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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."
But it sure cost SCO a whole hell of a lot of money. Maybe Novell was just trying to bleed as much money out of SCO because once SCO is out of money, they won't be nearly as much of a threat.
I bet that SCO will pull another "Joker" from their arsenal and will raise the bet. (there are plenty of them working for SCO).
not if you got a war of attrition. with sco, they just will keep launching attacks, and draining their captial. makes it real hard to fight a war with out ammo
INAL, but these are just the minutes to a meeting. They are just evidence to help interpret the real contract, but it is not in itself a legally binding document.
Qxe4
It is fairly simple for Novell to beat the slander of title charge. All they have to prove is lack of malace. In other words, as long as they thought they were still the copyright owners, they had a right to assert that claim. That was a slam dunk anyway even without this evidence.
Winning this one won't help the linux community that much though. What we really need is a judgement that linux contravenes no copyrights. That is IBM's counterclaim 10. When that one goes down, then I start cheering.
George Carlin had a bit in one of his stand ups. It had to do with the fact that all businessmen are out to fuck you over. How do you know? Just put them across the table from each other in a negotiation and both of them are convinced that the other is out to fuck them over.
It's true. In any business negotiation you must presume that the other guy is just as big a dick as you are and is trying to fuck you over just like you are trying to fuck them over.
evil is as evil does
Is it possible that once this slander of title suit is tossed, Novell could actually take steps toward trying to have themselves declared owners of UNIX?
And whether they do that or not, will they at least have the right to say to the public/media, once the slander of title suit is tossed, "we believe we own UNIX"? Since it appears the copyright is, at the least, in dispute?
Is there any way to potentially later challenge the side letter with a "valid Novell signature", the one SCO has a copy of, by which SCO claims ownership of UNIX? Is there any way in corporate contract law to claim something like this side letter was accidental, or unauthorized, in a case such as this when apparently nobody at Novell was aware that someone had signed away the UNIX copyright? Does the fact Novell has not yet done so mean that they don't have a way of doing so, or does it mean they're waiting until an appropriate moment (say, when it comes up in someone's court case)?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
SCO's charges against Novell aren't breach-of-contract or infringement, it's "slander of title". IA so NAL, but it boils down to (a) you're falsely claiming ownership of something and (b) you're spreading deliberate falsehood that the other party that REALLY owns it doesn't.
Well the judge has said ON THE RECORD that the purchase agreement between Novell and Santa Cruz Operation (which Caldera bought then renamed themselves The SCO Group) doesn't appear to be a valid transfer of copyright, so that shoots down the first part, because the copyright ownership is now questionable.
Now these minutes show that Novell believes they would be retaining the copyrights after the deal. If you think you still own the copyrights, claiming so can't be malicious, so there goes the other argument.
Case closed.
The side-effect is that it throws SCO's claims to the copyrights into limbo, which should give the other folks they've dragged into court ammunition to claim SCO doesn't have the right to sue them.
And SCO starting a new suit vs. Novell to force the transfer at this point would just confirm that and scuttle the rest of their cases.
Exactly that statement is in fact in the contract signed by both sides. The contract explicitly excludes 'all copyrights'.
SCO, bizarrely, is trying to dismiss this crystal-clear statement as some sort of 'scrivener's error', and has offered the statment of a former Novell employee (who wasn't even there when the contract was signed) to the effect that, no matter what the contract says, Novell really meant to transfer all the copyrights. The Novell Board document kills this (already absurdly weak) theory.
Seriously, I'd be interested to discover who your friends are, as I am getting a conflicting message from Novell. In fact, just this week I was having a conversation with a Novell Engineer that was excited beyond reason that he had a change to an OSS project that was accepted. Suddenly, from a company of engineers that had problems even thinking about using a different tool, I hear of mass conversions to Bugzilla, Apache and SuSE.
From what I can tell, the concept of Open Source or Free Software isn't what fascinates these fellows, but an actual desire to be part of the community. It's a foreign idea to them, but now that they've been exposed, it's a good feeling. I, for one, welcome our long-lost proprietary brethren. If they figure out a way to make money while doing it, good for them.
And if they need a little help understanding the GPL along the way, I'm sure we'd all be happy to oblige them ;-)
H0ek
Think you're smart? Prove you've got brains!
IBM has answered SCO's complaint and lodged several counterclaims against SCO. So, even if *all* SCO's claims against IBM are disposed of before any trial, the lawsuit won't end there. IBM will be entitled to have its counterclaims against SCO adjudicated. And before IBM is done, SCO will be in receivership and quite possibly some people will be facing jail.
I think that the "Enough Rope" approach does indeed make more sense. For a very long time, every time IBM smacked them down, SCO would file yet another "amended complaint" to change their story and change the thing they were suing about. The changing claims give any defense a moving target, an expensive target, to fight. Best to wait for them to settle down a bit before bringing out the big guns.
Novell did exactly the right thing by waiting for SCO to get all of its eggs in one basket before stomping on the basket. This is classic battlefield tactics, beautifully executed: Lure the enemy into committing completely to an action that will doom them. SCO's going to be hurt badly by Novell's filing. They've spent the last year trying to reframe this as only a copyright dispute. Now we have smoking-gun-class evidence that their biggest and best claim is void.
This is not my sandwich.