SUSE Requests Arbitration with SCO

rm69990 writes "In response to SCO's amended complaint against Novell alleging copyright infringement, Novell subsidiary SUSE has requested from the International Chamber of Commerce that SCO be barred from asserting copyright over SUSE Linux due to the UnitedLinux agreement between Caldera, SUSE, Connectiva and Turbolinux. This agreement requires that SCO arbitrate with SUSE instead of filing claims, removes the copyright from any work SCO produced while in UnitedLinux, gives SUSE sublicensing rights to SCO's copyrights, and constitutes an SCO commitment that any code released under an OSS license in UnitedLinux remain Open Source. Novell has filed a motion to stay SCO's claims against Novell until the outcome of this arbitration. So now it looks like Linux users are protected both through the APA between Novell and SCO, but the UnitedLinux agreement as well."

Comments

Who are the REAL pros here?

[TripMaster Monkey]

From TFA:

Man, do not mess with Novell. I never worked for lawyers as good as these guys, and it's a plumb pleasin' pleasure to watch them work.

Methinks this gives the Novell lawyers a bit too much credit...after all, all they're doing is patiently assertiing that the sky is in fact blue and that water is, and has always been, wet.

The real geniuses here are the SCO lawyers, for keeping this ridiculous dog & pony show going for as long as they have, although I admit that the admiration I experience witnessing their work is generously laced with nausea and trepidation. When SCO's house of cards finally falls, it will be with a deafening crash amid roars of appreciation from the OSS crowd, but in the meantime, hats off to the talented lawyers that have managed to keep it standing this long. They deserve respect, grudging though it my be.

Re:Who are the REAL pros here?

[morgan_greywolf]

You have brought up a bit of a quandry here. When all is said and done and SCO is officially dead, and the lawyers have to find other work, will this be a feather in their cap with SCO on their resume or will they be seen as the bottom feeding scum that they are. You may not like the job they are doing but they are certainly doing it rather well.

Look. If you were the one hiring the lawyer, who would you rather have? A nice guy who plays nice and fair all the time, or a lawyer who knows every little legal loophole and how to exploit it? Or, to put it in terms that most Slashdotters can understand, who would you rather have on your software security project? A nice programmer who might know a thing or two about breaking security, but has never done it, or a smart hacker who knows his way around every local and remote root exploit known to man and has done so? As the saying goes, when you have to dig through dirt, you get yourself a worm.

Re:Who are the REAL pros here?

[schon]

If you were the one hiring the lawyer, who would you rather have? A nice guy who plays nice and fair all the time, or a lawyer who knows every little legal loophole and how to exploit it?

Mu.

In the context of this litigation, I would rather have the one that says "look, you have no case. Find another way to solve your financial problem." Rather than "hey, it doesn't matter if you have no case, just sue them anyway - they'll just settle."

In other words, I would rather have the nice guy who plays fair even though he knows every little legal loophole.

Contracts :o\

[TubeSteak]

Contracts aren't really what make businesses work, it's the relationships.

If you have to fall back to pointing at the contract and saying "but you agreed," it means the business relationship is fuxxored... and not only are you going to have to win a contract lawsuit, you're going to have to reasses the relationship between the companies.

Obviously, SCO is an anomaly, but the effect is the same. Relationships were broken and contracts aren't going to stop the damage, merely mitigate it.