Is SCO's Unix business being sold to UnXis?

In an email, SCO  informed its partners that UnXis Inc. was chosen as the successful bidder for SCO's Unix software business on 26 January. The slightly convoluted phrasing is probably due to SCO's current reorganisation.  On 16 February, the transaction is to be submitted for approval to the bankruptcy court where SCO's case is pending.

The email also quotes Hans Bayer, SCO's Vice President Worldwide Sales, as saying that “We are delighted that after years of shifting targets, that under the UnXis ownership, we now will be prepared to create a truly customer driven, fully supported, open systems platform for high reliability enterprise computing”.



Apart from the aforementioned email, information about the deal is very scarce. The SCO home page contains a solitary link to the press release. The Groklaw web site has information about SCO and a company called UnXis Inc. from 2009. According to Groklaw, UnXis was incorporated in the US state of Delaware at the end of 2009. Whether this company is the UnXis Group in question is hard to tell. Also peculiar is that the obvious domain name, unxis.com, is for sale and that such potential alternatives as unxis-group.com or unxisgroup.com have not been registered at all – plenty of food for thought for conspiracy theorists.

SCO's Unix business includes the distribution and development of UnixWare and OpenServer as well as the support of these products. Last September, SCO announced its plans to auction off this business division. If the sale goes through, all the SCO Group will have left are its lawsuits against IBM and Red Hat about alleged copyright infringements in Linux and the hope that the most recent appeal against a final decision on the copyright to Unix, which SCO is fighting about with Novell, is successful.