SCO gets offer for Unix biz
Enough to pay the lawyers off
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The SCO Group, which earlier this month filed for bankrupcy protection, says it has received an offer for its Unix business.
A group of New York investors, backed by York Capital Management, are willing to pay $36m. This includes a $10m credit for lawyers' bills.
SCO is currently in Chapter 11 bankrupcy protection. This was agreed 14 September, and means that SCO must get the court's permission before it can sell.
The court next meets 6 November, and SCO wants it to reduce the time allowed for people to file their objections to the deal.
The company has filed relevant documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission including the following warning to investors: "There can be no assurance that the Bankruptcy Court will approve the proposed transaction or that final documentation will be reached on terms satisfactory to all parties.". More from the SEC here.
SCO has spent the last five years mired in legal action which has seen the once great company labelled little more than a patent IP troll. SCO sued Novell in a dispute over the ownership of UNIX. Then the company sued IBM for donating code, allegedly ripped from UNIX, to Linux.
In response SCO was hit by a volley of counter-suits - the latest from Novell which was given the court's go ahead to sue SCO for licensing money. Lawyers bills continued to rise - in one quarter SCO paid over $9m to its attorneys.
Groklaw has more on this here. ®
COMMENTS
For the past few years, SCO has been totally useless.
I feel no sympathy for SCO. Once a great company, the past few years have seen them spent their time and all their money, investing in frivolous patent lawsuits.
When did they last release a new product?
Ok, they may or may not hold the patents for Unix, but why run a good company, with a large capital, into the ground in cases that, if you ask many experts, they were doomed to lose.
The moment a company stops innovating, and spends its time trying to rob other organizations hard earned cash (patent violations or not), then it is doomed to fail.
SCO tried to be the school bully. It ended up with no friends, no respect and nothing to show for it.
York web site...
Their web site is just one big image:
http://www.yorkcapital.com/
I can imagine future versions of the OS will just be a big image map for functionality :)
Sweet.
Re: Not patents - copyrights, then contracts
Hi Scott,
Thanks for your comment - i've tweaked the story now to make it less wrong. This is why my sister is the lawyer in our family...
cheers
john
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