Slashdot Mirror
Novell Pulls Out Their Ace Against SCO
mattOzan writes "Groklaw is reporting that Novell has just filed a reply with an exhibit in support of their motion to dismiss SCO's complaint. The exhibit consists of "1995 minutes from the corporate kit of a meeting of the Board of Directors, which clearly and unequivocably say that Novell was to retain the UNIX copyrights in the sale to Santa Cruz that year."
From the Groklaw discussion, the real importance of this document is not necessarily that it proves that Novell has the copyrights (that's actually more difficult to prove), but that it does prove that Novell firmly believed that it has them. This is a direct defense against the specific slander charge against them.
I'd venture they wanted to give SCO "enough rope" first. This is a good thing; SCO are haemoraging cash in fashion that would put the most ridiculous dot.coms to shame. They've alienated virtually everyone - customers and partners, rid themselves of staff and are now largely owned a law firm. A year ago they might have backed out of this hole, but now the reverse gear has gone - they can only move forward and deeper into the mess.
Novell has decided to start shoveling the dirt in on top of them...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
I'm sorry ... insightful?
SCO's case is for slander of title. There is some chance that the judge might decide that SCO does not own the SysV copyrights, but this filing won't be the document that pursuades him so to do.
This document clearly spells out a lack of malice, since it shows that Novell's execs had a reason to believe that Novell still owns the SysV copyrights.
Furthermore, lack of SysV copyrights won't actually unravel SCO's mostly contract case, but it will advance IBM's counter claims.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
If they had coughed it up earlier, then SCO might have still had a chance. But since SCO spent all the earlier time jerking around, they just waited for the right moment. You know, when hunters spot a deer, they don't go blasting away -- the hunter will wait until the right moment. The hunter may know that he can hit the deer through the brush, but waiting until he can get a clear shot in the meadow is better. Novell warned them, and then waited for the moment. I see nothing wrong with it. Now Novell has taken aim, fired and is waiting for the finality of the bullet. My hat goes off to Novell -- not all Utah software companies are idiots.
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
Scary to think it might not be a coincidence that Novell didn't pound SCO until they settled with Microsoft. /me wonders what was in that settlement aside from half a billion dollars and Novell's not supporting the European antitrust issue. Or what wasn't in that settlement that Novell wanted in there.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
1995 minutes from the corporate kit of a meeting of the Board of Directors
But what they meant was:
Minutes from the corporate kit of a 1995 meeting of the Board of Directors
Or even:
Minutes from the corporate kit of a meeting of the Board of Directors held in 1995
There's no reason for the editors to leave such ambiguity in the summary when they could easily have avoided it. I've spoken English as my primarily language my whole life and seeing it as 1,995 minutes opposed to minutes from a meeting in 1995 was how I parsed it first as well. Also reference all the jokes high up in the list about a 33 hour meeting.
If not now, when?
Have you ever worked for a large bureaucracy? The company rarely has everything in the same system for anything - source control, document management, personnel databases, whatever you can imagine, they aren't doing it consistently. Legacy systems, competing systems in different departments, etc. can all cause things to be not where you expect them to be.
They brought this out now for a very good reason (see the "'nough rope" cousin post).
I don't buy that argument. If Novell could have killed this thing long ago, they would have. It's not in their interest to have the trial drag out any longer than it has to. They have legal bills to pay, too.
More than that, you have to first REMEMBER the minutes from 10 years ago contained this awesome point, and then track it down. More likely, they've had some poor 1st year lawyer or paralegal searching through EVERYTHING in the hopes of finding something, and this just turned up.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
You are correct, sir. Novell has brought out these minutes from a meeting of the board in answer to SCO's attempting to use Chatham's declaration as proof of malice.
The minutes do NOT conclusively prove that Novell owns Unix, only that they believed they did, and were acting WITHOUT malice, but in good faith.
Novell does not need to prove that they own Unix at this point. The burden is upon SCO, and so far, SCO is failing miserably.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.