SCO Looking To Ditch Actual Business To Try To Keep Lawsuit Going
January 19, 2009 Leave a comment
It what’s beginning to look like a never ending story, SCO is now potentially looking to sell off its actual businesses in order to keep the lawsuit campaign going. From the article (via Techdirt):
The embattled SCO Group Inc. is proposing to auction off its core products and use proceeds to continue its controversial lawsuits over the alleged violations of its copyrights in Linux open-source software.
The Lindon company has filed a new reorganization plan with the federal court in Delaware where it sought bankruptcy protection from creditors after an adverse ruling in the Linux litigation.
If approved by a bankruptcy judge, the plan could mean SCO’s server software and mobile products lines are owned by other parties while SCO itself remained largely to pursue the lawsuits under the leadership of CEO Darl McBride.
“One goal of this approach is to separate the legal defense of its intellectual property from its core product business,” McBride said in a letter to customers, partners and shareholders.
Jeff Hunsaker, president and COO of The SCO Group, said the litigation had been distracting to the company’s efforts to market its products.
“We believe there’s value in these assets and in order for the business to move forward it’s imperative we separate it from our legal claims and we allow our products business to move forward,” he said Friday.
“We’ve seen interest from a number of investment groups that believe in these assets, believe in the value of this business, believe in the installed base of customers throughout the world,” he said.
SCO’s plan shows it could sell off its entire product line in one package or sell them separately. If buyers do not emerge, it will continue to market the products.
IBM and Novell declined to comment on the plan. Both have an opportunity to make objections in court.
I agree that it’s amazing that after losing pretty much every aspect of this campaign from the very beginning, that folks at SCO still think it’s worth pursuing. I read this announcement as “having products to sell has been distracting to the company’s efforts to litigate”, but like many I’m a bit cynical about the situation at this point. With such a low market cap, it’s possible that one of the remaining customers would be interested in picking up the products simply to save on licensing costs. That’s an outside shot IMHO though, since I can’t see a current customer who would be interested in running that kind of business. For some reason, I’m actually a bit intrigued to see if someone does pick up the shattered pieces. Hopefully at that point the litigation half can finally go away, as it should have quite some time ago.
–jeremy
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