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?

Comments

Mmm..

[eddy]

"There will be a day of reckoning for Red Hat and SuSE when this is done." --Darl McBride, Apr 24 2003, here

Every right to sue...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Nothing to See Here, Folks, Move Along...

[judmarc]

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.

File a complaint with the FTC

[Slashdolt]

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

Your right

[bahamat]

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.

Re:The community should realize ...

[loginx]

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...

"Put up or shut up" move

[siskbc]

When you sue for defamation, the burden of proof is entirely on the person who brings the suit, and not only do you need to prove that the defamation has damaged you, you also have to prove that the defamation was comitted willingly and intentionally.

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.