I must have my calendar wrong. We just got past Valentine's Day, and Halloween is here already - SCO announced that it is clawing its way out of the grave with an injection of financing from Stephen Norris Capital Partners and some Middle East dollars.
Enter the Oil for 'Intellectual Property' Program, I suppose.
As Mark Radcliffe points out, this is terribly puzzling:
...The announcement is puzzling because SCO's principal assets were its UNIX rights (the scope of which are unclear). Yet, a court decision in August rejected all of SCO's claims to enforce copyrights in Linux that it claimed to own. The court rejected both SCO's contract claims for breach of the UNIX license agreements against existing UNIX licensees, such as IBM, and for copyright infringement of UNIX copyright by users of Linux (the court found that Novell owned the copyright in UNIX software and had not assigned it to SCO. In my 25 years of practice, the SCO decision was one of three most dramatic failures of an intellectual property strategy. The decision also made clear that SCO knew about these problems when they launched their litigation against IBM because they tried to get Novell to confirm the transfer of the copyrights. Apparently, we have not heard the end of this story...
OK, so I wasn't going insane. I was certain that SCO had been put out of its mystery - and it must be Halloween, because this is reminiscent of 'Bride of Frankenstein'. Why give a dead body that much juice? Where's the punch line?
Stephen Norris seems optimistic:
..."It's a bit of a mixed bag, but we see a business opportunity beyond that," said Stephen Norris, co-founder and former president of the Carlyle Group. "You can get a legal opinion on all sides of this thing. Everyone in the tech world has an opinion. But some of the court rulings on this just don't make any sense at all. We think the case has merits."
Norris disputed an earlier statement by a person close to the company that Prince Alwaleed bin Talal was involved in the deal. The prince, who is a member of the Saudi royal family, had previously partnered with Norris on major investments before.
"We will have very deep-pocket investors," said Norris, declining to name any of them...
I'm sure that somewhere, the revival of SCO has made someone happy. At best, it does seem like highly speculative investing... or a tax write off. It does seem apparent that Norris and his secret investors do see faults in the case. Whether he's right or not might cause a bit of a problem on the playground - but if there is a way to win, and they do, the payoff could be incredibly high.
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