As The SCO Group Inc."s reseller and developer community gathers for its annual SCO Forum convention in Las Vegas this week, one question on many attendees" minds will be whether the company"s future will be as a software vendor or as a litigator. Though SCO"s lawsuits against IBM Corp., Novell Inc., DaimlerChrysler AG and AutoZone Inc. have attracted a great deal of attention in the last year, they have not helped SCO"s bottom line. The company is facing mounting financial losses, which have been spurred by millions of dollars in legal fees, a flagging Unix business, and anemic sales of its SCOsource Linux licensing program, which brought in just $11,000 in revenue during the company"s most recent financial quarter.
In the face of these challenges, SCO has apparently chosen to make the company"s core Unix business, and not its legal adventures, the center of this year"s show. SCO will spend the week discussing new Unix products, such as the first developer preview of its next generation of OpenServer software, as well as a new developer program it expects to launch by year"s end, called the SCO Marketplace Initiative, which will use an online bidding system to attract developers to work on SCO"s Unix operating systems.