05.09.11
Season of Renames
Summary: SCO and Novell are both being renamed and rebranded due to structural changes and issues pertaining to corporate identity
LAST year we wrote about SCO getting a helping hand from Yarro, a loaner who had worked for the company and then turned to more shady activities. They try to keep the SCO case alive and Groklaw has an update on that. Groklaw has just few days left and we desperately need its analysis. The latest says:
A subset of the group that lent $2 Million to SCO in 2010, including Ralph Yarro, has retained a lawyer who has sent a letter [PDF] to the SCO Group’s Chapter 11 Trustee, Edward Cahn, claiming to be putting him on notice that he is in breach of the Secured Super-Priority Credit Agreement of March 5, 2010 and they want him to either cure by paying them their half of the UnXis sale proceeds or they demand the collateral. He has five days to fix the breach. Collateral would be mainly the right to any litigation proceeds, if any ever were to materialize, in that pretty much everything else was sold to UnXis. Here’s the document [PDF] that listed the collateral the lenders were to get on a default.
It remains to be seen if the SCO vs Novell case will carry on. Now that Novell is collapsing (we will have a separate post about the subject) and there are deep cuts, we are not entirely sure what it means to the company’s lawyers and legal budget. Novell will become just part of another company (by the way, this site Boycott Novell was never renamed, it just similarly fell under the wing of a larger site). From the article that quoted yours truly on the subject we have:
Novell has partnered with Microsoft since 2006, describing the partnership on its website as “collaborative,” where the “customers win.” But as a result of Novell’s layoffs, some are doubting the partnership’s reciprocity.
Twitter user Roy Schestowitz said in a tweet, “Novell taught us that no matter the circumstances, Microsoft partners always end down below. Microsoft must be laughing loudly.”
Smith said the relationship between Microsoft and Novell is still competitive.
We are going to prepare a more comprehensive summary of this type of news. It is not yet known what exactly will survive at Novell and what will be abandoned. It was not so properly announced, not with a detailed breakdown anyway. We are trying to find out just what will be shut down and what will stay. By looking at the latest OpenSUSE news and other development news we get no clues about it. We are generally not sure if OpenSUSE — unlike SLE* — will survive. Novell is uploading more of its ‘ads’ to YouTube these days [1, 2] and it’s not about SUSE, it is about proprietary software like GroupWise and other stuff. Some is borderline SUSE, but it is mostly proprietary [1, 2, 3], which leaves us suspecting that “Novell” under AttachMSFT will be just a narrow range of products, SLE* will become part of a separate company to be sold from Germany, and much of the rest — including Mono — will die. Novell is going through the same thing SCO had to go through. The change of names (e.g. TSG and UnXis) will help blur the history books. █
