SCO boots boss McBride Unix code claimant SCO Group has jettisoned its controversial captain, Darl McBride, as part of the company's latest scheme to emerge from bankruptcy. The serially litigious SCO's executive ousting was revealed in a filing today with US regulators, although corresponding paperwork gives McBride's actual dismissal date as …
"It also stated the company expects to finalize details of the restructuring and to reach cash flow break-even for core operations within the next month."
Clearly the lawyer team is now working pro bono and is consulting for third parties to generate some cash.
Oh deary me, what a great pity, etc etc... <vomit>
If you look on SCO's website, you'll see the 'Legal' section content actually overflows the space assigned to it on the index page - that's a pretty good metaphor for McBride's leadership model; grasping far beyond capabilities.
I doubt the remaining executives have the skill to dig themselves out of the gigantic hole McBride has put them in, but if there's a bright spot on the horizon it's that other patent trolls might learn the meaning of the word hubris.
Someone needs to run a website that will track such undesirables and parasites.
Someone might want to make sure that anyone they do business with in the future has nothing to do with certain types of crooks. Perhaps we could include RIAA lawyers, holocaust deniers, pushers of the Surveillance State and such like.
I understand the the UK construction industry has a database that will do the job.
the rest of the (mis)management of SCO are still carrying on the pointless, ridiculous charade that was the final nail in the coffin of this company.
Why doesn't the US government do the right thing and just put the thing to sleep like the rabid, toothless dog with four useless legs that it is?
Don't read too much into the ongoing litigation, Cahn (the bankruptcy trustee) hasn't finished digging through the huge heap of bullshit Darl created. Until that's complete he'll do nothing to damage any *potential* value in SCO, including the litigation.
Eventually he'll dig down to the truth, realize the threat of continuing litigation isn't even a valuable negotiating tool (IBM sat patiently through the last 6 years after all) and SCO will finally die.
Regulators are involved because SCO is in chapter 11 bankruptcy.
That aside, I hope the company that bought SCO and then assumed its name (it used to be Caldera Systems, a pretty decent Linux distributor until they got delusions of code ownership) will finally be laid to rest in pieces soon. They're a laughing stock, and the stockholders aren't laughing.
Me, I'm chuckling to myself as the machines I am responsible for are merrily running AIX, Solaris, FreeBSD and several flavours of Linux, all without as much as a penny down to SCO Group.
Mine's the one with the printout of the GPL sticking out of the pocket.
"SCO" never bought the Unix stuff. That was the "real" SCO, the ones that changed their name to Tarantella, and are now part of Sun.
Current "SCO" is what used to be Caldera, which bought SCO (the OS) and the trademark; they switch to "The SCO Group" when they decided to play the FUD game. Thanks to them, the SCO trademark will live in infamy for decades to come.
Flames, 'coz that's how "SCO" is going down.
Aren't Microsoft in the story too? SCO arguing Linux essentially is stolen from SCO, who benefits there, maybe someone selling competing software...
Also listened to Radio 4 AM and shorter PM version of Start The Week and the second one was cut so that when talking about King Charles II Nell Gwyn wasn't mentioned! They cut Nell Gwyn!
good little operating system. Shame they didn't just cut the price back in the day, but we probably have MS to thank for that mismanagement of Unix.
SCO and Sun have been the real casualties of open source, but Unix was always going that way, and they had a heads up. They just needed to swallow a price decrease and extend the FreeBSD kernel instead, but yet again bad management prevails.
And Unix is not that complex, on the PDP it was written in about 9,000 lines of code, so it is a bit of stretch to actually think you have something no one else can sus.
Was no doubt paid big money for being a CEO of a public company .. that he destroyed.
So now being a CEO with many years experience will no doubt roll on to another highly paid job, if not for private firms capable of googling his name, at least on the board of the odd company (perhaps legal firms) or government advisor.
Must hurt to have been a shareholder or on the staff at SCO, seeing the salary this turkey earned for doing sweet FA.
IIRC Microsoft had given them a cash injection at one point.
As long as this nonsense continues MS can wave the FUD of a *possible* win and "gosh corporate america, your open source server code might not be so anymore. Why take the risk when you can have a sensible licensing arrangement with ourselves."
Good new that the gang of 4 has now become 3.
Icon because this seems to benefit only one player and with their track record its the sort of fairly shabby business practice you would expect.
Not sure I understand Microsoft's mismanagement. While they were responsible for the port/rewrite of UNIX that produced Xenix, at no time have they had any control of UNIX. They bailed out of the UNIX market when the original SCO was spun off to a separate company, and the rest is a history of competition.
It is ironic to recall that at one time early in their history, Microsoft did actually see themselves as a UNIX vendor, making statements to the effect that their future was DOS desktop systems clustered around UNIX servers. They were an AT&T source code licensee.
I recollect that at the time, Xenix/286 was regarded as a poor UNIX port, as it did not adhere to man Section 2 system call semantics . I believe that this was only pulled together when (original) SCO joined AT&T, SUN and other notable UNIX vendors in the SVR4 converged UNIX venture, although I am prepared to be corrected on this.
BTW. As it is a trademark, UNIX should always be capitalised.
Anyway, I will be glad when the FUD that SCO have been peddling finally goes away.
Just to put this straight
IBM was sued for putting code IBM wrote for its implementation of UNIX into Linux, not any other UNIX code anyone else wrote in.
Think about that for a second
As it turns out even that was bogus. as the code came from OS/2
Ina sane world this would have been shut down years ago.
Yes, Microsoft was in the story, they gave a certain amount of money to SCO for licensing of Unix IP. So did Sun. Together their contribution to SCO was $26.5 million. Neither needed to, they just felt that, all things being equal, helping SCO take a bite out of the Linux arse was good business. A pox on both of them....errrr....I guess between Ballmer and Ellison this has already occurred.
"I used to drive a SCO system, I've known for a long time that they never intended to be in the software business"
Yep same here. I saw a device running SCO Unix drop kicked across a lab as an outlet for the frustration felt. Management wanted to sack him instantly for gross misconduct - until the whole lab threatened to walk off the job if they did. Only then the management started listening to what a pile of poo it actually was.
As I remember it, it was the JFS code that IBM wrote for AIX 3.1 that was the main issue. SCO were arguing that this was a derived wok from the AT&T source, although it was more like an evolution of the BSD4.4 filesystem, complete with distributed Inodes and block bitmap for the free space. The whole concept of derivative works currently appears to be sparking controversy with GPL2, which just shows how convoluted US Copyright law is. See http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/15/black_duck_gpl_web_conference_copenhaver_radcliffe/
All the LVM and hooks to extend filesystems were as far as I am aware IBM innovations that were actually new code unique to AIX.
Subsequently, IBM contributed the original LVM and JFS code to the Open Software Foundation, where it became used by several different vendors who implemented OSF/1 (although I don't believe that DEC used it in their implementation, they preferred their own Advanced File System [not to be confused with the Andrew File System]). This did not cause a problem, because all OSF members were already UNIX source licensees.
It is obviously now available for Linux, which caused the whole furore.
If anybody sees my copy of the Lyons annotated V6 UNIX code, I would be grateful to hear, as it appears to have fallen out of my coat pocket whilst in the cloakroom.
Now, the interesting thing about the legitimately published (1996) edition of Lions' is that it finally got the nod /because/ the Original SCO (thought they had?) bought Unix from Novell (Michael Tilson, of the Original SCO, wrote a prefatory note). So, if they didn't, is the book illegitimate?
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