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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.'"
obligatory groklaw coverage
this line is just filler.
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...
Their strategy is simple, delay, delay, delay until IBM goes bankrupt.
Dvorak on Doomtech
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!
Watching the SCO saga is like watching a completely preventable train wreck in the slowest possible motion - kind of like watching snakegrass grow, or watching paint on the ugliest painting ever painted dry. Mondrian's skidmarks after a night of taxidancing. Picasso's Kleenex. Something like that.
We should start putting up options on when this idiotic extravaganza will come to a final end.
2005?
2006?
2007?
2438?
I no longer feel sorry for any one left treading water at SCO. They've had PLENTY of time to jump ship and flee the scene. When the slowly grinding wheel of justice makes its dirty, uuuh, duty, clean, nnnuuh, clear, these trusswrappers will be persecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and they will all have to walk the plank.
"I was Darl McBride, CEO at SCO for ages. Now I ask customers 'you want fries with that?' "
Hope and Pray.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
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
The letters are fun reading and provide a good example on how to make opposing counsel look stupid. Both sides have accused the other of dragging their feet. So this time -- when SCO asks for a delay -- IBM says okay, as long as you don't want the delay in order to just ask for another delay. SCO refuses, basically admitting that this is exactly what they planned to do.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
..but we need something to gossip about on /.
THE SCENE: A COURTROOM. IT IS FILLED WITH MANY TENSE LAWYERS IN EXPENSIVE SUITS, HALF OF THEM ARE BLUE.
SCO SHILL: Your honor, most wise, humble and double wicked cool dud-
JUDGE: Get on with it.
SCO SHILL: *Ahem* In accordance with the 1887 ruling of the federal government vs. Keanu Reves, we would like you to summarily find for the plaintiff, SCO, and award damages to the tune of-
JUDGE: I'm not familiar with that ruling. Keanu Reves? 1887? If this is another delaying tactic counselor...
SCO SHILL: We request a three month period to shake down more, er, find um, evidence!
JUDGE: Denied. You haven't given a reason that there might be new evidenc introduced.
SCO SHILL: WE REQUEST A RECESS!
JUDGE: Denied. You just got back from one.
SCO SHILL: WE REQUEST AN EMERGENCY BATHROOM BREAK!
KEANU: (from the back of the courtroom) Woah.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
SCO was misquoted... the actual quote was... "Our evidence against Linux doesn't exist... oh shit... did I say that out loud... spin doctor that, wouldya?"
Stay of Execution? Come on, can't we just kill them now!?
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"
The internetnews article says "Originally scheduled for Tuesday, the hearing was pushed back to Oct. 19", but that was just the discovery hearing before the Magistrate Judge.
The important hearing, on IBM's motion for summary judgment on its tenth counterclaim, is still on for tomorrow, which you can verify at the court's website, both Judge Kimball's schedule and the case history (item 268).
If IBM's motion is granted, Judge Kimball will issue a declaratory judgment that IBM's copying of Linux does not infringe any SCO copyright. That would imply that anyone else copying any of the Linux versions IBM uses is not infringing any SCO copyrights, either.
The SCO-IBM disputes over contracts would remain, but the rest of the world needn't concern itself about those.
You can find the briefing papers on the motion here
So SCO accuses IBM of copying SCO's source code into Linux. Then delays claiming that IBM hasn't given the source code over for examination. This is what happened, isn't it? SCO obviously already has their own code. The Linux code is open source and freely available all over the net. So how can SCO credibly make such a claim? Why, through lawyers of course. God! We are so in need of tort reform.
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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