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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.
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
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