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SCO News Roundup
Bootsy Collins managed to combine all of today's SCO stories. He writes "The firm of David Boies, SCO's attorney in charge of their Linux IP cases, has
announced their compensation
(so far) from SCO: $1 million USD in cash, and $8 million in SCO stock. Keeping that stock price high until they can sell is clearly of some importance to
Boies, Schiller and Flexner LLP. Given the cost of
selling a $50 million convertible note to fund their legal actions, the actual cost to SCO is more like $17 million USD. Meanwhile, SCO CEO Darl McBride is saying that Novell's purchase of SuSE
violates a non-competition agreement reached when SCO bought the Unix source, and thus is legally actionable by SCO. Over at the Register, they've noticed that SCO's latest SEC filings indicate how firmly they're putting all their eggs in the legal basket: the filings effectively say that
'SCO has already lost business from its loyal customer base, and it expects to lose more.'
And finally, in response to a poor response to SCO's attempts to get Fortune 1000 companies to pay $699/server for 'Linux licenses' before the fee jumped to $1399, SCO has announced
that the $699 discount rate will apply to the end of 2003. Hurry before time runs out again."
The non-compete agreement prohibits Novell from directly competing with SCO's Unix-on-Intel business, McBride said.
Linux Is Not UniX, any more so than BSD, BeOS, or MacOSX. Better double check the wording of that contract Darl.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
The legal action is also causing them to have problems hiring. I was called up by one recuriter/pimp and asked if I would be intrested in working in their call center. To this I gave a firm but polite no. HE then let slip that everyone he had spoken to had said pretty much the same thing.
Oh well
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
IANAL, but I suspect now might be a good time to join in RedHat's suit against Darl and his crack smoking band of pirates.
From Groklaw...The firm will be enforcing and defending SCO's intellectual property rights, including the protection of our UNIX System V source code and our copyrights that were reaffirmed as a result of the BSDI settlement agreement.'" Does SCO now think that they also own BSDi rights?
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
I don't think Novell is competing with SCO. SCO does not have a product (well one that is worth much at least) The only way I think Novell would be competing with SCO would be to file lawsuits against all things linux.
More than that. IF SCO somehow wins and gets to charge everyone an enormous fee for using linux. Novell would just have to pay SCO, which I don't think is competion.
Can you ping me now?... Good!
...is the status of IBM's filings to compel discovery not just from SCO, but with companies investing in SCO.
This could get particularly sticky if SCO's legal team has a strong financial stake in SCO and the outcome.
Attorney/client privilege is pretty strong, but can it be pried apart if there is evidence of, oh, say fraud?
"Provided by the management for your protection."
The operative principle is a well understood one, that once you lose a customer (for any reason) it is very difficult to get them back. I don't think the folks over at SCO will change their tune, since it is apparent that they've put all their eggs in the legal basket. But, I really don't think I want to support SCO's customers with my money either.
Incidentally, I'm also pushing at my work to discontinue supporting older versions of our application which run on SCO, and provide those customers a free upgrade path to the Linux based versions. This may be successful, for more than purely ideological reasons as well. I don't think it is a coincidence that when we ported the original SCO version to Linux over 80% of our support issues disappeared overnight on those deployments. This certainly helps my case, and is a non-scientific indicator of what garbage their product actually is, source owner or not,
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
"As does NetWare."
thats the first thought that flew through my mind after reading Darls comment.
Netware does a lot of the common tasks as UNIX ware:
Runs oracle, runs mysql, pgsql, serves web pages, serves file sharing.
Only diferentiation is the OS itself.
They would have to be much more specific on what the terms of the non-compete. INAL , but it seems that if they can push a non-compete for SuSE , they can also get it for Netware as well as possibly some of the other products.
My guess is they can't go after existing business that SCO holds or develop a UNIX operating system themselves... where technically Linux isn't UNIX, it's all going to come into the careful wording of the non-compete.
Actually, they are planning to sue a large Linux user according to the Wall Street Journal (subscription required, I'm afraid, but you could try this printable view). Boies the lawyer claims that they will be suing a representative large copyright violator (Linux user) in the near future. That should teach all those deadbeats not to pay their SCO license fee, eh?
The article also said SCO is giving Boies' law firm $1 million cash and 400,000 shares. I wonder when this turns into a conflict of interest for Boies, if not an SEC pump and dump type of violation.
Amazing.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
What is the purpose of licensing "model" that inflicts more cost onto users than an "equivilant" M$ license. Microsoft is the known competitor to linux. (not that there aren't others, but this is what I get from October memos/Constant M$ bashing across the geek spectrum) as I suppose is BSD in all it's iterations.
Why would SCO present a model that would force a company to either A) move to M$, or B) move to BSD?
For one reason, for most companies who made the decision to move to linux, the overwhelming reason was going to be license cost. (Stability, Security, and Professional development on the part of the IT staff probably played a role as well, but nothing beats saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in OS licensing to a CFO.) Now, nobody in their right mind would pay for what they already recieved for free, and in their minds LEGALLY for free.
So, why is SCO doing this? There is only one reason, they started this whole legal BS to perpetuate a lawsuit for 2 years. Who actually purchased the Linux licenses from SCO? No one with any brains, that's for sure. They have made themselves a target, and gone after a cash cow. Hopefully the cash cow known as IBM won't be dropping them any change, as this is ALL they can be after. They certainly are no longer after DEVELOPING linux, so they sure as hell don't deserve ANY reimbursement in my mind. Besides, what do you get with that 700-1400 dollar license. Support? No. Regular updates? No. This business model is all about the benjamins, and they care nothing about the Linux users.
We don't know enough facts about the non-compete agreement to make a real judgement about the validity of this claim. Here are some factors that we need to consider.
First, Novell continued to sell its NetWare product, so we know right off the bat that the non-compete did not apply to any OS on x86.
Second, control of the definition of UNIX was transferred to the Open Group at around the same time. We do need to take into account that Linux is not UNIX. It is a system based on extremely similar principles and conventions, but does not conform to the UNIX standard.
Third, Linux was just starting to make an impact beyond the dorm room in 1995. BSD was already established. It was probably forseeable that BSD and/or Linux would impact the market for SysV on x86.
Lacking further information, we are left with impression that the agreement was likely ambiguous. Typically, when an ambiguity is discovered in a contract, that ambiguity is interpretted against the side that drafted the ambiguous clause. I would guess that SCO drafted that clause. Novell has no interest in it being there, so that would mean the clause would be interpretted as narrowly as possible.
There are a lot of leaps here. We'll see how this actually works out.
Novell Statement on SCO claims regarding a non-compete clause in Novell-SCO contracts
PROVO, Utah Nov. 18, 2003 Novell has seen the November 18 InfoWorld article in which SCO CEO Darl McBride refers to a supposed non-compete agreement between Novell and SCO. Mr. McBride's characterization of the agreements between Novell and SCO is inaccurate. There is no non-compete provision in those contracts, and the pending acquisition of SUSE LINUX does not violate any agreement between Novell and SCO.
Novell has received no formal communication from SCO on this particular issue. Novell understands its rights under the contracts very well, and will respond in due course should SCO choose to formally pursue this issue.