCO chief executive sacked as a result of his ruinous crusade to claim Unix. Groklaw has flagged …
Chapter 11 is an amazing way to run a business. You do not have to pay anyone you owed money to before filing for chapter 11. All outstanding lawsuits are delayed unless you convince the judge to let them continue. You get months to come up with a business plan that pays off your creditors. You can convince the judge to extend that those months to years with a few promises that an amazing deal will be ready real soon now.
In theory, the biggest creditors can form a creditors committee that has some say in what goes on. If you run up bills with your allies, you can stuff the committee full of people who will do nothing. In theory, you are supposed to file Monthly Operating Reports that say how much money is left, what you have spent and what you have earned. It appears you can delay these for months and say "All the MORs could be completely wrong because it is not clear whether income/liability belongs with the debtor or one of its non-bankrupt overseas subsidiaries".
There is some good news: SCO's reporters and 'expert' witnesses are (low down) on the pre-petition creditors list. The teams of lawyers SCO hired to handle the bankruptcy are asking to get paid, and it looks like the trustee and his lawyers may end up large unpaid bills too. It looks like going to enormous lengths to help a company delay chapter 7 bankruptcy is not a good idea. (Ch 7: trustee sells the disected corpse of SCO to the highest bidders.)
of a fast and quiet death of this disgusting "saga".
There is still this fifty/fifty chance with a jury, the lottery part of a legal system with a jury.
And as far as I understand the whole case has been taken over bye two scumbags, the new judge and the appointed Chapter 11 Trustee.
I think we will need Pamela for quite some time.
This farce has been going for six or seven years now. And the actions of the Court-appointed Trustee seem a bit strange, to say the least.
But Darl's purchase of the "mobility" assets aren't the only strange thing. As has been pointed out. $35K is chump change. Heck - he gets the "me" domain names and will probably sue Apple for their "Mobile Me" service.
Strange #2 is that Yarro is back from the dead and wants to "lend" SCO $2M with super-priority claim against assets.
The system is being seriously gamed here.
it's the damn necromancers that keep animating it long after the useful limbs have rotted and fallen off. SCO is dead as a doornail. Even if the universe tilts and they somehow won in court, they'd never sell another license for any of their software, and would only continue to exist as a money conduit back to their necromancers. An undead patent troll they'd be.
This is a train wreck, so slow, that the passengers have now been asked to get out and push the train.
Eleven years after Tim O'Reilly predicted that SCO's longterm finances might be in "a bit of bother" (in the prologue to the first edition of the book "Open Sources"), here we are, still looking at Our Gifted Sociologist, from Utah, with his whacky Ponzi-style schemes.
Ever since he tried to sue IKON for sacking him, back in 1998, it seems that Daryl's whole business ethic revolves around suing people, raising venture capital from his network of Mormon buddies, and using a process of stock acquisitions, to get rid of this capital again, that can only make sense if one assumes that waving a dead chicken around, is somehow involved in the decision-making process.
Hop over to Groklaw. Several people are seriously considering setting up a venture and making a bid, just to see how serious Darl is. The suspicion is that it's not the assets that are the big thing, its the covenant that Darl makes not to sue the trustee who is now running SCO that is the attractive feature, for the trustee, that is.
Can't IBM or some other one-time SCO target pay whatever is necessary to buy SCO's assets from the liquidator, and then bring this nightmare to a final close by declaring all SCO copyrights and patents to be permanently, irrevocably, non-actionable against the open-source community? It would surely take mere pocket-money for IBM to do this. (A lot less than they've spent to date on lawyers, now with no hope of getting it back from SCO even though they won).
...but didn't both Novell and IBM have judgements against SCO saying, essentially, "SCO owe us muchos big time dollars."
Theoretically, SCO's remains should be auctioned off to pay it's debts, (chapter 7,) including to IBM and Novell. While it is still in chapter 11 however, it is allowed to continue existing.
The trick would be to push it into Chapter 7, and *poof,* most of what SCO has left ends up in Novell and/or IBM's hands.
If I am wrong on any part of that, someone please correct me!
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
