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Posted: 3:22 PM- The SCO Group Inc., the small Utah company that gambled its future on a lawsuit against giant IBM over use of computer codes the Lindon-company claimed it owned, filed Friday for bankruptcy.
The SCO Group filed bankruptcy papers in federal court in Delaware a little more than a month after a federal judge dealt a huge blow to SCO's claims when he ruled it did not own the rights to the Unix code it has accused IBM of putting into the open-source Linux computer operating system.
The company said in a news release it would continue to operate as its seeks to reorganize under Chapter 11 bankruptcy rules. Voice mail and e-mail messages to the company were not returned.
"Chapter 11 reorganization provides the company with an opportunity to protect its assets during this time while focusing on building our future plans," Darl McBride, chief executive officer of SCO, was quoted as saying in the news release.
The SCO Group's stock finished down 26 cents closing at 38 cents a share on Friday on the NASDAQ stock exchange. It had traded as high as $3.11 in the past year.
U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball last month tossed out SCO's claim that it owned the Unix and UnixWare copyrights as part of a 1995 deal with Novell. SCO had sued in March 2003 accusing IBM of damaging it financially by putting some of that code into the open-source Linux computer operating system. Open source is software code that is made available for free that developers often work together on to make improvements or produce different programs.
Kimball's ruling threatens SCO's lawsuit against Novell over title to Unix and could also undermine its bigger, $5 billion claim against IBM.