Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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.
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 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!".