Investors To Take SCO Group Private For $100 Million
16 February 2008 
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SCO Group, best known for suing IBM and claiming it deserved royalties from companies using the popular Linux operating system, said Thursday that a private investment firm has agreed to put up the money to take SCO out of bankruptcy court.Stephen Norris Capital Partners and its partners from the Middle East, which SCO did not identify, have agreed to provide up to $100 million to reorganize SCO and take it private. As part of the plan, SNCP would take control of SCO.
Because of the investment, SCO is poised to emerge from bankruptcy court in the coming year. Jeff Hunsaker, president and chief operating officer of SCO, said the investment is in the best long-term interest of SCO, its subsidiaries, customers, shareholders, creditors, and employees. Source- informationweek.com
SCO-Linux lawsuits and controversies
The SCO Group is currently involved in a dispute with various Linux vendors and users. In this campaign SCO “announced that Linux contained SCO’s UNIX System V source code and that Linux was an unauthorized derivative of UNIX”. Although many are skeptical about their claims, SCO initiated a series of lawsuits and claims that, if upheld by the courts, may impact the future of both Linux and Unix. While making numerous public assertions that Linux infringes upon their copyrights, the lawsuits themselves concern contractual issues which are tangential to the issue of whether or not Linux infringes any copyrights. Further complicating the issue is the legitimacy of SCO claims concerning the ownership of System V Release 4.0 (SVR4) Unix copyrights. The success or failure of the claims will also have a profound effect on the financial future of The SCO Group, itself. SCO has, to date, made little headway in this dispute. In particular, in February 2005, Judge Dale Kimball, the judge in the SCO v. IBM case has stated:
Viewed against the backdrop of SCO’s plethora of public statements concerning IBM’s and others’ infringement of SCO’s purported copyrights to the Unix software, it is astonishing that SCO has not offered any competent evidence to create a disputed fact regarding whether IBM has infringed SCO’s alleged copyrights through IBM’s Linux activities.
On August 10, 2007, Judge Kimball, hearing the SCO v. Novell case, ruled that “…the court concludes that Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare Copyrights”. Novell was awarded summary judgments on a number of claims, and a number of SCO claims were denied. SCO was instructed to account for and pass to Novell an appropriate portion of income relating to SCOSource licences to Sun Microsystems and Microsoft. A number of matters are not disposed of by Judge Kimball’s ruling, and the outcome of these are still pending.
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