08.23.08
SCO Roundup: Novell Litigation, Money from Me Inc Software
SCO is not dead yet. It may seem like a dead man walking, but as we’ll show in a moment, one investment funnel [1, 2, 3] is not totally out of reach just yet. In TechWorld and some accompanying mirrors, an article was published to praise Groklaw for its work. It has defended Linux from SCO for over 5 years.
It’s Groklaw’s loose network of volunteers that has haunted the Utah courthouse, collecting paperwork, reporting on hearings and transcribing everything in sight.
It’s that same crowd of volunteers that has picked apart arguments, dredged up old news stories and computer manuals, and generally followed the SCO lawsuits with the kind of enthusiasm usually reserved for rotisserie baseball or, well, Linux.
All that has made it easy for reporters, analysts and deep-thinkers keeping an eye on the lawsuits. We just filtered out the partisan crowd noise — no mistake, this is a pro-Linux crowd — and dug into that virtual mountain of legal documents. Everything was there, posted, transcribed, organized and searchable.
That’s why we all picked up the ruling from Groklaw.
Early in the week, Groklaw complained about an article which suggests that SCO might have a “comeback” in store.
More bankruptcy filings. And there are upbeat chirpings in the air in Utah, with SCO proclaiming its own future brighter than they thought it would be, and you can read all about it in Tom Harvey’s article in the Salt Lake Tribune, which calls SCO “the comeback kids”. No bias there.
It might be a tad early for that title, methinks. IBM still looms on SCO’s horizon, after all. Novell was a sideline. The main event has yet to occur.
Groklaw was referring to this article.
The developments of the past few months also may mean that Darl McBride will continue as CEO, a post he was to exit when the company planned to give up control to new investors in order to save the company. Now, SCO may not need as much, if any, outside money to continue operations and pursue its lawsuits.
[...]
Shortly after that, SCO filed for bankruptcy and proposed a reorganization plan that included an investment of up to $100 million from a private-equity fund that would have taken control of the company. The fund, Stephen Norris Capital Partners, said McBride would not continue as CEO if the plan were approved by the bankruptcy court.
Here is the same optimistic/pro-SCO article from Tom Harvey reaching ECT. They also give room for pseudonym Paul Murphy, which Groklaw ignores as a matter of principle.
These battles are mysterious [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] and the connections worth exploring in depth. There’s lots of circumstantial evidence and shared interest guides many business decisions.
Groklaw reckons, based on the article above, that interest in an investment in SCO was lost. A few days ago, Groklaw also divulged the details about further SCO fines in Germany. Later on it was only ZDNet UK that covered this story.
SCO Group has been ordered to pay a €10,000 (£7,900) fine in Germany for making claims that Linux includes intellectual property from Unix.
SCO has repeatedly claimed that Linux is an unlawful derivative of Unix, but had agreed not to make this claim anymore in Germany, following a lawsuit in 2003.
The current case found that the claims were still present in US material available on the site of SCO Group GmbH, the group’s German subsidiary. As well as paying the fine, SCO will have to monitor its German presence.
Over at Heise, another new situation for SCO (in Germany) received some attention.
SCO Group GmbH, a subsidiary of US company SCO Group Inc., is required to check its internet presence for errors following software updates from its parent company. This even applies to past errors. The opinion was passed down by a district court in Munich, leading Jens Horstkotte, the company’s legal counsel, to agree to a settlement in which the GmbH is required to pay 10,000 euros to an IT service provider.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, money is arriving from a Hong Kong-based company land lands at Utah. Can Novell grab it? After all, SCO owes Novell a lot of money.
So, what do you think? Can Novell get its money from a Hong Kong foreign subsidiary? I’m sure we all agree that SCO would never try to stiff anyone, so the fact that they are setting this up just before the bankruptcy court is about to decide on the question of how Novell will get the money the Utah court decided SCO owes them must be entirely coincidental.
Some time was spent in the IRC channel trying to find our if there is a Microsoft connection that may justify investment in SCO by ordering of products. We looked at Me Inc Software. Nothing convincing was found.
The only clear-to-see investments are those ‘cash infusion’s from Microsoft that keep Novell’s its SUSE going at the expense of independent and free Linuxes that won’t cave or compromise. █
Image from Wikimedia
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Needs Sunlight said,
August 24, 2008 at 7:03 am
Novell is the new SCO.
SCO, as far as the lawsuits go, has nothing to stand on. Thus, MS is getting Novell to inject as much MS technology as possible into Gnome and other projects while leaving a full paper trail.
However, this time it’s easier: stop feeding Novell. stop feeding MS.