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."

Comments

Re:Linux written to compete with SCO?

[molarmass192]

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.

SCO

[rf0]

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

Going after HP's customers...

[dipipanone]

There was an interesting remark on the Linux Weekly News site about SCO's suggesting that they plan on going after HP's customers because they are covered by HP's indemnification policy.

"They also made numerous claims that copyright-based lawsuits will be initiated against Linux users in "the next 90 days. There were hints that HP customers could be targeted, as a result of that company's indemnification promise - as had been predicted previously."

It looks like IBM were extremely smart not to offer indemnification, despite the calls from the peanut gallery for them to do so, but I wonder how the people at HP feel, getting a good solid assfucking like this after they sponsored the recent SCO roadshow?

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.

What I Want to Know

[4of12]

...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?

Boycott SCO customers!

[i_r_sensitive]

This crap has continued long enough. It's high time that we the people start punishing the people who use SCO software. Perhaps a nice on-line petition to send to SCO customers indicating that the undersigned will boycott their businesses until such a time as SCO desists in their nuisance behaviour, or that the business in question terminates all their relationships with SCO.

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,

Legal basis of non-compete

[RevMike]

"When (The Santa Cruz Operation) sold us the property, included in the property was a non-compete," McBride told IDG News Service. "Last time I checked, Linux was intended to compete with our core products."

I think Darl is going to have to prove that if he wants to enforce that no-compete clause in the contract.

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.