UNBELIEVABLE.
Today they got $100 million in financing from a group called Stephen Norris Capital Partners (“SNCP”) and get this … “partners from the Middle East”
Who are these partners? We don’t know. But hey with crude oil at an all time high, I guess there is more money then ever in the Middle East that needs investing. Somehow SCO managed to convince these oil rich ‘partners’ that their business was viable and that their legal claims had legs. Talk about having money to burn (oil/money/burn i know I’m not great with puns).
This dramatic turn of events means that SCO may well be back both as a going concern for its customers in terms of Unix products – but also as a going concern for Linux users as well as IBM and Novell. In its release on the financing SCO specifically stated that : This reorganization plan will also enable the company to see SCO’s legal claims through to their full conclusion.
It also means that SCO will come out of bankruptcy and it means that the company will now be taken private too.
So now instead of just fading away as a historical footnote, the SCO saga will continue for the foreseeable future. SCO will go to court with Novell and possibly IBM. Even more importantly their continued existence could provide a source of doubt and possibly risk for those that don’t take the appropriate steps to make sure they have right legal indemnification.
Then again this could be a non-issue – since at this point SCO has tried to sell off its Unix business before and it has been making its IP claims for years – with little effect.
Whatever the case – the lesson here is quite simple. As the great Yogi Berra once said, ” It ain’t over till it’s over.”
