SCO Withdraws Unix Biz Sale, Puts Out OpenServer Patches

Published: December 6, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

So much for that idea. Beleaguered and bankrupt commercial Unix software supplier the SCO Group has put the kibosh on its plan to sell off its Unix software and intellectual property to a private equity firm to raise cash as it fights IBM, Novell, and Red Hat in various interrelated lawsuits concerning Unix code and intellectual property.

SCO petitioned the bankruptcy court in Delaware that is handling its case to allow an organization called JGD Management Corp., which is doing business in New York as York Capital Management, to allow this firm to buy all of the assets related to SCO's Unix software business and cross-licensed and other assets that have been incorporated into SCO's Hipcheck remote administration software. (Everything related to the Unix business--from the source and binary code to UnixWare and OpenServer, licensing agreements, intellectual property, trademarks, customer lists, and right on up to the PCs that employees work at and the chairs they sit on--were stipulated to be included in this acquisition.) The deal did not include any cash that SCO has on hand, any tax refunds it is due, any Me Inc code or intellectual property not related to the Hipcheck product, or any settlements that SCO might get from its lawsuits with IBM, Novell, and Red Hat.

On November 20, when everyone in America was gearing up to eat a lot of turkey and fixings, SCO withdrew the request for the Delaware court to consider the deal, and it gave no explanations as to why. It seemed pretty obvious to anyone who thought about it for a second that there is no way that the lawyers hired by IBM or Novell would allow this, and it also seems clear that none of SCO's creditors would have either, since these Unix assets are basically all that SCO has of any real economic value. (SCO's Me Inc. mobile connectivity business is not really helping the top and bottom line all that much, even if it is good software.) So it seems unlikely that the Delaware bankruptcy court would ever approve such a deal. Hence, SCO said forget it. Why SCO proposed a deal that it didn't want is a bit of a mystery--one of many surrounding the original SCO-IBM lawsuit from March 2005 and the others it has spawned.

Back in the reality outside of the courtrooms of Delaware and Utah, earlier this month SCO announced that it has put out Maintenance Pack 3 for its OpenServer 6 Unix variant. The update includes an improved Xenix emulator that SCO says will make upgrades to OpenServer 6 a lot easier than the jump from Xenix to OpenServer 5 was a few years back. The code has also been tweaked so OpenServer 5 applications run better on the more recent operating system, and various open source applications that are part of the OpenServer 6 distribution have been updated. Specifically, OpenServer 6 includes PHP 5.2.3, Perl 5.8.8, Java 2 Standard Edition 1.4.2_16 and 5.0_9b, OpenSSH 4.6.p1, a patched Apache 1 (where is Apache 2?), Tomcat 4.1.31Si, KDE 3.5.6, and Samba 3.0.20. The patch is available to OpenServer 6 customers at no cost; those shops with earlier OpenServer releases have to upgrade, and this costs cash.

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