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SCO Volleys to Red Hat
ZeroVerteX noted that News.com is saying "The SCO Group fired back against Linux leader Red Hat on Monday, filing a motion to dismiss the Linux company's suit against SCO. In a motion filed late Monday in U.S. District Court in Delaware, SCO argues that Red Hat has no grounds to sue SCO, as SCO's actions against the open-source Linux operating system have not specifically targeted Red Hat." So it's ok to threaten a community, but not ok for a member of that same community to stand up?
"There will be a day of reckoning for Red Hat and SuSE when this is done." --Darl McBride, Apr 24 2003, here
Belief is the currency of delusion.
By SCO using fraudulent claims to deminish the marketability of RedHat's own products (as well as that of the Linux marketplace as a whole), RedHat has every right to sue.
Wow! SCO's stock is at 19.17 WTF!!!
I mean, of course they have. A motion to dismiss is just part of the dance. It's typically the first reaction of a legal team to a legal threat. I'm pretty certain its the first thing that IBM did as well.
It's often a long shot, but if granted, it will save SCO a lot of time and money.
IAAL, and a motion to dismiss is something that is filed in nearly every lawsuit on the off chance that it will actually work and you can avoid having your client pay the expenses of litigation.
Leaving out any comment about the legal judgment involved in SCO filing the original lawsuit, if SCO's lawyers *hadn't* recommended filing this motion to dismiss Red Hat's suit, it would have constituted malpractice.
I've posted this before, but instead of simply whining about their behavior here at /. we should be filing complaints with the FTC. Mention how they are trying to sell something that they do not own, and that if you don't pay them now (before they show what they own), they are saying that you'll owe them more later. Licenses start at $699 for a single processor during the promotional period.
SCO's Address:
The SCO Group
355 South 520 West
Suite 100
Lindon, Utah 84042 USA
801-765-4999 phone
801-765-1313 fax
FTC Consumer Complaint Form
Take a stand and make a real difference.
--
Slash
A day of reckoning indeed. Lots of SCO insiders have been selling shares during the past few months. None of them are buying. These aren't just anybody. We're talking Robert K. Bench, Chief Financial Officier ; Reginald C. Broughton, Senior Executive VP ; Michael P. Olson, Controller ; Michael Sean Wilson, Senior VP ; Jeff F. Hunsaker, VP . These are people who should have some idea of the health of the company.
Legally speaking, nah, that's not what failure of a motion to dismiss means.
A motion to dismiss says that *without considering any evidence*, and *taking everything you say as true*, you haven't managed to show anything wrong. Or in plain English, "Yeah, even if you're right, so what?"
So all that the failure of this motion to dismiss would mean is that Red Hat's lawyers know how to start a lawsuit, which presumably they do.
SCO is sending out letters about liability to licensing fees to GNU/Linux users, including RedHat's customers. That should be all the standing they need in court.
-t
http://unmoldable.com W:"No one of consequence" I:"I must know" W:"Get used to disappointment"
One thing to note, Caldera did not win that case. Microsoft cut their losses in the midst of the anti-trust lawsuit and settled out of court.
endit
No. SCO must pass along most (I believe) of the money to Novell. They're like a debt-collecting agency, collecting for Novell.
Yes, on each sale 5% goes to SCO and 95% goes to Novell.
Quoting an e-week article here:
Under that agency agreement, SCO collects all customer payments and remits 95 percent of the collected funds to Novell and retains 5 percent as an administrative fee. SCO records the 5 percent administrative fee as revenue in its consolidated statements of operations.
I don't know why this troll was modded but now that it is I'll respond.
First of all what was taken from freebsd? the idea or the code?
Second the ATA "copy" was in fact proved to be just some headders that the freebsd people had reverse engineered but that Andre had gone to the manufacturer for and gotten the actual documentation. So who coppied what?
As for the Virgin incedent I found no info on that at all other than how to install a new linux distro onto it and some comments about how the default OS is dog slow and installing either windows or Linux on it is a better idea.
Please check your facts next time.
Not really.
These are the same grounds on which the OFT dismissed mine (and quite a few other) complains against it in the UK.
It is a generally valid argument as far as anticompetitive practices are concerned. You are not allowed to complain unless you are directly affected. All that Red Hat needs to prove that it is directly affected with relation to one or more of the SCO actions it alleges to be illegal.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Right, and in this case really it is just a question of jurisdiction. Federal courts can only hear actual cases and controversies, they are not allowed to give what amounts to an advisory opinion under Article III of the U.S. Constitution. SCO is simply arguing (based on the press report of its motion to dismiss) that there is no such controversy here since SCO has made no direct threat of imminent litigation towards Red Hat specifically. So SCO is arguing that Red Hat's claim is not proper under the declaratory judgment act. Basically this motion has nothing to do with the merits or substance of either sides claims regarding the software/code/copyrights etc. It is a mere jurisidictional issue. Even if SCO wins this motion and Red Hat's claims are dismissed, if SCO later sends a demand letter or something to that effect to Red Hat, Red Hat could bring this same action... But not that Red Hat has shown its willingness to litigate, SCO probably would file a suit before sending such a letter so that they could pick the forum for the litigation....
--Kobayashi--
And in order to do this, all they have to do is show the court The letter sent from SCO to RedHat's clients... pretty sure that'll do it...
So, naturally for a libel suit there are generally three standards. 1) Did they say it? 2) Was it damaging? and 3) Is what they say factually incorrect?
Here, the first is a foregone conclusion, and the second nearly is. The third is effectively the IBM case.
But think about what that means. To prove that Linux DIDN'T steal from SCO, then either 1) SCO can actually turn over their allegations, for RedHat to refute, or 2) RedHat can subpoena the entire Sys V source code to show that any matches can be attributed to BSD or textbooks.
This is exactly what SCO is trying to avoid - you know, an actual lawsuit? So I think this is more of a "put up or shut up" move by Red Hat than anything else. Effectively, it's a way of letting teh Open Source camp control the pace of the lawsuit that SCO has no intention of actually following through with. They're trying to use it for their pump'n'dump scheme, and the Open Source camp (here, Red Hat) is attempting to take that away, to force their hand.
All in all, it's a damned good strategy.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat