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SCO Versus Novell Going All the Way
Robert writes "Computer Business Review reports that ownership of the Unix System V code copyrights is set to be decided in court after a US District Judge rejected Novell Inc's second request that SCO
Group Inc's slander of title case be dismissed." From the article: "Novell's second motion to dismiss SCO's slander of title claim was prompted by an apparently positive response from Judge Dale Kimball to its first request to throw out the case, although he rejected it having concluded that the arguments about the agreements at the heart of the case would be more properly heard on potential later motions for summary judgment or trial."
Like it said in the article, this means that rather than throw out the case based on the definition of malice, they will settle once and for all who owns the Unix copywrite and rights to licence its source code. I think this is a good thing, like when AT&T and Berkeley finally sorted out that BSD was entirely free of any of the AT&T code and could go on with life free of dumb lawsuits like this.
Judge Kimball followed up that Monday SCO v. Novell ruling with a SCO v. IBM ruling today. Here are text and pdf versions.
He granted SCO a four-hour deposition of Sam Palmisano, IBM's CEO and former VP of all things Linux. He denied SCO's motion to belatedly amend its complaint to include a claim for Project Monterey-related copyright infringement.
The order includes a new schedule. The old one had been tossed out in January.
The new schedule roughly matches IBM's proposal (as amended at the hearing; see pages 90-91 of the transcript where IBM says to add two months to everything in the proposal), but with another two months added for most pre-trial dates, pushing the end of discovery to July 10, 2006. He added another couple months for deciding dispositive motions before the trial, making for a trial date of February 26, 2007. He included the interim deadlines IBM wanted for parties to "Identify with Specificity All Allegedly Misused Material", setting December 22, 2005 as the final date for all source code at issue to be identified by version, file, and line of code.
Per Kimball's order back in February there will be no summary judgment motions before the end of discovery, and the new schedule calls for the last brief on post-discovery summary judgment motions not to be due until September 26, 2006, so I think November 2006 is the earliest we could see a summary judgment motion heard and decided.
If you look at their product offerings they do have new releases of SCO OpenServer and SCO Unixware. Take a gander at some of their features:
Optional KDE desktop for modern look and feel
OpenSSH and OpenSSL
Includes Mozilla 1.7
Includes MySQL database (Community version)
Includes Postgresql database
CUPS has been added as an alternative to System V LP
Gimp-print 4.2.5, foomatic 3.0.0-01, and ghostscript 7.05.6
Now if your a BSD or linux user you may be thinking "hmm, those look familiar" and you would be correct.
It seems that many of the new features in SCOs software offerings are actually open source software from those same people the SCO CEO says are dope smoking, thieving, pinko communists.
burnin