Well, after years of trying to make a business out of suing basically anyone who uses binary, SCO has finally realised that as they didn't succeed in this venture, they had better file for bankruptcy.
SCO tried to sue IBM because SCO claimed that they owned the copyright to code that IBM was using, the copyright to code that RedHat were using, and the copyright to code that pretty much every Linux distribution was using - not all the code, mind, just some of it. SCO of course could never actually say which code it was, they could only threaten to take your company out if you continued to use this code that they owned but couldn't tell you what it was.
Say what?
Yes. Exactly. SCO didn't actually OWN the copyright that they claimed they did, they therefore couldn't sue anyone for this copyright that they didn't own, yet they managed to garner over US$26m from a number of companies for "royalty fees"by using these threatening tactics. On August 10, 2007, Judge Dale Kimball ruled, basically, that Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare Copyrights, therefore SCO has no claim to them. (Yes, SCO finally let the court know what copyrights they were laying claim to, and they were found most definitely not to be the owner of what they claimed.)
I'd like to see what happens to SCO's bank accounts when the 95% of these royalty fees that actually belongs to Novell is paid back to them. Actualy, I think that the directors know what will happen, which is why they voluntarily filed for Chapter 11 as well as a petition for reorganization.
(Of course, with that court case scheduled to start in the very near future, this Chapter 11 is going to prove timely - hopefully Novel gets their dues before the Chapter 11 is deemed to have taken effect. It is clear that the timing was chosen to further damage Novell, and this is something that SCO should not be allowed to do. The courts should rule that all proceedings from the outcome of this court case should be taken from SCO's accounts before they filed for Chapter 11, leaving whatever (if anything) remains for them to function under Chapter 11.)
All I can say is that, well, SCO's board deserves to go. They cannot make unsubstantiated claims that they cannot backup, keep threatening companies to cough up their "protection fees" and then eventually tell the courts what they are laying claim to.
When the courts dismissed their claims, SCO's board of directors must have collectively taken the biggest dump in their pants in their lives - they realised long ago that their actual business was gone, so they tried well practiced (not necessarily by them, up until this point) organized crime-style heavyhanded tactics to force people to hand over protection monies. Then when they finally tell the court what they are claiming and have it totally dismissed, they file for Chapter 11 and hope like all hell that there will be something left to save and start again with.
The Board deserves to be totally dismissed without any compensation - they took a floundering company and dragged it totally through the mud. SCO's name is now mud. You can thank their corrupt Board for that. Fire the board, dissolve the company and pay out the creditors and shareholders (and exactly why there still actually are shareholders begs a number of other questions) and let bygones be bygones.
SCO is dead. They died a long time ago, it is just now that they are finally realising it themselves.
Regards,
The Outspoken Wookie
No comments:
Post a Comment