Who will Buy SCO?
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For the last year I have monitored the declining financial condition of SCO
as they bleed away cash on both ill-advised litigation and ill-conceived
products. In the past week various news organizations have belatedly
followed my lead, speculating on when SCO’s death knell will sound.
Given the financial inevitability of SCO’s demise, the more interesting
question is "who might buy SCO?" Lord knows SCO is a cheap stock, running
just north of a buck per share this afternoon and facing delisting if it sinks
much further. With a market cap of a measly $23M, any one of a number of
players could gobble it up in an instant. If there is any meat on SCO’s
bones, it may be a race to see which vulture picks the carcass clean.
So who would buy this corpse, and to what end? On the chessboard of
marketing, there are some interesting gambits.
Red Hat - The King: The recent (un)holy alliance between Novell
and Microsoft, with their unwritten threats of litigation against other Linux
distributions and developers, gives Red Hat motive. SCO claims copyrights
to much of the UNIX foundation, and hence to (allegedly) much of Linux. If
Red Hat were slick and fast, they could procure SCO, liberate the copyrights,
publish and mirror the key information, and throw Novell and Microsoft’s
newfound advantage into a meat grinder. There are legal dangers therein,
but this litigious front is so littered now that this action would take years to
resolve, and in the mean time earn Red Hat top honors among Open Source
advocates around the globe. Fast shuffle this plan through any of the
non-profit (and hence expendable) Open Source organization, and it might be a
risk-free adventure.
Novell - The Queen: Novell has a vested interest in acquiring SCO and
any supposed claims they have to UNIX. By bringing home what was once
entirely theirs, Novell would multiply the leverage they already possess and
make the Novell/Microsoft F.U.D. machine even more fearsome. This one
trick might well knock a leg out from under Red Hat, and make Larry Ellison
wince.
Oracle - The Rook: Ellison knows a gambit when he
sees one, and is not shy when it comes to using the courts to push an issue (as
he did by going up against the FTC during his Peoplesoft plunder). Larry
now has a vested interest in keeping Red Hat propped-up, especially since the
Novell/Microsoft pairing is beginning to show serious traction. Since
Larry wants to make money from Red Hat’s work, and keep Microsoft on the
server-side decline, he must slow any progress Novell makes in the Linux market.
"Owning" some rights to UNIX/Linux gives him a means to that end.
IBM - The Knight: Since IBM is now the champion of all things Open,
they may chose to be a white knight. IBM could buy SCO from petty cash,
and publicly indemnify anyone contributing to Linux by holding alleged title to
SCO intellectual property. This helps keep the Linux market competitive by
maintaining equality between two main vendors. IBM does not want Linux to
slip into a one-company product, and they want to please the Open Source
community.
Any bets?
