Slashdot Mirror
Novell Sued Microsoft Through Caldera?
cheesedog writes "The intrigue increases: According to this article in the Salt Lake Tribune, the secret terms of the sale of DR-DOS to Caldera included the provision that Caldera would have to sue Microsoft (for Novell by proxy) over the OS and that they would have to do so without revealing Novell's hand in it. Did Novell indirectly create a monster? Caldera's 300 million winnings against Microsoft are now being used to fund lawsuits against Linux (and Novell)."
And the baby is Caldera's! And Steve Ballmer and Steve Jobs are stuck in the well while their evil twins go about their daily lives!
Find out the exciting conclusion on the next episode of As the Slash Dots!
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
The US funds Saddam Hussein against war with Iran. Saddam and the US later go to war. (Twice.)
The US funds the Afghans against the Russian army. The Afghans later turn all kooky and "kinda" go to war with the US.
I think that this corporate thing just reaches to the roots of the problems in American society -- one person "helping" another by fuelling their hatred against a third party, only to have it backfire on them.
dying!
Novell sues Caldera for revealing Novell's hand in it.
I would laugh my ass off if this wasn't so sad. Can you believe that justice, through litigation, has become just another corporate weapon? Oh wait, we knew that already.
Nevertheless, the irony would be enough to kill a medium-sized vulcan town.
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
it has to be said, innocent until proven guilty
It's nice that you want to keep an open mind, but paragraphs 3, 4, and 5 of Judge Jackson's findings, Novell did indeed arrange secretly for Caldera to sue Microsoft, essentially on Novell's behalf. I think that qualifies as "proven guilty."
Linux Weekly News had an article about this several days ago, and it's been talked about on Groklaw. Basically Caldera claims that there was an unwritten, oral contract between Novell and Canopy that said they would sue MS on behalf of Novell, and not reveal Novell's hand in it.
Of course Novell responds in the negative. Canopy is using a rather interesting attack here though. Many of the people working with Canopy now worked for Novell back when this suppossed oral contract took place. They claim no one at Novell knows about it because all those people who once worked for Novell have moved on. This of course puts them in the spot of saying "We know everything because we were there and you people running Novell now have no idea what you're talking about. Our guys worked for Novell back then, and they know what was said."
Novell's defense is simple. Show me a written contract.
Slackware, what else when it must be secure, stable, and easy?
Your enemy's enemy is potentially someone who will sneak up behind you when you least expect it and stab you in the back.
Seems quite a few people need to learn that lesson.
Dan.
Novell is a extremely ironic situation.
They had the rights to AT&T Unix stuff.
BSD Unix was a free OS that was used to create stuff like TCP/IP and other things that directly related to the early commercial success of Unix.
As a show of gratitude companies led by Novell helped sue to stop the free distribution of the BSD operating system. They claimed they just wanted to protect their IP.
Eventually when it turned out that the court case would end up being painfull they settled out of court.
It finally made it so that BSD had to remove every bit of code that was related to Unix. This turned into a near fatal blow to BSD, one that they never recovered from.
Now Novell owns a Linux Distro. A Unix compatable operating system dedicated to being free.
The owners of the Unix IP are suing them to stop the distribution of Linux and pay royalties to a company that they helped create.
A company (Caldera, original SCO change it's name and sold its company off to Caldera) whose early success came directly from using Linux!
Live buy the sword, die by the sword.
Hopefully this will be a lesson to the industry don't bite the hand that feeds you (free software).
We will soon discover that it was truly Microsoft funding Novell in a behind-closed-doors manner to create the deal with Canopy in order to hype up the media attention around unix/linux/bsd all in order to drive SCO/Canopy/Caldera into the ground. Novell's merger with Suse then becomes an easy way for Microsoft and Novell to take a larger chunk of the open source OS market away from the big players (read: Novell then scrapping Suse or giving it away to MS to play with in their sandbox) and become their own litle megalopoly.
Just spewing out semi-humorous consipracy theories, as all the twists and turns in these shenanigans are quite amusing.
Novell was to be awarded around 17% of the Microsoft settlement money, but of course, as the money lovers they are, Canopy wanted more and sued Novell over their share of the pie.
Also, while Caldera initiated the suit against Microsoft, Caldera later split in two and the DRDOS operations went to the embedded division, called Caldera Thin Clients, then later Lineo. Lineo never got much of the settlement money, Canopy and Caldera Inc (the original company, who had nothing to do with DOS anymore for years when the suit ended) got most of it. And their lawyers.
Oh, and also, you might be interested to know that Ray Noorda, the man behind the suit against Microsoft, was the former CEO of Novell, and everybody close to the suit knew Caldera was Novell's tool.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
At the time, it was clear that the sale of DR-DOS to Caldera/Canopy was to allow the lawsuit to commence without tying Novell to it too closely. The details of the arrangement are interesting nevertheless. It wasn't a case of the Novell board refusing to go along with a vendetta by Ray Noorda against Microsoft. Instead,the arrangement was specifically designed to allow Novell to realize some of the monetary value the (iron-clad, caught-you-in-the-act) antitrust claims contained.
The connection to the SCO/IBM suit is also obvious, if you ignore any good guy/bad guy spin. It's the same business model playing out in the new case, but hopefully with different results.
"Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there" - Will Rogers
They are both owned by the Canopy Group
No, the Canopy Group and Novell were both founded by Ray Noorda, the Canopy Group being the company he started after being booted out of Novell.
Wu-Tang Name: Half-Cut Skeleton Get your own Wu-Na
You're safe for now because I believe most people can't figure out what it is that you're saying.
... creating further automations of complexity...
>Programming is the act of automating complexity
You've been fairly successful in encoding the ultimate compexity in your posting, therefore you're King of Complexity and Hero of Open Source!
Check your code for looping bugs, though!
Novell was at the time headed by Ray Noorda, who was instrumental in the Canopy Group which was funding Caldera. It just that in addition to providing the litigation funding, it seems that they have also provided the litigation-friendly-managers which SCO and Canopy now are using to launch their campaign.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Novel sought to hide it's involvement from Microsoft, fearing retaliation. It would be easy enough for Microsoft to have done that, as the DRDOS case itself proved. At the time, Microsoft making your code look bad was deadly. Novel sought to protect itself from Microsoft and recover a little of the damage already done.
Microsoft sought to hide it's involvement with SCO from the public and watching anti-trust regulators. Microsoft learned that their public smear campaign against free software had backfired and sought proxies to say the same things. Microsoft seeks to further injure it's competitors but does not dare level such factually unsubstantiated charges themselves. The rapidly disintegrating SCO case is proving that there was never any merit to the accusations and the whole thing was designed simply to slander a competitor they can't break by any other means.
Both cases show what happens to people who deal with Microsoft.
Actually, no. A portion (and I suspect a very significant portion) of Caldera's $300 million winnings against Microsoft went to Novell. That is the entire point of Novell's current lawsuit against Caldera. From the linked Salt Lake Tribune article, "Novell wins breach-of-contract dispute with Canopy Group":
As stated in paragraph 5 of the opinion of the Utah Court of Appeals in Novell, Inc. v. The Canopy Group, Inc. (see also here):
Novell may have created a monster, but not a $300 million monster. Indeed, Novell received some undisclosed portion of Caldera's recovery against Microsoft, which Novell can now use to battle... Caldera.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
Oral contracts are worth the paper they're written on.
Sure, an agreement with someone you've known for years is one thing, if the stakes are relatively low. But, otherwise, get it in writing.
It's hard to believe that people in charge of a corporation would be that stupid, but there it is.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
Of course Novell did it. The way I read the article, Novell is suing because they didn't get a big enough of the cut.
How could they sue without admitting to being the masterminds behind the deal?
Wake up.
Thompson and Ritchie wrote Unix to play a game on. To make it portable they wrote C and a compiler. This was done at Bell Labs on their dime. They let Berkley, and some others, have copies to evaluate and improve, thus causing BSD, and other variants. AT&T allows this and causes the forking of Unix. Then through mirad stupidity and laywer speak we end up with todays chinese fire drill. All because AT&T did not think to guard their original IP by copyrighting it. Then allowed several groups to modify it without central control.
At least all Linux kernal mods have to be approved by Linus. It's more control than AT&T ever exerted when it mattered.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
This is not the same Judge Jackson, not the same court, not the same state, and not the same finding. It is, however, the same nation, so by all means let us distrust judge Norman Jackson because judge Thomas Penfield Jackson talked to the press too much.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
Is it the end though? I doubt...
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
The decision of the Utah Court of Appeals, which was also reported on Groklaw, says that there was a secret agreement that Canopy would sue Microsoft. Novell and Canopy were simply fighting over which of them should pay the cost of Canopy's suit against Microsoft.
You're wrong in almost every detail.
Thompson, Ritchie, Plauger, Kernighan, Pike, and so on used the PDP-7 and later PDP-11 for a number of purposes. UNIX started as a platform to experiment with file systems, the game (space war) was not related. AT&T Copyrighted and Trademarked UNIX, but as a regulated monopoly were legally constrained from selling UNIX commercially.
At no time were they in a position where they lost control because they were "stupid" or "didn't copyright it".
The only thing interesting here is that even when Novell kicked out Norda, he was willing to work with them in going after Microsoft. And even that's not too interesting considering Norda, at the time he was CEO of Novell, was pointing the gun at Microsoft with a Novell based Linux desktop project.
So, is this really THAT interesting and new? Not if you've been in/around the industry for about 10 years. IMO.
There's nothing here. Move along, move along.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Hardly secret, as the Utah courts have already noted. Novell sued them and WON for their share of the proceeds. SCO tried the usual tricks of getting greedy and trying to rewrite the contract unilaterally, trying to bring in oral agreements, then as usual, got shafted by their own evidence.
Groklaw has already covered it.
best quote: The district court perspicuously noted that the Canopy position "requires the court to reach the anomalous conclusion that by taking the attorney fee provision out of the agreement it really was writing the provision into the agreement."