After The Incredible Shrinking SCO, it's now time for The SCO That Wouldn't Die. Maybe SCO should sell its story rights to Hollywood for more fast cash and make a follow-up to Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.

Groklaw -- ever the diligent observer of all things SCO -- has weighed in with their own analysis of what this all means. The main thing is that the whole matter of whether or not SCO owns the Unix copyrights is now to be sent to a jury trial, rather than simply being decided on summary judgments.

The decision takes no stand on whether or not the copyrights are valid and simply says it's something best left for a jury trial. Good, I say: a jury trial will only make SCO's duplicity that much more public.

Novell is also still due royalties, and if SCO ends up in Chapter 7 (a possibility that's been looming for some time now), that would be more or less the end of that.

Unless someone else comes along, infuses SCO with cash, and starts the whole sordid thing over again.

But even if by some mad miracle SCO does prevail, they're still going to be horribly tainted by everything that has come before. Who in their right minds will want to do business with them, knowing that anything they do with SCO could turn into a patent-troll deathtrap somewhere down the line? There is no way SCO can come out of this and expect to do business with a world that is now rightfully wary of them and all they've done.

Then again, maybe they don't expect to "do business". Maybe Darl McBride decided somewhere down the line that suing people was a pretty good way to make a living, as long as there were anti-Linux allies to be found. Too bad for him that the rest of the world is quickly moving past such childish conceits.

When they finally do get this movie made, here's my title for it: A Bullet in the Foot. (Apologies to John Woo.)

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