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Did SCO Actually Buy What it Thought?
Int27h quotes The Age saying "Just before Christmas last year, Novell announced publicly that SCO had known for some time that it did not receive all rights and ownership to UNIX technologies, despite public statements to the contrary. Novell has made public correspondence between lawyers representing both Novell and SCO." Lots of links and commentary on what continues to be one of the strangest stories in the history of Linux.
Easier to read than to click on...
... required for [Santa Cruz Operation] to exercise its rights with respect to the acquisition of UNIX and UnixWare technologies.
Did SCO actually buy what it thought it bought?
By David Heath
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January 8, 2004
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Just before Christmas last year, Novell announced publicly that SCO had known for some time that it did not receive all rights and ownership to UNIX technologies, despite public statements to the contrary. Novell has made public correspondence between lawyers representing both Novell and SCO. Read these in their entirety - they are quite enlightening.
These letters finally start getting to the heart of the mysterious "Amendment No. 2" which SCO referred to publicly in a press release dated June 6, claiming it transferred "everything" to them and which Novell claimed never existed - Novell's legal team is adamant that no copy ever existed in their files. Bruce Lowry, director of public relations at Novell told me today, "We've acknowledged publicly that Amendment 2 is valid, although we have not said we agree with SCO's interpretation of Amendment 2. As we said on December 22, we believe we've retained the ownership of UNIX copyrights and have registered those with the US Copyright Office."
In two letters sent to Darl McBride, president and CEO of SCO, dated June 26 and August 4, 2003, Joseph A. LaSala, Novell's general counsel specifically refutes recent claims by SCO regarding transfer and ownership of "all rights to the UNIX and UnixWare technology" as announced in the June 6 press release.
On June 26, LaSala wrote: "SCO's statements are simply wrong. We acknowledge, as noted in our June 6 public statement, that Amendment No. 2 to the Asset Purchase Agreement appears to support a claim that Santa Cruz Operation had the right to acquire some copyrights from Novell. Upon closer scrutiny, however, Amendment No. 2 raises as many questions about copyright transfers as it answers. Indeed, what is most certainly not the case is that "any question of whether UNIX copyrights were transferred to SCO as part of the Asset Purchase Agreement was clarified in Amendment No. 2 (as SCO stated in its June 6 press release). And there is no indication whatsoever that SCO owns all the patents associated with UNIX or UnixWare."
Clearly, this is saying that although SCO received the software, it did not get the full suite of patents and copyrights pertaining to UNIX. A second letter, on August 4, also written by LaSala, seeks to clarify the interpretation of Amendment No. 2.
"We dispute SCO's claim to ownership of these copyrights. The asset Purchase Agreement, in Schedule 1.1(b), contains a general exclusion of copyrights from the assets transferred to Santa Cruz Operation. Amendment No. 2 provides an exception to that exclusion, but only for 'copyrights
"In other words, under the Asset Purchase Agreement and Amendment No. 2, copyrights were not transferred to Santa Cruz Operation unless SCO could demonstrate that such a right was 'required for [Santa Cruz Operation]' to exercise the rights granted to it in the APA. Santa Cruz Operation has never made such a demonstration, and we certainly see no reason why Santa Cruz Operation would have needed ownership of copyrights in UNIX System V in order to exercise the limited rights granted SCO under the APA. Nor is there any reason to think that a transfer of the copyrights required for SCO to exercise its APA rights necessarily entails transfer of the entire set of rights associated with a particular copyrighted computer program."
Now, LaSala is telling SCO that not only are there very few reasons for gaining some of the copyrights in UNIX, they have never even used those reasons to ask for them! Novell is being very specific here - it is quoting clauses and giving reasonable interpretations. On September 10, Ryan Tibbitts, SCO's general counsel replied, essentially disagreeing with LaSal
This guy is way out there
Did SCO Actually Buy What it CLAIMS? It is easy to employ a broad and self-serving interpetation of a contract to justify questionable actions.
Has it not occurred to people that this whole lawsuit is nothing more than a trick to allow SCO shareholders to make huge bucks dumping their stock before the whole company implodes?
How is this whole debacle any different than the plethora of over-hyped "dot-coms" that exploded with large claims, made a few people rich, and screwed over everyone else?
This whole deal is one huge PR-fueled stock scam. I feel sorry for anyone who is actually buying SCO stock that the executives and legal team are dumping... but what's worse is it very well may be US, with corrupt fund managers fueling this overblown stock. People should pay attention to what's keeping this stock higher than it should be, and if unbeknownst to us, some of the holdings in our IRAs are loaded with this crap.
Have we forgotten the quiet Open Group's stance in this copyright-driven debacle? They have steadfastly maintained that SCO does *not* own UNIX. There are many flavors of UNIX, and the contract between dispute between Novell and SCO/Caldera cannot possibly involve possible UNIX variations.