SALT LAKE CITY: A member of the Saudi royal family and a private equity group are coming to the rescue of SCO Group, a company that claims it holds the copyright to the ubiquitous Unix operating system and that developers of the Linux open-source operating system stole it.SCO, which since 1995 has controlled licensing and development of Unix for corporate servers, wants to go private, get out of bankruptcy and resurrect its legal claims involving Linux.The company said a Middle East partner it would not identify and New York-based Stephen Norris Capital Partners will finance SCO s comeback with up to $100 million.Stephen Norris, co-founder and former president of the Carlyle Group, enlisted Prince Alwaleed bin Talal in the deal, according to a person familiar with the company s strategy, who asked for anonymity because SCO wasn t authorizing the release of the information.Norris didn t return a message Thursday seeking comment on the deal. The Saudi embassy didn t return messages asking about Alwaleed s involvement in SCO.SCO filed for federal bankruptcy protection in September after a federal judge here gutted its Linux claims. US District Judge Dale Kimball ruled in August that Waltham, Mass.-based Novell Inc. owns copyrights covering the Unix operating system - not SCO - because SCO didn t buy ownership rights from Novell in 1995.Kimball s decision left the company potentially liable to Novell for millions of dollars in licensing fees. A four-day trial on that issue is set to start April 29.SCO has separately sued IBM Corp. for millions of dollars, claiming it had no right to dump Unix source code into Linux, a move that made it more sturdy and reliable.Executives with SCO and its new partners believe Kimball s decision will be reversed if they appeal it to a higher court, according to the person familiar with SCO.Norris previously teamed with Alwaleed in a $590 million restructuring of Citigroup Inc. that returned a $15 billion profit, according to Norris Capital Partners web site.That partnership was mentioned in a news release SCO issued Thursday that did not explicitly identify Alwaleed as one of SCO s partners. More recently, Alwaleed helped bail out Citigroup when bad mortgages left the bank with a $10 billion loss in the fourth quarter of 2007.SCO said the new financing will position it to resurrect its legal claims. It also marks an exciting future for our business, Jeff Hunsaker, SCO s president and chief operating officer, said in the statement.SCO s core business remains licensing Unix, but it also sells software for group communications on cell phones.Neither Hunsaker nor CEO Darl McBride returned messages Thursday for comment.Novell bought Unix from AT&T Corp. in 1992, and SCO has said its predecessor, Santa Cruz Operations Inc., paid Novell 6.1 million shares of SCO stock valued over $100 million for Unix rights.Novell and IBM are among companies that have begun developing products for use in Linux.
