Groklaw - SCO Reports on De Minimis Assets Sale & Ocean Park's 6th Bill

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SCO Reports on De Minimis Assets Sale & Ocean Park's 6th Bill

Monday, May 03 2010 @ 11:45 AM EDT

SCO has now filed with the bankruptcy court in Delaware its report on the small stuff it sold off, what it calls its First Quarterly Report of De Minimis Asset Sales Consummated By the Chapter 11 Trustee Pursuant to Order Approving Certain Procedures for the Sale, Transfer or Abandonment of De Minimis Assets.

It's their report on selling off the minor stuff, from a financial standpoint, like fork lifts and domain names. Caldera Graphics in Paris finally got the Caldera.com domain name it's been wanting for years, for just 500 Euros. That means, of course, that the prior robots.txt file no longer blocks access on Internet Archive. Surprise! Linuxtraining.com got sold for $10,000.

Ken Nielson bought a laptop, which will not surprise geeks of the security variety. He paid $100, which does surprise me a little. And Canopy got a conference table and chairs. And SCO really did sell off a fork lift for $700.

And Ocean Park has filed its sixth bill. $91,829.50. Heavens. For the month of March. Well. You'd have to sell a lot of fork lifts to pay them off. Who knew bankruptcy could be so lucrative? They do know the idea is to take in more than they spend, right? And that creditors are supposed to get at least some of the money? I mean, without all the professional help SCO has been getting in bankruptcy court since September of 2007, Novell could have been paid on the very first day SCO filed for Chapter 11 protection. There seems to be an imbalance in the universe.

Update: And news on the US Supreme Court front. SCO has been given more time to respond to Novell's petition. The new date is August 5.

So, what have Ocean Park folks been doing for their $91,829.50? Some of it is rather vague. This covers the time period of the sale of mobility assets and the finalization of the Yarro loan, so the vagueness is a little frustrating. There are several items about conference calls regarding various "commercial, financial issues." Whatever that means.

This sounds good, though: On March 23, an associate worked on the following:

Coordinate worldwide storage and document retention efforts; email re the same.

At least they don't say they are turning them into toilet paper. But what would this be on the 18th?

Call on The Open Group communication path forward and economic finalization.

On the 26th, there is another reference to the Open Group, that might explain it at least in part:

Analyzed sale of new units and upgrades over the past year in preparation for call with The Open Group.

Toward the end of March you see several items regarding revenues in Asia, and Vinod Bhat wrote up a draft summary. I would love to read that one, assuming it's about Japan. He also spent an hour on preparing a "schedule of historical litigation expenses." Only an hour? We're talking millions. And for what?

Almost 45 hours were spent on "Prep/Participation in Company management calls and meetings". Meetings. 45 hours of meetings in one month. I'll bet you wish you could bill for that. Their bill is $19,003.50 just for those meetings. Another 29.4 hours were spent on "Prep/Participation in Meetings/Conf. Calls with Counsel and Ch. 11 Trustee" for a total of $11,828.00. So almost another 30 hours preparing for more meetings and then participating. That's 45 plus 29.4 hours of meetings in one month, all billed to the debtor.

Cluebat: just declare Chapter 7. Then tell the world you are really, really sorry you caused all this unnecessary trouble.

There. I said it.

That meetings total doesn't even count the 32.2 hours spent analyzing and preparing court filings, at $10,706.00. Preparing court filings? I thought lawyers did that.

But the biggest item is $22,371.50 working on the restructuring plan. Ah, yes. The restructuring plan. And yet, SCO remains un-restructured, does it not? It is totally and utterly depending on a lottery dream that doesn't appear to be coming true. I didn't know bankruptcy court let a debtor gamble away all the creditors' money. See how much we can learn on Groklaw?

Seriously, for a minute, they are hoping the judge in SCO v. Novell will give them the copyrights the jury wouldn't. But here's the cluebat part: even if it were to get them in some crazed alternate universe, it can't successfully sue anyone over them, because they distributed all the files under the GPL. It's an insurmountable obstacle. [Update: A reader points out that it's actually worse for SCO, in that Novell has been found to be the copyright holder. Even if the judge were to force Novell to hand over the copyrights now, "Novell, the copyright holder, has distributed under the GPL such of any unix code as is in the linux kernel and SCO cannot acquire by the transfer any better title than Novell has at the time of transfer. What has got into the kernel is there and that is that." That's if there actually were any such code in the kernel, which I have yet to see demonstrated.]

Unfortunately, SCO can't learn anything except the hard way, so if the judge fulfills their dream, we'll have to play it all out, until they find out that I'm right, and I told them this since 2003, and I wasn't alone. Eben Moglen, lawyer and expert on the GPL, explained it to them too. Here's just one example. So I sincerely and most whole-heartedly hope that if we are forced to touch all the bases before SCO gets it, that in the end the court rules the litigation was frivolous. Because to me it is, and it always was. They can't say nobody told them.

Here are the documents:

04/30/2010 - 1116 - Status Report // First Quarterly Report of De Minimis Asset Sales Consummated By the Chapter 11 Trustee Pursuant to Order Approving Certain Procedures for the Sale, Transfer or Abandonment of De Minimis Assets Filed by Edward N. Cahn, Chapter 11 Trustee for The SCO Group, Inc., et al.. (Attachments: # 1 Exhibit A # 2 Certificate of Service) (Fatell, Bonnie) (Entered: 04/30/2010)

04/30/2010 - 1117 - Monthly Application for Compensation (Sixth) of Ocean Park Advisors, LLC for the Period of March 1, 2010 Through March 31, 2010 Filed by Ocean Park Advisors, LLC. Objections due by 5/21/2010. (Attachments: # 1 Notice # 2 Exhibit A # 3 Exhibit B) (Fatell, Bonnie) (Entered: 04/30/2010)

And speaking of fork lifts, a truck came by and removed the SCO logo from the building where they have offices the last week of April. A reader sent me the photo. If I can figure out how to make it smaller, I'll share it with you.

Update: Thanks to directions from a reader on how to use Gwenview, here it is:

Of course, this is Linux, so there are lots of other instructions on how to do the same task in other ways. Help yourself. And, here's a picture a member sent me years ago, showing you how the building used to look. Note the prophetic detail:

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Corrections

Authored by: artp on Monday, May 03 2010 @ 11:51 AM EDT

Please keep to errors of fact in the article, not errors of opinion.

Title could read: eror -> error

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