SCO Lives! Aarrgh! Rawrr!
The more I watch SCO's progress -- from Unix vendor to patent-wielding lawsuit machine to bankrupt has-been, and now a privately funded corporate reboot -- the more I feel like I'm watching one of those cheesy 1960s Japanese monster movies with a nigh-unkillable creature from outer space. The super heat ray didn't work on the monster, the mysterious Element X that spews out Radiation Y didn't have any effect either, and now the scientists are falling back on the absolute last resort plan of them all: Awaken Godzilla! Would that we had Godzilla here, though.
Yes, SCO has lurched to life once more. The details of SCO's resurrection are still sketchy, but the plan seems plain to anyone who's followed the story so far. The way I see it, the "tremendous investment opportunity" that SCO's new investors are talking about in their statement is a) to drag out the court battle with Novell (NSDQ: NOVL) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) as long as humanly possible, b) score as many wild hits as possible in court to scare people away from Linux and open source, and c) Profit!
I do have to wonder how much SNCP, SCO's new investor, understands about what it's getting into. The one sentence from the release that hints at a business plan other than suing everything that moves is "SNCP has developed a business plan for SCO that includes unveiling new product lines aimed at global customers", which is as vague as trying to predict the weather a year from Monday. Do you know of anyone with even a kernel (pun intended) of technical savvy who would have anything to do with SCO at this point, either as an investor, a customer, or an employee?
My hope is that SNCP will pump a bunch of money into SCO, discover that there's no immediate benefit to doing so other than protracted legal struggles and, eventually needing to pay off the $25 million it owes Novell, give up and move on to another boondoggle. My nightmare, however, is a rejuvenated SCO that manages to continue being an indefinite irritant in the side of open source everywhere. Having Mothra nesting in the Tokyo Tower seems positively benign in comparison
