Darl McBride (pictured), the CEO of SCO and the industry’s favorite pariah, expects to get fired any minute now.

He expects to get fired because he’s adamantly opposed to winding SCO down, laying off its people and settling the company’s litigation against Novell and IBM for chump change, which is the way he sees things going if the Chapter 11 trustee put in charge of SCO keeps going down the path he appears to be going down – despite the fact that the trustee told McBride when he got there that he thinks there is “significant value in the litigation.”

What’s got McBride’s hackles up is that after the favorable 10th Circuit ruling overturning the summary judgment that Novell owns Unix McBride brought a major Wall Street investor new to the scene to the table, complete with term sheet, to invest up to $25 million in SCO, keep it functioning and let it get to the jury trial it’s been hankering after all these years.

The only problem is this opportunity fell on deaf ears. Not so much as a return phone call to the would-be investor from the trustee, McBride says.

So here’s what’s gonna happen.

If McBride gets fired and the trustee comes through with a reasonable settlement all well and good, he said. IBM can have the company and declare victory. However, if the best the trustee can do is a quick settlement in the range of tens of millions, then the shareholders will revolt and McBride is prepared to lead them to the bankruptcy court in Delaware and plead for the opportunity for their case to be heard by a jury in the district court in Utah where the Novell case is currently headed anyway.

Mock trials – whether done by SCO or reportedly by IBM and Novell – all indicate SCO would win and be declared the owner of Unix, reopening the IBM case and the charge that Big Blue ripped off SCO’s IP and stuck it in Linux and reopening the SCOsource tax on Linux. The third-party calculations of the damages SCO suffered all reportedly put the number somewhere between $2.5 billion and $7 billion.

That’s why serious people with serious money and equally serious lawyers of their own who look at the case are reportedly willing to underwrite SCO and roll the dice.

McBride is figuring on coming up with a counter-proposal to lay before the bankruptcy judge to get SCO its day in court and keep the shareholders’ right intact.