who's gonna get the UNIX ownership then?

In bankruptcy the remaining assets would be auctioned or sold off to claw back some money for the creditors. Stockholders are the lowest class on this list, below employees owed wages, business suppliers owed money, and investors holding loan notes or preferential shares.

There are always creditors when a company goes belly up. If SCO dosen't sell the rights before dying, the bankruptsie (spelling?) court will sell off all IP. Including the rights to UNIX weither its worth anything or not.

See, if SCO does die, who's gonna get the UNIX ownership then?

Is this some sort of trick question? SCO doesn't actually own UNIX. The trademark is owned by someone else. The copyrights are claimed to be owned by SCO and Novell both, so if SCO dies, I'd presume that leaves Novell with an uncontested claim. All SCO really owns of UNIX (as far as I can tell), is the right to sell and collect license fees for Novell, some documentation, and some historical legacy code (to which they don't necessarily own the copyright, so really have no control over).

I'd forgotten that whole "who owns Unix" quagmire. Let's ignore it for a second.

I wasn't looking for the theory of who would get "it" (whatever SCO owns) but the actuality of who would get "it". My point is that IBM would seem an obvious candidate, but I don't know that I want a major Unix vendor owning "it", as they could conceivably force Solaris, HPUX, Irix, etc. (wow, the crowd is getting thin) out of the market by refusing to license, leaving AIX, which I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.

except that even IBM seem to prefer linux right now
Although someone out there could actually attempt to buy 'it' in an attempt to restart the legal cases.

Apparently there are companies out there who specialize in buying IP from failed companies only to try to screw money from everyone else in court.

Just bumping the thread since DaimlerChrysler made a motion to dismiss SCO's lawsuit with prejudice today. Looks like they were as low as $6.27 today.

Not that this has any direct relationship to your post, Jon, but it's important to note that even though everyone seems to be predicting SCO's death, SCOX is still trading at twice the price of two years ago:

IIRC, they were hurting pretty badly back then. Not to mention that there hasn't been a single major ruling one way or the other. As soon as they get ruled against, I imagine the stock price will dip further.

True. I've only ever seen two SCO installations in my life, so they must have been living solely on Unix licensing. Maybe the lawsuits weren't engineered by MS; maybe they just had no other funding source.

I've only ever seen two SCO installations in my life, so they must have been living solely on Unix licensing.

They (I am talking the original Santa Cruz Operation now, not Caldera) were quite strong player in their best days. After licensing Xenix (early System III port to 8088) from no less than Microsoft (who in turn licensed the SysIII source from AT&T) around 1980 SCO nursed it until more capable processors came out, and Xenix/286 and Xenix/386 in various versions and flavours were quite popular. A bit later came SCO Unix (later called SCO OpenServer), a relatively good, 386+ port of SysVr3, which is virtually unchanged to this day. I saw hundreds of them. The main competitor (there were many) was Interactive Systems Corporation product, also SysVr3 (significantly better than SCO, IMHO), and the competition was quite brisk. A month or two after ISC launched SysVr4 as one of AT&T's principal publishers, Kodak sold it to Sun, which ruined then discontinued it in short order. Soon AT&T sold its Unix System Laboratories (with Unix and excellent transaction monitor Tuxedo, now owned by BEA) to Novell, which didn't quite know what to do with it, but continued to develop a version of SysVr4 half-heartedly. It became UnixWare. Then SCO bought Unix operation from Novell (Unix name went to X/Open, Tuxedo to BEA), had mostly failed joint development effort with HP, focused on Tarantella (whatever that might be) and sold Unix to Caldera, which itself was Linux-focused startup by ex-Novell people.

My company was a very early adopter of Unix on Intel for business applications, so I lived through all of this. Fascinating history.

Er, what I was actually trying to say, there are many SCO OpenServer and UnixWare installations.

They (I am talking the original Santa Cruz Operation now, not Caldera) were quite strong player in their best days.

Great history! Yes, tons of small-mid business installs like PoS. In 1999, I was faced with the task of installing SCO on 50 Panasonic Toughbooks for a mobile blood banking systems (at ~$500 per seat IIRC). We kept asking the vendor "...and this doesn't run on Linux *why*?". I left that project later in 1999, but I hear it runs on Linux as of 2000-2001. I think lots of SCO customers were asking that type of $25,000 question.

SCO under $6.00 this fine Monday AM.

Note: to be consistent with my stated rules, I was going to mark the day that SCOX first trades/drops below $5/$1, not the day it *closes* below those prices. I think Genixia's instincts (re: rapid downward acceleration are good.) Maybe he wasn't pessimistic enough, though!!

A handy link to the SCO ticker on Yahoo, for those lazy folks following this thread.

tick... tick... tick...

I'm not a financial whiz, so help me out. There's been a lot of talk about people looking down on Google for having two different stock classes, the more influential of which will be held onto by Google insiders. First, why? Who cares? Second, what would the difference be between the Google folks hanging onto (to make up numbers) 5000 of these shares that are worth 10,000 normal shares and not having these special shares and just keeping 50,000,000 normal shares? I just don't get it. I don't get why anyone cares one way or the other.

Current price as of 4pm, May 10th: $4.992

w00t! Unless I'm mistaken, I'm the closest entry posted here... Wonder if anyone else emailed Jim with something closer.

Now for a nice, gradual descent to below the $1 mark...

w00t! Unless I'm mistaken, I'm the closest entry posted here... Wonder if anyone else emailed Jim with something closer.

W00T! Yea! All legit entries are also in posts here so you can see if anybody beat your 18 points. Oh, time for me to build that scorecard and do some math!

Ah, SCO circles the drain...

(Now back to work, Jim!)

A fine birthday gift, except I didn't guess it. I guessed my father's birthday. Oops.

Well, SCO reportedly took a hit in the DaimlerChrysler case today...trading at $4.25 as of this writing... as low as $4.14 today.

OUCH.

JaBZ = jaidev
hmmmmmm when did I respond with two completely different sets of dates? :P

EDIT: ahhhhhh

well, I'm in the top 10!

Quote:
well, I'm in the top 10!

Well, for every day that passes between now and January 31, your score drops by 3 points while several others go up by 3.

Go, go, go! S-C-O!

A bit late for an answer, but here is my understanding of it.
Having a two-class stock structure is a mechanism to decouple the share price from influence and eventually control over the board of directors. Class A shares, which were sold in the public offering have one vote per share, whereas Class B shares have 10 votes per share. Class B share are - at the option of the owner - convertible in Class A shares(1:1), whereas Class A shares can not be converted.

Quote:
There's been a lot of talk about people looking down on Google for having two different stock classes, the more influential of which will be held onto by Google insiders. First, why? Who cares?

Class A shareholders have less influence over strategic decisions. Some financial experts claim that the mere presence of a super-voting-power class, depresses the market value of the normal-voting-power class. It makes takeovers less likely, wether this is good or bad depends on the color of your flag. For the founders it protects innovation, experimentation and the do-no-evil approach, while it's obviously an unfortunate structure for those who would like to takeover. IIRC there are some economical theories that would accuse this system of beeing undemocratic.

Quote:
Second, what would the difference be between the Google folks hanging onto (to make up numbers) 5000 of these shares that are worth 10,000 normal shares and not having these special shares and just keeping 50,000,000 normal shares?

If the founders held the same class of shares as the average shareholder they would need more than 50% percent to be absolutely sure to keep control. With the dual class structure they are able to maintain that control even if their stake drops below 50%. Effectively it allows one to sell more shares while at the same time keeping absolute control.

But essentially all they're doing is holding onto ten $10 bills instead of a hundred $1 bills. Sure, it takes up less room in your wallet, but why does anyone care? If they just had one stock class and kept 50% of the shares behind closed doors, no one would care, right? But people seem to be up in arms just because they have a different denomination. Which raises two inverse questions. First, why do people care? It's not as if they were going to sell more than 49% of the shares regardless of how they're distributed. Second, if they knew it was going to cause this backlash, why would they bother? It's not as if they actually need to save space in their wallets.

Back up to $3.13 now, but new 52-week low of $2.96 this AM.