SCO is becoming Intergraph.
For those who don't know it, Intergraph was once a workstation maker.Last year they had 10M in business income. And 385M in lawsuit income.
Basically the company sits in a few patents, does nothing, and milks
everyone else (not that it's illegal to do so).
And why I say SCO is becoming intergraph?
Let's look at the possible income sources for SCO, shall we?
SCO OpenServer and UnixWARE: pretty much just upgrading old servers. That is not going to pay for R&D for new versions, and then this dries up, because no new version == no upgrades == no income. Unless of course, this gets subsidies from somewhere else.
Caldera Linux == If this suit killed something, this is what got whacked
Licensing of IP, either friendly or forceful a.k.a the Intergraph path
There is no d!
And about c)... who is going to license the UNIX stuff from SCO anymore?
This suit means if you do it, you can NEVER AGAIN develop a unix system or a linux system, or SCO will sue your ass. To do that to get a technology that is not too much better than FreeBSD... it makes no sense. Specially considering there will be no R&D on it anymore (see a).
The only ones with UNIX licenses wil be those who got them from AT&T, and they don't pay a dime to SCO. BTW: this basically means Sun, since HP-UX and IRIX and the rest is on their death bed anyway (and AIX... well, just think about it ;-).
So c), the only visible income source for SCO becomes "We will sue people, and live on what we get out of settlements".
Because SCO can't even do a GOOD Intergraph and actually win the lawsuits. Not this one, and not against IBM, at least, and they don't have a good patent portfolio!
Tu put it another way, SCO will become a bully that will try to look impressive and steal milk money from smaller companies. That is, they will, if IBM lets them.
If IBM caves in and settles, SCO will look impressive enough for this to work. Which is why I hope IBM beats the crap out of them, just to make SCO have to work to earn an honest buck.