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SCO Files for Stay of Execution
An anonymous reader writes "SCO has filed for another delay in the case against IBM. The article reports that 'According to filings in the case, SCO is looking to buy time until the court can hear its arguments compelling IBM to release more information. SCO lawyers argue the information -- namely source code they claim was lifted from AIX and Dynix to bolster the open source Linux kernel -- is necessary in getting a successful ruling.'"
And again, it's another journalist who repeat like a parrot SCO' press release without digging a little bit... annoying.
"Tell us what we want to know, but we need more time to find what we've been claiming for months."
Truth is stranger than fiction.
--Coming up with something clever... please wait...
So they're asking IBM to open the source that was stolen to SCO so they can investigate it?
I thought the thing they were investigating in the first place was source that was already opened that SCO found.
Am I missing something?
SCO is just digging, I wish they would either strike, or leave us the hell alone. Slander is what it's boiling down to. They need to get more sales and money and all they can do is talk shit about linux until someone figures out they have no case..... but the lose of sales from their bullshit will hurt other companies and they deserve to be sued back.... Anyone care to join in with Big Blue?
Sometimes the majority just means all the morons are on the same side.
The real reason for the delay is that the lawyers have their next scheduled stock sale next week!
By necessity, Judges are very patient creatures. Don't be surprised if the judge waits until SCO is done hanging themselves before he slams the case shut. If he doesn't give them enough rope, they could start all over in an appeals court.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I know you stole my ring. If you let me in your house, to look around, I am sure I will find my ring. Stop hiding my ring, I know you have it.
It is my precious......
This is insane. SCO wants to go on a fishing trip, looking for something they claim IBM stole, yet have no proof of. If they don't have proof, what are they doing suing IBM other than to be annoying. Are we (collective) just supposed to believe that they (SCO) are telling us the truth, BLINDLY?
What a crock. The judge should simply dismiss the case at this point, with prejudice. I can think of at least 15 different reasons to do so. Namely every time SCO gets themselves in a pickle (technical term), they change the subject. At this point, they are suing for infringement that they don't have ANY knowledge of.
Incredible. Insane. ENOUGH already.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
IBM's motion depended on the claim that "AT&T didn't mean what SCO says they meant in their derivative works clause". In support of that, IBM presented two witnesses from AT&T who said that AT&T had intended for the clause to be narrowly interpreted. Unfortunately for IBM, SCO had access to the original BSD depositions, where these same two officials testified to exactly the opposite "fact".
Oops. There goes that argument -- and, very probably, any chance for a summary judgement. The net effect of the contradictory depositions will be to establish beyond doubt or cavil that there is a clear uncertainty about the meaning of the contract, which allows SCO to say "If the clause is relevant to the case, then we must determine what the clause meant. People who signed the document don't even know what it meant, and thought one thing once, and another thing later. Summary judgement is not possible."
This shows again how royally screwed up our legal system is. We need tort reform because in the end we'll all wind up paying for this stupidity by the courts. SCO has gone after multiple parties in multiple districts, wasting countless hours in our courts and a ton of money on the accused. This ultimately costs us all.
Whether it's medical malpractice cases, bogus lawsuits or SCO, this will all cost us more in everything we buy. It does now, and it will only get worse unless we put a stop to this legal self feeding excercise.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
I am reminded of a quote from Londo Mollari of Babylon 5:
"Only a fool fights a war on two fronts. Only the heir to the kingdom of fools fights a war on twelve fronts!"
My rights don't need management.
SCO's position is that according to the original AT&T contract, any derived code becomes part of the SysV and thus is owned by SCO not IBM. Because IBM used "methods and concepts" of Unix when developing AIX, there is no such thing as "homegrown" code for IBM. They base this on THEIR intrepretation of copyright law. This is according to their SCO's Memo in Support of its Expedited Motion to Enforce the Scheduling Order
IBM has already answered this argument. If a contract is being questioned, the court can ask the original parties what they meant. If there is a dispute, the court has to decide between both sides. They have affidavits from everyone involved with the original contract negotiations at AT&T (some of them still work for AT&T). There is now questions from IBM, Sequent, and AT&T all that AT&T does not claim ownership of derivative or "homegrown" code and disagrees with SCO's interpretation.
SCO responds by challenging only two of IBM's many witnesses (Wilson and Frasure). Back in the USL vs BSD case, two of IBM's witnesses argued the opposite. They said the AT&T should own all derivative code. Two things that SCO forgot to mention to the court. The USL vs BSD is sealed and testimony from the case is highly inadmissable AND the court was in favor of ruling against USL on their notion of copyright law and derivatives. Since then the witnesses may have changed their opinions.
IBM also argues SCO's notion is ridiculous. It would mean SCO owns any code written by MS, Sun, Compaq, HP, Irix, IBM, etc simply because they at one time put that code anywhere near SysV code.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
We know this, but more importantly, they know this too. This has always been the expected outcome.
I don't think this is true.
In my opinion, here's how it went down:
In the beginning, it was just a ploy to get bought out by IBM. When IBM didn't bite, SCO tried to turn up the heat by saying some outrageous things and by threatening to cancel IBM's UNIX license. When IBM still didn't bite, SCO decided to turn up the heat some more by filing a lawsuit. IBM is a very risk-averse and PR-sensitive company and it was somewhat reasonable for SCO to assume that IBM would try hard to stay out of court. IBM, however, learned long ago that if you cave to every threat, the leeches will suck you dry, so IBM hunkered down and prepared for battle.
Now, if SCO's management were really smart, they would have realized somewhere along the line that it wasn't going to work and backed off. But some other things happened during this series of SCO-initiated escalations. First, SCO's stock price took a massive jump. In fact, Darl and company quickly realized that the more outrageous the claims they made the bigger the spike they could provoke. Now they knew, and had planned on, the stock price going up and had already set up their timed, periodic sell orders, but I think they got a much bigger boost than they had ever dreamed, and I think it made them a little (more) nuts and (more) stupid.
Another thing that happened was the cash from Sun and Microsoft, which made SCO realize that perhaps there was another way to squeeze money out of this furor they were stirring up. The Baystar and RBC investments cemented it. They also found that threatening to charge for Linux licenses gave their stock price a nice bump and they wondered if, just maybe, people would really pay. They knew that given the herd mentality of big business, if they could scare a few into paying, lots would. And LOTS of big companies use Linux. They almost made a severe mistake here, BTW, when they began talking about sending out invoices. Whether it was the response from the community or their own attorneys that did it, they managed to figure out that sending invoices might constitute mail fraud, and that's a Bad Thing.
I think that was the point of no return. In order to create the frightened stampede of Linux licensees that they hoped for, they had to threaten so hard and so loud that they essentially made backing off impossible.
But that's not all. I think that fairly early on, they did some cursory examination of Unix System V and Linux and found some snippets of duplicate code. "Aha!", they said, "This smoke that we've been blowing actually has some fire underneath!" Of course, some of the code was BSD, some was Unix System III, and the rest was trivial errors made by SGI, quickly corrected. But I don't think they realized any of that until the community pointed it out to them. Even after that, I think they really believed that there *had* to be infringement in there. These guys are not programmers and they didn't understand that it is, in fact, much easier to replicate existing functionality than to build something new, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that Linus et al were able to bring Linux from nothing to a powerful kernel in a little over a decade. They also didn't understand just how much of a leg up the GNU tools gave the Linux developers.
On top of the suspicion that there actually was copied code, if they could just find it, I think they they had read too much of the secret USL vs BSDi documents and understood too little of them. In that court case, AT&T was arguing the same sorts of expansive theories that SCO has been arguing, claiming that anyone who brushed up against Unix was mentally "contaminated" for life. What they missed were two fundamental points: First, that USL was arguing trade secret, copyright, trademark and copyright all together, unlike SCO, who has tried to argue everything, but has gotten whittled down to purely contractual arguments and second
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