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IBM Puts Pressure On SCO
inode_buddha writes "An article at Groklaw shows IBM's legal team dissecting the whole SCO thing professionally and thoroughly. I'm almost willing to bet the case gets dropped with extreme prejudice, especially now that Novell is getting involved. Is anyone taking bets as to when the case actually closes and how?" I suggest the MIT Technology Review add this one to their markets.
Case closes. All SCO execs having got rich, got jobs with micro$oft or just laying low for a while. No charges pressed, only people who suffer are SCO's employees. SCO gets taken over or closed for good.
I can't really decide if I want this case dismissed or not. (I know my desires in the matter have nothing to do with it, but hear me out.)
:-)
:-)
On the one hand, if the judge comes back with "SCO is lying through their teeth, there's nothing here, SCO bugger off, sorry about all the trouble IBM", then it will neatly tie up the FUD machine and probably bring an end to SCO right quick. Yes, there IS such a thing as bad PR, and we don't want any more of it.
On the other hand, a dismissal would not allow for a vetting of the GPL in court. Of all the possible tests of the GPL, this is perhaps the most pro-GPL case we could hope for. (Not SCO's accusations, but IBM's responses that SCO is in GPL violation.) For a judge to formally declare theat the GPL is indeed valid and legally binding would be a very good thing, but won't happen before 2005 at the earliest the way this case is going. That's a lot of FUD time.
I really can't decide which to root for.
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
It's been stated time... after... time... That's why it's been modded redundant. Basically, if you say something at the beginning that hasn't been said in that story, you're OK, unless it's a joke, in which case you've gotta make sure you're not beating a dead horse.
> I allready paid my license to SCO, will they be returning my $699?
If you already paid, then you deserve to be ripped off (think auto-LART).
It is all about stupidness. Stupid people click on links in spam, stupid people feed the trolls, stupid people give SCO money, stupid stockmarkets give SCO Execs money, stupid journalists report every fart venting out from a SCO office etc. etc.
If it werent for the stupid ones, all of the above would just go away.
-- Having problems sending big files over the net? Try out Efisto (http://efisto.org)
Parent is absolutely correct.
Dismissal of SCO's suit doesn't mean dismissal of IBM's countersuit.
In IBM's countersuit they accuse SCO of copyright violations and GPL violations. The GPL will have it's day in court. There is nothing SCO can do about that now.
Who ares which way the legal action goes.. That is not the point. The idea is to spread enough confusion and uncertainty that corporate entities will be more likely to use perceived 'legal' and 'safe' versions of unix that don't have any licensing issues.
Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt contribute to the bottom line when it comes to conservative decisions about technology platforms. And let's face facts how many people read below the headline with its exagerrated emphasis on legal uncertainty and disarray.
No company wants to risk their technology decisions being upset by later unbudgeted licensing, legal and technical problems when the quiet life of a standard product from a multinational is on the shelf next to it...
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
I suspect SCO will stop before any actual lawsuit takes place, using some obscure excuse. But at the same time holding their doors open for future litigation, just to maintain the insecurity among todays and future linux users.
But Marth inside trading a few million worth of stock (for a net gain of only a few hundred thousand dollars IIRC) does...
IANAL (or his coffee boy) but one thing strikes me almost immediately upon reading the SCO and IBM requests and responses: IBM's method and language is far clearer and to the point than SCO's. IBM does not resort to the use of (semi)abusive language but stays focussed and follows avery clear pattern of logic which basically states that IBM will present reasonable evidence as requested, but it requires that SCO also provide resonable evidence and point out exactly what, where and when has been infringed. That is something that SCO seems to have real problems in doing (and no, the 337'000 lines in 531 files in the Linux source that have been mentioned by SCO will not suffice as nowhere does SCO point out exactly, as required by law, which lines in those files are SCO's property with a reference to Unic source code), and SCO seems to have real problems in defining what has been infringed. In fact it seems as if SCO is trying to make a case as it goes along and has no real evidence to date.
What is also noticable is that IBM is bringing SCO's public behaviour into the case, finally. SCO is finally being called to account for it's disgusting public behaviour, and I'm pretty sure that IBM is going to use Darl, Chris and Mike's statements against them in court. I think those boys are probably too fucking stupid to realise that what they're said amounts to public record and is admissable in court. I hope they end up being as poor as I am. I hope Darl and co get sued individually by hordes of Linux contributors for damaging Linux business and end up poverty stricken on the street corner begging for booze money in Salt Lake City.
According to the article, SCO pulled up some 519 files which have around 300,000 lines of code, which might or might not contain tainted code. That is something like 1 percent of Linux kernel code.
You're suggesting the Linux kernel alone has 30,000,000 lines of code in it? I don't think you and I are looking at the same kernel. It would be closer to say that 300,000 lines of code is 10% of the Linux kernel, which would take some substantial rewriting, and makes your last comment stupid.
Last time I heard, IBM had a whopper of a lawsuit against SCO - for patent violations.
Someone said patent lawsuits are expensive and just trying to defend from one could crush SCO...
So, when will SCO get gutted and pan fried by IBM's lawsuits?
I suspect that IBM is not trying to get the case dismissed at all. IBM is using the threat of dismissal to pressure SC0 into public discourse of the alleged stolen code.
SC0 desperately does not want the alleged stolen code to enter the public record because we all know it will be 3.2 seconds before any code is re-written in the kernel even if it's IBM doing the re-write.
This however is a great thing. SC0's case should be dismissed but not IBM's countersuit, which if found to be true will force SC0 to stop distributing Linux and probably their Linux personality kit too. It is IBM's countersuit which squarely applies to the GPL and it is also where the GPL will receive it's vidication.
Not anymore. IBM filed a countersuit against SCO, and SCO can't make said countersuit go away in any way except to win it.
It will look very, very bad for them if their lawsuit-- their one and only source of potential future revenue-- drops, yet the IBM case-- an inescapable very likely source of large potential future damages-- does not drop. Bad enough I don't expect any of that stock price to be left..
Can SCO get out of the IBM case by any form of bankruptcy? If so, can IBM continue their counterusits against the teams of stockholders that are actually controlling SCO at this point?
If this does spell the end for SCO, what will become of UNIX in that case? Is it possible to finally move this ancient codebase - which seems to have little value beyond it's potential as an IP strongarm weapon - into the public domain once and for all?
Everything that SCO has done, they announced to the public months ago.
SCO announces a lot of things to the public. It doesn't make any of them true. Ever heard directly from any of the MIT mathematicians who found all those millions of lines of infringing code?
Have you received your invoice yet, and paid your $699 into the program that SCO said got an "adequate" response?
Do you think any investors are still waiting for SCO to bring up it's copyright claims in court, since it hasn't been able to shut up about them in the media? For some reason SCO has decided to make it's IBM lawsuit entirely about contracts and "methods and ways of doing things" instead, and to claim in it's Red Hat defense that the only controversy between them and Linux will be settled by the IBM suit.
Wouldn't it be nice to take a look at that "copied" code, too, especially if you decided to buy SCO stock based on those NDA'd reports and made your purchase before it turned out they were just hyping up public domain Unix32V and independently cloned BSD code?
There are a lot of things that SCO has said in public that are outright lies, and just because you or I can do enough research to determine that doesn't mean every stockholder should be forced to.
How is it anything but fraudulent to make false public claims regarding the extent of one's ownership of intellectual property then to initiate litigation based on those false claims, causing a baseless runup in stock price which is in turn exploited by the corporate officers for personal financial gain?
How can you say that a 47.0% change in "Institutional Shares Held" Vs a 1.1% is similar.
Those SCO execs are pulling the "yellow handles" hard and fast yelling "eject! eject! eject!".
Where each side can only spend as much as the other. If I am sued by McD, and only want to spend $100 on my defense, that's all they can spend on their offense. Or if I sue McD, and only want to spend $2000 on the case, that's all they get to spend of defense.
... if McD wants to spend $1M, they have to loan me the difference from what I want to spend, and if they lose, they don't get it back. I have to agree to this loan.
:-) Seems like it ought to go a long ways towards reducing the money power in our legal system.
There has to be some minimum, of course, it makes no sense to expect a corporate lawyer to only spend $100 on a case. But no banks of several lawyers deponing hundreds of witnesses just to put the fear of McD in people.
Another aspect would be an escape clause
This would apply in all cases, criminal or civil. No more state DAs spending a fortune on sending some illiterate scumbag to the death chamber because his public dedfender only had $300 to spend.
Anyway, I like my scheme
Infuriate left and right
It ain't over for a looooong time yet.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
Martha Stewart is a Democrat (or at least has donated a pile of money to democrats over the years).
What if SCO really had 2 reasons for doing this:
1.) Inflate stock price, etc, typical conspiracy theory.
2.) *VALIDATE* the GPL. They've sold Linux before, they know how much IT managers that are sold on UNIX/Windows bitch about not being sure how stable the GPL is. What if they also planned on this?
I know this sounds like bullshit, but hey, its a possibility. Microsoft bought licenses from them, what if they want to fuck MS over? What if they actually *WANT* to do something good before SCO dies? SCO knows that its products were crap. Its Linux sales weren't quite up there either. What if SCO wanted to get rich quick, and then validate the GPL? For instance, IBM would probably buy them out. IBM is *THE* pimp for Linux, all of SCO's Linux people would probably work for IBM. In the end, SCO would be somewhat a good guy.
Just a thought for all of you conspiracy theorists....
Well, IBM will have to provide the evidence, and is doing so through the discovery process, although it may fall to SCO to organize it. To beat an example to death, consider JFS. There is no question that it is available as part of AIX. There is no question that the code and methods were revealed to the world through Linux. What remains at question are (1) was it ported to Linux from AIX or not, and (2) more importantly, if it was ported to Linux from AIX, do the contract terms require SCO to approve such a revelation? Only IBM has the evidence to prove or disprove the first proposition. If I were one of SCO's attorneys, I would be doing my best to get the judge to rule that IBM should be organizing the evidence to show the development history. And I would be telling Darl and the rest of them to STFU, that there's a whole lot more potential value in quietly winning the contract case in court than there is in sending those damned invoices out...
Really? Is it fun? The closest I ever came was playing obnoxious witnesses in mock trials at law school. That was fun!