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Sep. 15th, 2007
SCO files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy!
Sep. 15th, 2007 09:16 amPretty much an inevitable conclusion after they lost a very important case that Novell brought against them. If you're late to the action, SCO (Santa Cruz Operation) tried to sue the known universe (or so it seemed) for allowing proprietary source code to make its way into the Linux code base. They sued IBM, Red Hat, Auto Zone, and a host of others.
There's a basic rule about law suits: don't sue people who can buy you for chump change. IBM fought back HARD and pretty much stymied SCO every step of the way with very strong counter-claims. Then Novell jumped into the game and sued SCO, claiming that Novell did not sell SCO part of the license that SCO was suing everyone else over when Novell sold Unix to SCO. A month or so ago a judge issued a preliminary ruling that Novell was right, thus cutting the legs out from under SCO for most of its other lawsuits.
The ruling opened the door for Novell to demand a LOT of money from SCO in the form of royalty payments. So the scene changed from SCO trying to rule the Unix world to Novell creeping up behind them with the sword of Damocles poised above their neck. Looks like the sword is beginning to fall.
I think it's a good thing in that it looked like SCO was trying to do what a lot of these patent firms do, i.e. buy up patents then sue people who use something similar and don't pay a license fee. In a lot of these cases, the suit is frivolous and if vigorously defended, the patent is frequently pulled, but a lot of smaller companies can't afford to defend against such suits, so they settle and pay penalties and license.
But this case is slightly different for me. A good friend of mine and a few of my LJ friends, Richard, the company that he works for has two software platforms: SCO and more recently, Windows. He still has LOTS of systems around the country to support, but this will have some definite repercussions for his employer. The good thing is that he probably would have little difficulty getting a job as a *nix admin if he had to, the bad thing is that he's been with this company for a very long time and change like that is difficult.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/14/1948257
There's a basic rule about law suits: don't sue people who can buy you for chump change. IBM fought back HARD and pretty much stymied SCO every step of the way with very strong counter-claims. Then Novell jumped into the game and sued SCO, claiming that Novell did not sell SCO part of the license that SCO was suing everyone else over when Novell sold Unix to SCO. A month or so ago a judge issued a preliminary ruling that Novell was right, thus cutting the legs out from under SCO for most of its other lawsuits.
The ruling opened the door for Novell to demand a LOT of money from SCO in the form of royalty payments. So the scene changed from SCO trying to rule the Unix world to Novell creeping up behind them with the sword of Damocles poised above their neck. Looks like the sword is beginning to fall.
I think it's a good thing in that it looked like SCO was trying to do what a lot of these patent firms do, i.e. buy up patents then sue people who use something similar and don't pay a license fee. In a lot of these cases, the suit is frivolous and if vigorously defended, the patent is frequently pulled, but a lot of smaller companies can't afford to defend against such suits, so they settle and pay penalties and license.
But this case is slightly different for me. A good friend of mine and a few of my LJ friends, Richard, the company that he works for has two software platforms: SCO and more recently, Windows. He still has LOTS of systems around the country to support, but this will have some definite repercussions for his employer. The good thing is that he probably would have little difficulty getting a job as a *nix admin if he had to, the bad thing is that he's been with this company for a very long time and change like that is difficult.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/14/1948257