Published at LXer:

SCO Group CEO Darl McBride says competition from the open source Linux operating system was a major reason why the company was forced to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Friday. In a court filing in support of SCO's bankruptcy petition, McBride noted that SCO's sales of Unix-based products "have been declining over the past several years." The slump, McBride said, "has been primarily attributable to significant competition from alternative operating systems, including Linux." McBride listedIBM ( IBM), Red Hat, Microsoft (MSFT), and Sun Microsystems (SUNW) as distributors of Linux or other software that is "aggressively taking market share away from Unix."

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Hm. Couldn't have anything to do with the blatant misuse of SCO cash trying to sue people for IP you don't even own, could it? Nah, couldn't be.


I'm sorry, but instead of whining about how the competition is beating you bloody, maybe you ought to try, you know, competing.

Ha! I thought those lawyers would bankrupt them sooner or later. Slightly sooner then I thought. Looks like instead of SCO getting anything from Novell, it is actually the other way around. Novell is claiming $30 million from SCO.

SCO might have to shut down completely. Groklaw is also saying that half their Finance department has been made redundant or has quit already.

From what I've been reading lately, this could get even funnier. SCO has filed for bankruptcy but they haven't been granted the status yet. It is possible that a judge could look at their balance sheet and determine that this is just a ploy to delay the Novel trial and then deny them bankruptcy protection. From some of the statements I've seen out there, it isn't clear that SCO's liabilities actually do exceed their assets.

It's not uncommon for any person to blame half (or whole) the world for bad luck..actually teenagers do it every day, so why not SCO too?

IIRC: SCO shortfall last quarter looked an awful lot like the same figure as their legal bill for the same period. But it is correct that Novell claims for more than SCO net assets.

This sort of thing is always a risk when you try to use the courts to boost your bottom line. The strategy requires that the case never reach court in the first place or the case drags out so long that it is cheaper for the defendant to settle. It requires a defendant with deep pockets (so they can pay up) but not as deep as yours (so you can outlast them should they decide to slug it out). It helps if you are not the party that suffered the direct damages - instead you are protecting your investment.

The youthful Microsoft was a target for Caldera (successfully) - they tried the same thing on IBM, and reckoned without IBM's competitors coming to their assistance. While the heavyweights slugged it out the old-fashioned way, the youngsters zipped around the periphery probing for weaknesses. And there was one glaring one.

The rest is comedy.