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SCO Denied Again In Court
CDWalton writes "Groklaw has the latest in the SCO v. IBM case. Judge Wells denied SCO the opportunity to get depositions from involved parties after the date she had specified as the cutoff for those activities." From the article: "Brent Hatch started out talking about the request to take the depositions of Intel, Oracle, and The Open Group. Judge Wells brought up her October 12, 2005 order and said that depositions MUST be completed by the cutoff date. That any that cannot be taken by that date must be forgone. Brent stated that they properly noticed the depositions before the cutoff date and that they were not taken for reasons outside his, or his client's, control ... Judge Wells asked if the subpeonas were defective in some manner. Hatch: Yes, they were."
Asside from the fact that judges work on several cases at the same time, so they have to schedule things, there are HUGE amounts of documents involved in a case like this.
Cases like SCO v IBM take such a very long time to resolve for several reasons.
1. The case is complicated. They're dealing with a web of contracts and code dating back decades.
2. Judges give everyone lots of time for *discovery* to minimize opportunities for appealing the decision later on. It'd be a massive waste if they spent years litigating a case, only to get it overturned during appeal because of something that would have only added a week to the discovery process.
3. IBM hasn't been pushing for an accelerated time table because of #2. IBm, like the Judge, doesn't want to win & then have to spend another 10 years in Appeals Courts.
So... no, I don't think you can blame inefficiencies. Or if there are inefficiencies, they are left in place in order to avoid greater inefficiencies.
SCO's lawyers have fucked up this case in so many ways that the Judge is beginning to seriously lose patience. I'm actually quite amazed that the Judge has given them so much slack up till this point.
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IBM dropped the patent claims nearly a year ago, so as to expedite the case.
IBM also file several summary judgement motions and the court told them to stop doing that until after discovery.
I don't think you can say that IBM is dragging this out.
SCO has so far not been asked to make a specific accusation yet for gods sake.
You are incorrect. SCOX has been not only been "asked", but they have beeb ORDERED to specify what their allegations are, on *THREE* separate occasions. They've failed to do so (while claiming they have) each and every time.
The last time they did it, they filed everything under seal, so that nobody besides IBM can point out that they've failed again (and yes, IBM has pointed it out to the court - out of the 294 items that SCOX filed, IBM has said that only one (yes, *ONE*) is "specific" enough for the court, but that one doesn't actually identify anything that IBM did.
Why hasn't anybody asked SCO what bits of unix they own, what pieces SCO alleges Ibm stole.
Again, they did (and not just "asked", but *ordered*, by a federal judge.)
They still haven't said what IBM stole form them.
This bit is correct, but that doesn't mean that nobody has "asked".