SCO Sells Its UNIX Product Line To London Firm 95
An anonymous reader writes "SCO just forged a deal to sell its UNIX product line to Gulf Capital Partners LLC of London. Under the terms of the deal, SCO would continue to exist as a separate company helmed by Darl McBride, with its primary remaining assets being related to its mobile platform offerings. However, it's noted that this deal must be approved by the court, and should not be considered 'done' yet. It could fall through as others have in the past."
Re:Who? (Score:5, Informative)
People with large legacy infrastructures who didn't want to pay to have their software converted to Solaris, BSD or Linux. They buy the upgrades so they can run old software on new hardware because in the short term it's cheaper.
Used to be very common for restaurant chains on their cash registerslLike McDonald's. Also Autozone had their ordering system on SCO but left(and got sued).
Re:Worst thing to come out of this SCO mess (Score:2, Informative)
Seriously, I don't mean to feed the troll, but I don't see any bullying of the "IT press". Unless you mean Maureen O'Gara.. but I remember reading her crap from before SCO and thinking she was a muck-raker. I was rather worried when the SCO thing first came out, but they never produced any solid evidence. The "SCO may not own the copyright" bit aside, they never actually gave any bits that were copied.
They also then proceeded to try and sell everyone who runs Linux a "license" and threatened to sue you if not, while trying to distribute the unmodified kernel under the GPL! And we're not talking about suing IBM or Red Hat (or even Novell, again, copyright issues aside), they wanted money from everyone running a server, a desktop, or an embedded device.
Who Tried to bully whom here, exactly?
Re:Who? (Score:5, Informative)
Pizza Hut also used OpenServer.
Now they're a SUSE shop! :)
Re:Nearly had a heart attack (Score:3, Informative)
Both versions of SCO can use the same trademarked name of "SCO" without infringing on one another. Not only is similarities of the mark considered, but also the industry that the mark is used in. SCO the operating system company works in the computer industry. SCO the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is a intergovernmental mutual-security organization similar to NATO between Russia, China, and a few other *stans. There wouldn't be a whole lot of confusion between the two marks.
Re:products? (Score:4, Informative)
The also used to make one of the nicer X11 servers for Windows machines way back when. I would have likely bought it had my university not had a site license for Hummingbird eXceed. These days though Xming does everything I need it to. Same story for all of SCO's products - and the reason for their 5 year hissy fit. All of their products have free and open source replacements available that match or even exceed them in functionality. Personally preferences aside, nobody is going to pay sticker price for a Chevy if the Ford dealer next door is giving cars away for free.
Re:Gulf Capital Partners (Score:3, Informative)
I'd like to know what they are thinking for 1) considering buying SCO and 2) leaving Darl McBride in charge if allowed to purchase SCO.
One would think after where the company ended up a leadership change would be the first order of business.
Darl wouldn't be in charge of what Gulf Capital Partners would be buying. He'd be in charge of the even-emptier shell they'd be leaving behind. They're not buying SCO, they're buying SCO's UNIX product line.
Re:What about Novell? (Score:2, Informative)
I don't think SCO requires Novell's approval, I don't think the original SCO required Novell's approval to sell their Unix business to then Caldera, but I admit I could be wrong.
But they most definitely require the bankruptcy court's approval.
And if it's anything like SCO's last "deal", Novell, IBM and the US Trustee are going to have a lot to say about it in court.