SCO - that's what you get for being greedy!

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Banned
The company at the centre of an intellectual property dispute with IBM that has lasted for years is facing the prospect of financial ruin. The SCO Group said it may be unable to continue operating as a company.

SCO challenged IT giants IBM and Novell over the rights to the Unix operating system in a set of court cases which began in 2003. On 10 August the company lost its case against Novell when a court ruled that Novell and not SCO owned copyrights to the Unix system.

One month after the ruling the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, a US process in which the company is shielded from creditors while it reorganises itself. The company has now lodged a filing with financial regulator the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) which casts doubt on the future of the company.
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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/21/sco_financial_woes/

Enjoy it as I did... :)
 
Yeah, it totally backfired, as not only the SCO not get the money they were suing for, it was legally established that they did not have the rights to sell *nix licences on. The reason why SCO have gone into Chapter 11 is because they now need to turn over all the money they got for illegally selling licences back to Novell - and they don't have the cash, having spent it all on lawyers.

Serves them right, the rapacious greedy corprorate lawyers SCO are.
 
Is that accurate BZB? I thought SCO lost the whole schmuck because they based it on copyrights that were not sold to SCO. SCO, AFAIK, still had the right to sell Unix, but didn't own the copyrights and the Ch11 thing is simply a result of having spent everything on lawyers.
Thankfully Novell, who owns the copyrights, has said they have no intention of ever enforcing them.
 
Here's the Arstechnica story.

There are still details to be resolved in SCO's ongoing court battle with Novell. The original agreement between the two companies stipulated that SCO would have to pay Novell 95 percent of royalties collected from licensing the original UNIX intellectual property. Judge Kimball has already determined that SCO breached its fiduciary duty by failing to turn over the licensing money. In an upcoming bench trial, Judge Kimball will have to determine which portion of SCO's $25 million licensing deals with Microsoft and Sun were related to the UNIX intellectual property owned by Novell. Although SCO won't be able to totally dodge that bullet, it is all but certain now that Novell will never see a significant portion of the licensing revenue.
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From TheInq summary:

Therefore, the SCO v. Novell trial that was to have started Monday had mostly devolved to the sole issue of how much money SCO must pay Novell for UNIX SVRX licences it sold to Microsoft, Sun and others for over $25 million. Based upon preliminary court rulings, it was beginning to look a lot like SCO might be forced to pay Novell every penny it had collected from Microsoft and Sun, et al.
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So it looks like SCO claimed they had the rights to sell *nix, but didn't have anything on paper to that effect, and SCO were supposed to be sending a lot of that cash back to Novell, and didn't do so. They then screwed themselves by suing Novell along with everyone else.
 
For the best coverage of any and all SCO cases you need to check out Groklaw.
 
Color me Dan said:
Forgive my ignorance, but who or what is SCO?
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Used to be Caldera Systems or something like that, then they acquired a bunch of stuff from Santa Cruz Operations and became The SCO Group, which became some litigious organization claiming they owned huge parts of Linux and that a bunch of companies owed them boatloads of money.

They are currently receiving their just rewards.
 
AlphaWolf said:
Used to be Caldera Systems or something like that, then they acquired a bunch of stuff from Santa Cruz Operations and became The SCO Group, which became some litigious organization claiming they owned huge parts of Unix and that a bunch of companies owed them boatloads of money.

They are currently receiving their just rewards.
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Corrected.
 
McBride and the board sucked the company dry with quite extravagant salaries and bonuses too for a company which was basically doing bugger all ... it wasn't just the lawyers. I'm sure they are disappointed they couldn't stretch it out any longer but unless they are taken to the cleaners for mismanagement, which pretty much never happens, evil will till have won to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.
 
MfA said:
McBride and the board sucked the company dry with quite extravagant salaries and bonuses too for a company which was basically doing bugger all ... it wasn't just the lawyers. I'm sure they are disappointed they couldn't stretch it out any longer but unless they are taken to the cleaners for mismanagement, which pretty much never happens, evil will till have won to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.
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I'm curious to see if there will be SEC investigations. There appeared to be some pretty big insider trading going on. It also may be possible to reclaim some of those bonuses and pay raises to pay Novell if SCO does not have the assets on hand to do so (As Novell isn't a creditor but rather the owner of those assets, the judge can basically tell the board to give everything back).

Should be interesting to see what happens.

Nite_Hawk
 
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