The odd case of the SiCortex asset sale

You might recall that when SiCortex ceased operations their assets, including the PathScale compiler, went on the auction block. The sale was to have been concluded on the 25th of June. In early July I got in touch with the firm managing the sale, Gerbsman Partners, and got a very polite reply back that they weren’t talking about the results of the sale. Since then no one has talked about those results either. If anyone bought a part of SiCortex, they aren’t telling us.

And evidently we aren’t the only ones. In a story in the Worcester Business Journal (hat tip to HPCwire for the pointer) about the virtues of open source software in the case of companies that go out of business there is mention of the unanswered questions about the SiCortex assets

SiCortex logoThe auction for SiCortex’s assets closed June 25. The company that ran the auction, Gerbsman Partners of California, has not disclosed publicly the results of the auction and refused to comment for this story.

The Linux Fund, based in Oregon, raised money with the help of Bergstrom to put in a bid on the SiCortex compiler software, according to David Mandel, the fund’s executive director. He declined to say how much the bid was for, but is under the impression that the fund’s bid was not successful.

“I never got any official notice that we didn’t win, but we heard through others that we weren’t successful,” Mandel said.

Which just seems odd. It seems, that even if I don’t know who the winner was, at least the losers would know that they lost.

Trackbacks

  1. […] been trying to keep tabs on SiCortex’s assets since the company shuttered during the summer. The sale was to have been […]

  2. […] Scale Compiler Suit. Some news about this in 2009 at: http://www.wbjournal.com/news43822.html and http://insidehpc.com/2009/08/07/no-results-sicortex-asset-sale/ and http://www.wbjournal.com/news44363.html and from Cray page, […]

Comments

  1. Thanks John, for keeping up with this story. As holders of PathScale licenses that have an expiration date, we too would like to know what is going on with PathScale. If there is to be any value left in that company, the party that thinks they are holding on to a valuable asset had better get off the dime. Then again, maybe it’s being controlled by a competitor who wants to bury the product and doesn’t want anyone to know who they are for fear of the ill will that move would surely foster.

  2. And here I was hoping for a legitimate open-source competitor to GCC… I guess Intel and Portland Group can exploit the anxiety of existing PathScale customers by offering competitive upgrades, etc.

  3. There are still Open64, CLang+LLVM and PCC around as open source compilers (though LLVM depends on GCC derived parts for Fortran support, and PCC says that “Hello World” works in Fortran).