Looks like Novell will get paid after all

A company apparently has demonstrated the validity of a P.T. Barnum quote . SCO is going private. PJ at Groklaw has a note on this. So after this is over and SCO goes private, Novell ought to get its appropriate share of the about $50M or so of license revenue that SCO owes it … right? Which leaves about $50M for the IBM lawyers to go after. Maybe the title should have been “night of the living dead”.

A judge has already determined that SCO’s case has no real merit in terms of ownership of assets. Those are Novell’s assets. That part is done. Yeah, the lawyers can try to undo that if they want. Until SCO runs out of money again. But then there is the little problem of their suits against IBM, Redhat, … I don’t know from Redhat’s lawyers, but you don’t go monkeying around with IBM’s. They play for keeps. Maybe the equity group needed a way to write down a loss to offset some capital gains? I dunno. Gotta hope that the IBM legal folks don’t try to pierce the corporate veil, and go after assets of owners. I am not a lawyer, and I don’t know when it is possible to do this. I have heard of it done. By IBM lawyers. Long story from many years ago. One of those “their heads on a pike by the city gates” moments when I was an intern at TJ Watson Lab (oh my gosh) 20+ years ago. Some former IBMers did bad things according to the IBM lawyers. The went after the new company, dismantled it, and garnished future earnings of these “bad” ex-IBMers for some extended length of time. These ex-IBMers had founded a new company, supposedly with tech they took from IBM. No memory of the details of their alleged transgressions. Corporate veil was pierced. Personal assets confiscated. Notice posted in all the stairwells so that others with similar ideas would see the heads upon the pikes by the city gates. Message received. You don’t mess with IBM legal. Unless you really want to lose everything. Apparently no one told SCO.