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SCO Files Suit Against Novell Over System V Ownership
nadamsieee writes "Yahoo! Finance is carrying a press release from SCO that details a new lawsuit against Novell for "Slander of Title". It looks like SCO has finally ditched their failing product line in favor of 24/7 litigation and PR work." To recap: Novell and SCO have a lengthy correspondence over the meaning of the contract between the two companies, Novell registers a claim with the U.S. copyright office over the code in dispute, SCO files this suit in response. Update: 01/20 23:04 GMT by M : SCO has placed their complaint (pdf) online.
No. SCO had until 12 Jan to comply with IBM's interrogatories. There is to be a hearing on 23 Jan to determine compliance.
SCO did file stuff, but some of it was "You told us we couldn't ask for anything from IBM, but we won't give IBM what it wants until we get what we want", and more of it was "Oh, gee, our executives don't give a damn about a $3billion lawsuit -- they went away for Xmas, and we couldn't reach them. Too bad."
The hearing on Friday should be very interesting.
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
Round and round they go... being sucked inexorably to the bottom of the funnel, at which point they die.
SCO's updated SEC documents found it necessary to state that they can't afford to pay their lawyers in cash, so they're using stock instead. So it makes a lot of sense to take on a new lawsuit... Oh, except they have to, to defend their other lawsuits.... And they don't seem to be noticing anything *wrong* here. Either they or us are missing something.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Except that this Friday is Judgement Day #1. If IBM isn't happy with SCO's discovery replies (and based on what I've seen -- see Declaration of Ryan Tibbets -- they won't be), SCO will be in very hot water, because it could be seen as a violation of a court order.
Disclaimer: IANAL, nor do I play one on TV.
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
Unlikeley, as SCO is not a Business Software Alliance member
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
Unfortunately they have a nasty habit of getting law enforcement to do their audits when their demand for proof of compliance is turned down. Knew someone who suffered such a raid once, cops treated it like a major drug bust (only found minor piddly stuff like a zipmagic by the way). Business was shut down, and heads rolled. Fact is they should never be able to get law enforcement into what should be a purely civil matter, but they do anyways.
They have my nomination for understatement of the year (& it's only January). Second, anyone? It's a bad sign when you start putting disclaimers in your press releases.
I realize you may be joking but in the interest of being sufficiently pedantic, SCO actually is legally required to put disclaimers like this in. Whenever a company releases information about the managament's expectations for future events they have to identify "forward looking" information with a disclaimer like this. If they do not put this sort of disclaimer in the press release, the could be subject to discipline by the SEC or shareholder lawsuits. (I know, I know, that would be a good thing here...) SCO is just following the law and giving investors a disclosure of risks.
In other words nothing to see here. Move along...
The asset purchase agreement in a much more readable form than the scrambled PDF on SCO's site:at Groklaw
I don't think I've seen attachment E before, but it appears to be a list of documentation, not software. I wonder if SCO thinks that owning the documentation for the ABI gives them ownership of the ABI itself?
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
Bull. Caldera got DOS quite a bit after it was founded. Caldera started as a company bundling the Looking Glass desktop interface on top of Red Hat Linux! DOS wasn't even in the picture then.
:)
Getting history straight on this whole convoluted mess is not the easiest thing in the world. But seeing some of it first hand helps...
Just found this: McBride was singing a slightly different tune back in October..
Trolling is a art,
IBM stole the SCO code and copy-pasted it into Linux, that's what.
Here's what it means, courtesy of yogi61bear's findings:
Slander of Title
To recover in an action for slander of title, a party must allege and prove: (i) the utterings and publishing of disparaging words; (ii) that they were false; (iii) that they were malicious; (iv) that special damages were sustained thereby; (v) that the plaintiff possessed an estate or interest in the property disparaged; and (vi) the loss of a specific sale. Malice is a basis for recovery of actual damages in a slander of title case means merely that the acts must have been deliberate conduct without reasonable cause. A patent may well be the subject of a slander of title action as Prosser and Keeton state that intangible interest such as "trademarks, copyrights [and] patents" may be the subject of the tort.
As compared to other "injurious falsehood" causes of action, slander of title or property differs in that there is no presumption of damages. The plaintiff must show that he or she sustains special damage proximately, naturally and reasonably resulting from the alleged slander. Attorneys' fees are not recoverable in slander of title actions, and neither damages to reputation nor consequential mental damages are recoverable in action for slander of title. The plaintiff must prove the loss of a specific sale, i.e., that a pending sale was defeated by the slander. However, the reasonable expense of litigation necessary to remove the doubt, or cloud, from the property or title thereto has been held to be recoverable. Additionally, punitive damages are also recoverable in an action for slander of title. Thus, as was the case with a defamation cause of action, a plaintiff should allege that defendant's actions were both intentional and with malice.
-- By Paul C. Van Slyke
Belief is the currency of delusion.
These guys at SCO are deceptive idiots!
Reading Amendment E and you will see that only the copyrights to the various manuals of Sys V are transferred to old SCO (not current Caldera/SCO Group).
However to a casual observer it might look like SCO got the copyrights to Sys V itself, which is not the case.
Thus Novell is correct and this new Fog and Mirror attack from SCOG is completely bogus.
--
Andre
SCO has a worldwide network of more than 11,000 resellers
You know I believe that...it's just that none of them sell anything. I just had some consultant buy me lunch and she was telling me about how they are resellers for a whole bunch of companies including SCO. I asked her what the deal was with SCO to see what they are telling their resellers...she said they are not really talking much to anybody about anything, and her company (one of the bigger independent IT outsourcing companies in the midwest) hasn't sold a single SCO product in over a year. She said from her chair, she wouldn't notice if they fell off the face of the earth.
I thought that was kind of funny....and kind of telling.
teeker
Funny thing is, a friend of mine actually does use some of the documents SCO filed to point out common, silly mistakes to his class, which in fact consists mostly of first year law students.
Ah, what would we be doing all day long without Darl the Bride and his litigation clown department..?
Caldera as a company was split shortly before filing suit - it was split into (at least) Caldera and Caldera Systems. Caldera Systems was the Linux part, Caldera was a holding company that existed solely to sue Microsoft. In fact, they filed suit against Microsoft the very day they purchased DR-DOS from Novell...
Apparently Caldera Systems as a compnay didn't profit from the MS settlement at all (only Caldera stockholders did, MS nemesis and Novell co-founder Noorda chief amongst them), but their IPO was on the exact same day Caldera announced the MS settlement, hehe...
The parallels are eerie though...
1. Buy "dead" technology from Novell...
2. Sue
3. Profit!
Yes, it has everything to do with IBM. SCO's claim is that their intellectual property was copied into Linux by IBM in a breach of contract.
Novell's claim is that any intellectual property in question actually belongs to Novell, not SCO. If the IP belongs to Novell, then SCO has no basis whatsoever for their lawsuit. Summary judgement time.
The worst that can happen to SCO for violating a court order is pretty damaging. Their case against IBM can be "dismissed with prejudice". The counter-suit IBM has against SCO will continue, and SCO will be severely hampered in litigating against anyone else based on the same grounds as the IBM case.
Watch IBM put forth a motion to dismiss.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
As I understand Novell's side of the story: they sold Caldera A) the right to use the whole source tree of UnixWare, and B) copyright ownership of some vaguely-defined subset which was "required for SCO to exercise its rights to the acquisition of UNIX and UnixWare technologies". The case will probably be decided based on the court's interpretation of that clause.
SCO sues Novell, but won't disclose its copyrights in Linux, even though it has to defy a court order.
In its press releases and letters to its customers, SCO claims that violations of its copyrights are in the Linux kernel. On December 5,SCO's lawyer, Keven McBride, said in court that SCO would be filing copyright claims against IBM. He also objected to the requirement to specify copyrights, but, after the judge insisted, said that SCO would comply. SCO was compelled by court order to answer ALL IBM questions with specificity by January 12. One of those questions was:
INTERROGATORY NO. 12: Please identify, with specificity (by file and line of code), (a) all source code and other material in Linux (including but not limited to the Linux kernel, any Linux operating system and any Linux distribution) to which plaintiff has rights; and (b) the nature of plaintiff's rights, including but not limited to whether and how the code or other material derives from UNIX.
On 1/12/04, SCO responded with an affidavit, a 60 page supplemental response, and some documents. Like everyone else, except IBM, I am still waiting to see the 60 page supplemental response, but I have additional information from public statements by SCO.
On 1/13/04, in the interview "SCO shows IBM the code", SCO spokesman Bruce Stowell said: "Monday's response included no examples of copyright violations. We've not introduced copyright infringement as part of our case with IBM. We've tried to make it clear that it's a contract issue."
SCO could have made arguments like this before it was ordered to respond to IBM's questions without further discussion. Now it's too late.
The order said to identify all rights that SCO claimed. It was not limited to rights that SCO was currently claiming as part of its suit against IBM, and, in my opinion, even includes the code contributed by SCO to Linux.
If, as Stowell said, SCO did not specify any copyrights that it owns in Linux, then either it is not claiming to own any such copyrights, or it has not complied with the court order.
If SCO now officially declines to claim ownership of any such copyrights, then it is hard to see how they could claim them in any later suit against a Linux user or distributor.
If SCO does claim ownership of any copyrights in Linux, it has blatantly defied the court order, and the judge can order sanctions. My guess is that part of the sanctions would be to bar SCO from suing anyone on any claims that it failed to specify in its 1/12 response to the compel order. The judge might also order SCO to show cause why it should not be held in contempt, and why it should not suffer sanctions for failing to comply with the order.
I wonder if SCO will now claim that it does not own any code in Linux, but it owns the copyrights that Novell claims. It would be typical of the way SCO has been making and revising claims.
The difference between a used car salesman and a computer salesman is ..... the car dealer knows he's lying to you.
Seriously, it looks like Darl and the SCO Group really do believe what they're saying. A ponderance of the evidence, er <groklaw> groklaw <groklaw> hasn't phased them. A judgement against them in court still might not break the denial, nor would likely an expression of the meritless nature of their case by the judge (as in USL vs Berkley over BSD), and the subsequent collapse of their stock price.
The point is they're in denial, even since the bluff didn't work when IBM gave them the finger. Every wrong turn, every setback, every shred of evidence they've had ripped to pieces in public... only has served to strengthen their resolve and deepen the denial.
What you need is hopeless denial/delusion glasses. Simple lie/love detector glasses will be much too simple for SCO.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
I'm not so certain----
They need to LOOK like they believe what they are saying, otherwise the pump and dump wouldn't work.
Regardless of whether or not they are sincere, they need to look like they believe every word of their BS---
Otherwise, the scam would all be for naught....
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
As I understand it, Novell had two key bits of Unix, the old SysV codebase and the newer Unixware. SysV wasn't under active development and had mostly been used as a base platform on which companies built their own customized Unix versions. Most of the big Unix vendors had to pay SysV licensing fees to continue selling their Unix variants. (Many other companies had in-house versions of Unix and also had to pay licensing fees. Companies were allowed to buy out their licenses for a lump sum, and I think that most of the big vendors have already done so.) Unixware was an actively developed system that was sold by Novell to end-users as a fully fledged operating system.
SCO (and it's important to note that this was "Old SCO", which is now Tarantella, not the company now calling itself SCO, which was then called Caldera) bought different rights to the two codebases. Unixware was the main point of the sale, and SCO got the essential rights to Unixware. As I understand it, that included the right to all the earnings from sales of Unixware and the right to develop the codebase further. SysV was seen as being something of a dead end, even though companies still had to pay licensing fees for it, so SCO bought much more limited rights to it. SCO collected the licensing revenue, but it then paid all that money straight back to Novell. Novell then turned around and gave 5% of the SysV money back to SCO as an agent's fee.
It seems pretty ludicrous to think that SCO bought full rights to SysV. There would be no reason for them to agree to a 5/95 split with Novell if they were actually buying the SysV codebase lock, stock, and barrel. NewSCO clearly has an uphill battle to convince anyone that the agreement with Novell constitutes a sale of the full rights.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
or else
I really think Linus should file a similar suit. He has been slandered and the proof is in the public domain. If SCO fails to deliver the goods on the 23rd - case closed. If nothing else he could donate the judgement to some worthy cause like groklaw, OSDL or FSF.
Caldera as a company was founded with the sole purpose of suing Microsoft over DR-DOS.
Unless you have insider evidence that proves otherwise, that's simply not true. Caldera was founded in 1994 by the programmers who were working on Novell's original Linux product in the early '90s, which Ray Noorda wanted to bundle with DR-DOS and make a "Windows 95 killer" before Windows 95 got to market. Infoworld did a fair amount of reporting on this back in the day, referring to it as "the Corsair Project." Caldera's original web site talked about this project originally, and had internal logos that they were using for the project, although they were referring to it as "Expose." When Noorda was forced out and the project was canned, the programmers took what they could and built a Linux distribution from it.
Caldera acquired DR-DOS in 1996 from Novell, and Novell had already laid out the groundwork for the litigation, which they had chosen not to pursue. Caldera did pursue it, and frankly, they were right to. At the time, I can assure you the general feeling on Slashdot was, "Yeah! You go!" Seven or eight years ago, these were the good guys. Caldera certainly wasn't sitting around and waiting for a big payoff, though--they were actively developing both Caldera Network Desktop and embedded systems based on Linux and DR-DOS.
Last but not least, what you really must remember is that the current SCO Group has no executives, no products--and quite possibly no employees at all--in common with Caldera Systems. For all practical purposes, they're a completely different company.
in my life God comes first.... but Linux is pretty high after that
Francis Smit