SCO Assets Going To October Auction 217
Posted
by
CmdrTaco
from the vultures-are-circling dept.
from the vultures-are-circling dept.
An anonymous reader noted that the SCO Group is having a
bankruptcy auction in October. The article says 'After bankruptcy in September 2007, SCO and an affiliate filed schedules listing combined assets of $14.2 million and debt totaling $5.2 million.' I wonder if we could all chip in and buy something as a sort of 'Thanks for being a pimple on the face of humanity' present.
Got an idea (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's all chip in, buy the whole mess, release anything of value to the public domain, then burn the rest.
I'll kick in $20 for that. Heck, I might be persuaded to donate a Bennie.
SCOXQ already has a "stalking horse" buyer. (Score:4, Interesting)
They essentially know who's going to bid.
Any bets on who? My money is on Yarro.
Zits (Score:3, Interesting)
That's a rather delicate way of putting it. I confess to having a lower opinion.
Buy any computers and hard drives for sale (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd buy any computers and hard drives I could find, then check to see if any data is left on them. If it appeared the drives were wiped, I'd go over them with data recovery software. You never know what interesting tidbits one might find on those things.
At worst, you'd get some hardware. At best, you might find some extremely incriminating evidence. It likely wouldn't hold up in a court of law, but can you imagine the PR damage it could do to certain companies if it ended up online?
And even if all you end up with is a bunch of random data, save it as an image file and post it online for people to download and try to decipher. It could provide countless hours of entertainment for years to come.
Doing this might also provide a bit of insurance against any vultures buying the contested IP and carrying on with this shakedown scheme. No matter what might be on those drives, they could never know for sure how damaging the info might be, so it may give them pause, lest some bombshell appear at some point down the road. They'd essentially have a big black box floating around out there that contains either nothing at all or information that could prove disastrous to them, and that black box is constantly being picked at by folks trying to unlock it. Would you want to risk a bunch of money pursuing shaky legal claims with that uncertainty out there?
Anything of Value? (Score:5, Interesting)
They have two things that would be good for open source. One is the old "Documenter's Workbench". It was a proofing tool that had lots of good AI stuff from Bell Labs. The other useful thing they might have as the old Toolchest selection of software. I figure either would be worth $100 or so just to release into the public domain. The spell checker in the DW had some interesting stuff like knowing how you make typos and it also had some ideas about reducing vocabulary so the wrong synonym was less likely to end up in your technical document.
Story from the top (Score:5, Interesting)
Ok, let's see if I have the story right:
1. Caldera sells OpenLinux.
2. Caldera sells company to a group of stupid, evil or evil & stupid investors.
3. SCO seeing Linux eating up their microcomputer Unix biz sells it to Caldera.
4 Caldera rebrands as SCO and the real SCO changes in to Tarantella.
6. SCO tries to get everyone who has linux to give them some money for a promise not to sue or something because they own Unix.
7. SCO decides that IBM and AutoZone are good targets for a bizarre lawsuit, despite both firms having at least as much money as God.
8. Somewhere along the line someone points out that SCO does not actually own the copyrights to Unix, and they distributed Linux under the GPL for a long time. And bragged to the public about it.
9. SCO sues Novel hoping that the judge will have a bad day and just give the copyrights to Unix to them and break a contract that they accidentally bought from SCO.
10 SCO sees that the judge is not going to have a bad day, and files for bankruptcy to get another judge, who may have a bad day and make SCO's fantasy reality.
11. Bankruptcy judge does not have a bad day.
12. SCO tries to appeal, but appears to have ran out of gas.
Chip in to buy the Companies Instead (Score:2, Interesting)
It might be more productive if we could chip in to a single non-profit company that would buy up the absurd patents or the entire company that holds them.
The company could put them into the public domain, or just blanket-license them for members at low cost.
Note to Caldera/SCO (Score:3, Interesting)
Thank you for Caldera Network Desktop, which made online package repositories work well. It was a groundbreaking product that could have been the dominant distribution today if you hadn't given in to the dark side of the force. Caldera Network Desktop was a wonderful Linux distro - for the time it was a well-polished distribution that worked, and was a lot less work to configure than Slackware or even Red Hat Linux.
Sadly, you let scumbags like Darl McBride steer you wrong. You became greedy and tried to reneg on the GPL, i.e., the code that you contributed to Linux kernel. You tried to steal UNIX from Novell and engaged in pump&dump schemes, ripping off your shareholders and your customers alike. By 2000, Redhat had long passed you by, because you lost your way, and by the time 2005 rolled around, every other distro grew in popularity and have been earning good returns for the respective disributions' sponsors and for integrators alike.
We will take the good - the code you released under the GPL, and leave the bad - that is, your total bullshit and your douchebag manner of doing business the last 10 years. Although you contributed a lot to Linux in your pre-McBride years, you will not be missed. I hope Darl McBride and any board and senior staff members who endorsed his pump & dump schemes are indicted for securities fraud and malfeasance, because through your actions it is self-evident that you ultimately did not have your shareholders' concerns at heart, but only extracting as much as you could into your own pockets. For that, and for trying to monopolize Linux and UNIX alike and contributing to Microsoft's FUD campaign which encouraged enterprises to avoid *nix and stick with the Windows malaise, fuck you very much.
Re:Note to Caldera/SCO (Score:1, Interesting)
I think the Tetris game during the installer had always been a Caldera gimmick. I distinctly remember Caldera Linux 1.3, which still had a text-mode installer, had the Tetris game during the installer.
I remember the Caldera 2.3 installer being amazing for the time, being able to run X11 and Qt right from the CD. It was quite well designed, asking configuration questions while copying files. And the game after all of the questions were answered was icing on the cake :) I haven't seen a modern Linux distribution that does this, though the point is a bit moot now since installs are so much faster and take place in a live environment anyways (in most distros).