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Businesses Caldera The Almighty Buck News

SCO Assets Going To October Auction 217

Posted by CmdrTaco 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.
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SCO Assets Going To October Auction More

SCO Assets Going To October Auction

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  • First bid! (Score:4, Funny)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Tuesday August 31, 2010 @05:42PM (#33430864) Homepage Journal

    $50 for Darl McBride's greased Yoda doll!

  • who would of knew (Score:3, Funny)

    by Dyinobal ( 1427207 ) on Tuesday August 31, 2010 @05:42PM (#33430868)
    Who would of knew suing people is not a viable business model, I mean it works for all those other patent trolls.

  • Face? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Zipo Bibrok 5e8 ( 82846 )

    I think you meant "ass".

  • Corporate Reality (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 31, 2010 @05:45PM (#33430898)

    Darl McBride's new corporation, OCS, will buy all of the assets at auction for a fraction of the original cost, and continue exactly where he left off with the lawsuits, only this time with a brand new credit rating and no debt to bog him down.

    • In REALITY this happens all the time but nothing goes to auction and there is never an official bankruptcy. Just enough rumors of bankruptcy to get the vendors to give up.

    • Darl McBride's new corporation, OCS, will buy all of the assets at auction for a fraction of the original cost

      Hmm. I bet he sure wouldn't appreciate people bidding for the purpose of making him pay more.

    • I plan on buying UNIX from SCO...

    • Darl McBride's new corporation, OCS, will buy all of the assets at auction for a fraction of the original cost, and continue exactly where he left off with the lawsuits, only this time with a brand new credit rating and no debt to bog him down.

      True, from the wiki on McBride

      "On April 9, 2010 McBride purchased the SCO Mobility intellectual property from The SCO Group for $100,000"

      An asset that McBride had before referred to being worth millions.

    • And then erect a great bonfire with everything they've bought; Perhaps even driving a wooden stake through a boxed copy of whatever SCO was still selling, after sprinkling it with holy water first. And at the end, the ashes could be scattered in the wind or buried underneath a crossroads...

      IBM already made an example of them. This would be a nice way to end the saga.

  • Some sort of a phallus along with a note that says "Thanks for all your hard work guys. For that we are giving you this award! Turn this note over to find out where you can shove it!"

  • There is a tradition. (Score:5, Informative)

    by randomencounter ( 653994 ) on Tuesday August 31, 2010 @05:46PM (#33430904)

    Once upon a time there was a practice known as the "penny auction".

  • Bad Reporting? (Score:5, Informative)

    by UnknowingFool ( 672806 ) on Tuesday August 31, 2010 @05:53PM (#33430956)

    The bankruptcy judge called for a Chapter 11 trustee in August 2009, about one month before the U.S. Court of Appeals in Denver ruled in the company’s favor after six years of litigation with Waltham, Massachusetts-based Novell Inc. The case went back to the district court, where the judge and jury further clarified SCO’s rights in certain Unix software incorporated in software for network systems.

    Reading that section, it would seem that SCO won their case against Novell. But that's not the case. SCO won certain points in the bankruptcy case like receiving Chapter 11 designation instead of Chapter 7 which Novell and U.S. Trustee's Office wanted. But it had to accept a trustee in place of management handling the bankruptcy. It definitely lost the Novell case.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by mindwhip ( 894744 )

      SCO Misrepresenting something? I don't believe you!

    • Re:Bad Reporting? (Score:4, Informative)

      by UnknowingFool ( 672806 ) on Tuesday August 31, 2010 @06:03PM (#33431030)
      Also SCO won a partial judgment in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in August 24, 2009. The Court of Appeals reversed and remanded the district court decision noting that the issues decided in summary judgment should have gone to trial instead. It did not rule whether SCO should have won, only that they could not be decided in summary judgment. It was all for naught as in trial later, the district court found in favor for Novell in that Novell owned the copyrights to Unix. But the appeals court upheld the district court's decision that SCO owed Novell for the 2003 Sun agreement.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cduffy ( 652 )

      Reading that section, it would seem that SCO won their case against Novell.

      "Clarified [their] rights" means clarified what they did or did not have. That it happened to lean decisively to the latter doesn't make the language inaccurate -- as a non-lawyer who maybe has read somewhat more legalese than the average layperson (a few law classes back in school, and my wife is a paralegal), I didn't even think it misleading.

  • For the shrunken head of Darl McBride.

  • Got an idea (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jtownatpunk.net ( 245670 ) on Tuesday August 31, 2010 @05:59PM (#33431006)

    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.

    • Let's all chip in, buy the whole mess, release anything of value to the public domain, then burn the rest.

      (Thinks back on SCO's recent output.) So, burn everything then?

  • Are they going to auction off their rights to Linux? Because those might well turn out to be a goldmine if someone decided to sue some Linux vendors with them.

    (I'll be here all week!)

  • I'll take the UNIX copyrights and SYSV rights (Score:5, Funny)

    by mysidia ( 191772 ) on Tuesday August 31, 2010 @06:03PM (#33431038)

    For $10

    So I can start a small litigious company to aggressively defend Linux and pursue proprietary "Windows" OS vendor(s) whose names start with "M".

  • As to "I wonder if...," no, we really shouldn't give those attention whores any further reward. The best thing to do from here is to ignore the bastards.

  • SCOXQ already has a "stalking horse" buyer. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sconeu ( 64226 ) on Tuesday August 31, 2010 @06:07PM (#33431060) Homepage Journal

    They essentially know who's going to bid.

    Any bets on who? My money is on Yarro.

  • The man who would be king. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 31, 2010 @06:08PM (#33431072)

    Let this be a lesson for all those whose greed surpasses a normal man's measure... ... for all those who want power over others' knowledge... ... who want to leverage the State to oppress the weaker... ... who think they can sit on previous conquests and not work anymore... ... who think they can stop mankind evolution... ... who think they or their country is above the others... ... who think first of their friends instead of humanity as a whole... ... who try to take what they cannot ever return.

    This is a spaceship which we cannot control, but one we can destroy.

    Let this be the beginning of our awakening.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by plasticsquirrel ( 637166 )
      I'm not sure if you caught this, but SCO was defeated in court principally by IBM, one of the largest international corporations on the planet. They got pummeled, and the major reason it happened was because IBM had its powerful team of highly-paid lawyers. If a company like SCO pursued you or I for litigation, we would be raped financially by them. The court system only works for those who have the money to fund its high costs, similar to the patent system.

  • Zits (Score:3, Interesting)

    by overshoot ( 39700 ) on Tuesday August 31, 2010 @06:10PM (#33431082)
    "Pimple on the face of humanity."

    That's a rather delicate way of putting it. I confess to having a lower opinion.

  • Sco Auction? (Score:3, Funny)

    by fishthegeek ( 943099 ) on Tuesday August 31, 2010 @06:11PM (#33431100) Journal
    Yes!!! Anyone have change for a dollar? It's biddin' time!

  • Why wait? (Score:3, Funny)

    by mknewman ( 557587 ) * on Tuesday August 31, 2010 @06:16PM (#33431136)
    Why wait? I'll sell you several boxes full of SCO licenses, manuals and disks! ODT 3.0 on! Great for your Labor Day bonfire!
    • I've still got a Caldera Linux disk and license, still in box! Does that mean I don't have to pay the $699 for the Linux license?

  • Buy any computers and hard drives for sale (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ISurfTooMuch ( 1010305 ) on Tuesday August 31, 2010 @06:19PM (#33431152)

    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?

  • As I recall (Score:4, Funny)

    by fwarren ( 579763 ) on Tuesday August 31, 2010 @06:20PM (#33431160) Homepage

    I believe my share is supposed to be $699 per CPU.

    Better put me down for several thousand dollars. I have installed Linux quite a few times

  • After bankruptcy in September 2007, SCO and an affiliate filed schedules listing combined assets of $14.2 million and debt totaling $5.2 million

    After almost three years of depreciation, I'm sure their assets are worth a lot. I have a few three-year old computers around, I'll happily sell them for cheese.

    • Yeah, that's pretty typical in these auctions... They value the property too high. Used office chair: $250. 3yr old PC: $800. 5yr old server (no software): $8,000. Intellectual Property: $2,500,000,000. Stupidity like that.

    • combined assets of $14.2 million and debt totaling $5.2 million

      I don't think those numbers are right. I don't think you can file for bankruptcy if your assets are roughly three times greater than your debts.

      Or is there another way of reading the sentence that I am not seeing?

      • The combined assets likely include non-liquid assets like real estate and office furniture. IANAL, but from my understanding you can go into Chapter 11 pretty much any time your liquidity falters and you can't realistically service your debts and still maintain business procedures.

    • I can get you lots of cheese. How many pounds of cheddar for a Core 2 Duo with 2 gigs of RAM?

  • GOOD FUCKING RIDDANCE.

    I mean, sure, this is the final phase of beating a dead horse. But dear LORD, this took for ever. Finally -- finally! -- SCO and AdTI are both "yesterday's news."

  • I'd like to be in the viewing audience when they liquidate Darl.

  • This begs for a "SCO is dying [hiro-tan.org]" post.

  • Could we buy the brand? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Tuesday August 31, 2010 @07:52PM (#33431632)

    Couldn't the slashdot community buy the brand? If everybody donates a few bucks and we bid that sum for the brand and then use it to release FOSS, print cool t-shirts and use the sco website to make fun and jokes about MS, Mc Bride or whatever the f*ck his name is and his entourage. Wouldn't that be worth it? Ever since they did the caldera back-and-forth and then switched to pissing of the entire nix community the brand is dead anyway. It can't be that expensive, no?

    We could also release a debian rebrand as 'SCO Unix 2010' for 200$ a pop and donate the proceeds to EFF, FSF and any other organisation that goes against patent and IP trolls. That would actually be usefull, no?

    Just an idea.

  • Disco STU is gonna do some GRAVE DANCIN'

    Oh Yeah!

  • The trustee's sale of the aforedescribed real property will be made without warranty as to title, possession, or encumbrances.

    Sounds like selling a pig in a poke.

  • I'd drop $5 for a shot to dunk Darl. Any trustees wanna go for it?
  • I have got a few hundred dollars. The name and logo should be worth at least that. Perhaps I could build a Linux distro...

  • Anything of Value? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by thogard ( 43403 ) on Tuesday August 31, 2010 @10:00PM (#33432226) Homepage

    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)

    by salesgeek ( 263995 ) on Tuesday August 31, 2010 @10:34PM (#33432360) Homepage

    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.

  • I'll give them $12 for their SCOSource business. Maybe I can write it off on my taxes and make a profit.

  • 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)

    by kimvette ( 919543 ) on Tuesday August 31, 2010 @11:22PM (#33432540) Homepage Journal

    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: (Score:3, Informative)

      by dbIII ( 701233 )

      Caldera Network Desktop

      Trolltech of Qt fame probably did all of the polishing that impressed you. They were contracted to do a lot of work on it at the time and threw in the tetris game you get to play during installation.

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