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SCO Amends Novell Complaint
rm69990 writes "According to Groklaw, SCO now seeks to amend their complaint against Novell. SCO says it 'seeks leave to file a Second Amended Complaint in significant part in consideration of the counterclaims that Novell asserted in its Answer and Counterclaims.' SCO now accuses Novell of infringing SCO's copyrights by distributing SUSE Linux, of breaching a non-compete clause between the two companies, and SCO is also asking for specific performance forcing Novell to turn over the Unix copyrights to SCO. So SCO is essentially admitting that Novell owns the copyrights at this point, but is saying that Novell breached the contract (that specifically excluded copyrights) by failing to transfer them to Santa Cruz."
The... both... sell... and... support... operating... systems. How can they NOT compete?
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
It is amazing to me that SCO can continue this long without totally running out of lawyer money. I really wonder if some third parties are funding them under the table.
Tell me this -> How are they making a profit today?
No. I really want to know.
Watch out, they have finally gone completely nuts and are going to start shooting!
Auron may be different, Cally, but on Earth it is considered ill-mannered to kill your friends while committing suicide.
"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
That's pretty off base, even for SCO.
I can't help it - I'm a 19D.
A Second Amendment complaint? Now they want to take my unix AND my guns!
From the complaint (via Groklaw): V. PRAYER FOR RELIEF
Wherefore, Plaintiff SCO prays this Court enter judgment for SCO and against Novell:
Although I doubt God will be listening, as he's upgrading his SUSE Linux...
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
"So SCO is essentially admitting that Novell owns the copyrights at this point, but is saying that Novell breached the contract (that specifically excluded copyrights) by failing to transfer them to Santa Cruz."
I can see there collectively being a large amount of heads exploding after trying to make sense of that one. I'm thinking SCO has nothing to do with Santa Cruz and more to do with SChizOphrenia because they've seem to have lost touch with reality.
If big boobed women work at Hooters do one legged women work at IHOP?
Pretty much everything that makes SuSE remotely like UNIX, basically. This seems to be derived from SCO's amusing claim that all our UNIX are belong to them; they must have sat down, asked themselves 'what makes a UNIX system so UNIXey?', written out a list and handed it to the lawyers...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
The fact that this hasn't been laughed out of court yet makes me sad.
I know Debian has "Virtual RMS", but I think SuSE is really going weird if they implement stuff like this. Weird syslog messages from SuSE boxes:
Jan 4 06:47:45 localhost esr: gunning some processesDoes SCO even know what they're suing for?
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
The problem arises when Joe Shmo tries to sue Microsoft for stealing his idea and driving his company out of business and gets buried under a 100,000 dollar a day legal team, which he then has to pay for.
I think we definitely should have more protections in place against frivolous and groundless lawsuits, but I don't think that dumping all the legal costs on the loser is the way to go about it.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
If the Brits really had "looser pays" then the Spice Girls would have to pay for every case in Britain. I think you mean "loser pays."
According to this article, SCO got another ten million from a private placement of stock with existing institutional investors. Since every rational assessment of the stock suggests that the ten million is not going to pay off on the stock market, it's reasonable to assume that these "investors" have some motive other than profiting from the stock directly.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
"Oh man, they must be crazy! The lawsuits make no sense at all!" Right? Wrong, scox is being crazy like a fox. What scox is doing makes perfect sense.
At this point, the entire point of the scam is keep delaying. Msft's army of shills are screaming the message: "People are being sued for using Linux - don't use Linux." Of course the msft influenced tech-pop-media is leaving out the details, but most of the public isn't interested in the details.
There is also a very powerful object lesson being sent to other companies: "if you contribute to Linux, you better be ready to spend $100MM to fight a msft backed nuisance lawsuit. And you better be squeaky clean, because the discovery will never stop." How many companies want to bother with that? "Screw it. I was going to donate this code to Linux, but it just isn't worth the trouble."
McBride rakes in an easy $1MM a year. Scox market cap goes from $6MM to $70MM. Life is good for the scox scammers. Scox execs can lie, cheat, and steal, all they want. The USA bogo-justice system isn't going to do anything about it.
How about "loser pays", but the amount is limited to the amount the loser spent. If you lose, it will cost only as much as you spent. There would have to be some ground rules for things like self-representation and lawyers who work on contingency. There would also have to be an on-going public record of actual costs.
It would sorta act as a resource balance in proceedings. If "big company" is sued by "Joe Schmoe" working with a single lawyer, they have every right to use a team of 30 lawyers, but should only expect to be reimbursed for the first one.
- Tony
That's not the problem really, the problem is expensive lawyers in general and their stranglehold on the entire system. Even with two law teams in an adversarial position it is still them against you when you look at it hard enough.
The US should just admit that the "law" is supposed to be for the people and be reasonable and just and understandable for the most part for anyone with any sort of normal English language comprehension. This "law" situation has gotten to be too complex and ill suited for "the people" because they are essentially locked out of the system and must needs hire (most of the time) an EXTREMELY expensive translator. That's all lawyers are, glorified translators who turn human speak into confusing and overly verbose law speak, then enjoy a "vendor lockin". Even "your" lawyer has a clear cut case of belonging to this conflict of interest scenario of maintaining the translator monopoly, along with the judge and the rest of the "legal system". Then you notice that there is no incentive whatsoever for them to make laws simpler or fairer or easier, or just "less" of them,nope, the opposite is true, and they rule in congress.
We have no over all "law" that would limit the growth industry of "more laws" and more complex laws on the books. We are already at the "millions of laws" state now, with no end in sight. This is obviously insane to anyone who isn't a lawyer, but they hold the cards now.
It's just a carved in stone racket now. Would we put up with plumbers who consciously and universally always add an extra quarter mile of plumbing to a house just because they could?
Would we put up with carpenters who used tens times the amount of wood needed for a project all the time, just so they could always charge more? Would we put up with auto mechanics who insisted on replacing your engine and transmission every time you needed an oil change? No we wouldn't, but we as a society put up with that crap from the politician/lawyers/lobbyist/judges law racket cartel.
Oh ya, they have an added bonus! They have armed mercenaries who do whatever they are told, usually involving you when you run afoul of one of their bosses rackets. Too bad the plumbers and carpenters and mechanics can't enjoy this level of the threat of violence to increase their profits and social standings in the "equal" society we are supposed to have.
I certainly would love to know if this ten million dollars started, one way or another, at Microsoft. I can't think of any other people with lots of money (with the possible exception of Sun) who would remotely benefit from continuous legal challenges to Linux.
At first I thought that ESR was a conspiracy nut. Then you realize that, no, Microsoft actually *is* as nasty as he claims.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Man in suit of armor walks in and hits SCO over the head with a dead chicken.
Dear Sir,
I would like to protest in the strongest possibe terms about your SCO sketch. I have been a village idiot all my life and your Darl Mc Bride character is giving village idiots everywhere a bad name.
Sincerely,
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Just to clarify a bit, as an attorney: it's termed "pleading in the alternative," and in this case SCO's claim is better described as "We maintain that we own the copyrights; but even *if* that were not the case, we would win anyway because Defendant was contractually obligated to transfer them to us." It is not the same thing as admitting, even conditionally, that they might not own the copyrights.
(Note: just pointing out how "pleading further and in the alternative" works, not - Heaven forbid - supporting those clowns at SCO.)
TANSTAAFL
Well, that's pretty much what the whole proceeding is about isn't it?
It'd be one thing if Novell stole SCO's bicycle. But we're not talking about property and stealing, we're talking about property rights and agreements made about future behavior with respect to the use and non-use of those rights. Since what we're talking about is abstract, it's not as simple as looking in SCO's garage and seeing the bicycle is gone, then going to Novell's and seeing it is there.
What SCO is arguing now is more like this: "Novell sold me the exclusive rights on the use its bicycle to court Mary. Then he rode over on his bike to Mary's house."
Then Novell says, "True, I sold you exclusive rights to use that bicycle to court Mary, but I bought a different bicycle and used it."
Then SCO says, "Well, you gave me exclusive rights to the design of the bike in courting Mary. Look see, the derailleur on the bike you rode works just like the one you gave me exclusive rights to."
Then Novell says, "No, I sold you exclusive courting rights to use the components specific to the bike in question. The derailleur design is not specific to that bike."
And so on. It's all about promises not to engage in broadly defined classes of activities centering around vaguely defined abstract entities. It's always going to be possible argue that an activity does or doesn't fall into the relevant class, or that the entity in question is or is not identical to the one covered in the agreement. On top of this, the judge is supposed to render if possible an airtight and irreproachable decision, otherwise he risks being overturned and losing judge-karma.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Not only that IBM didn't want every IP crooked company on the planet trying to sue it just so IBM would buy them out. One of the stranger twists of fate is that IBM really does own patents on just about everything having to do with computers. One of that patents it is claiming SCO infringed on is for a menu structure! There is an old story that Microsoft found out that IBM was infringing on like ten of it's patents. When they meet IBM brought in a list of 5,000 patents that Microsoft was infringing on. True or not the moral is you don't start an IP fight with IBM. IBM wants to make sure EVERYONE know that so they are going to slap SCO as hard as they can. Novell wants Unix back. Why? So it can make Linux an official Unix and gain mind-share in the Linux world.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
SCO is hoping to use this vague wording to override the clear wording of the original contract. They're claiming that the conditional clause has been met and that all the copyrights should be transferred. Novell is going to argue that SCO doesn't need the copyright to exercise their rights "with respect to the acquisition of UNIX and UnixWare technologies". No doubt they're going to ask what technologies SCO is seeking to acquire and why they'd need the copyrights to do so. It's going to be up to the courts to decide this one.
I don't see how this can be read the way SCO wants to read it. SCO doesn't want the copyrights to acquire UNIX technology (which they did a decade ago); they want the copyrights to sue Linux users. This clause was put in so SCO could co-develop Monterey with IBM, so the historical context doesn't help SCO out either.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====