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Judge Calls SCO On Lack of Evidence
Rob writes to mention a CBR article on Judge Wells' assessment that SCO just hasn't made its case against IBM in the well-known and long-lasting legal battle. The magistrate called the lack of evidence inexcusable. She further likened their claims to a shoplifter being handed a catalog for a store after being stopped, and being told 'what you took is in there somewhere, figure it out.' From the article: "In the view of the court it is almost like SCO sought to hide its case until the ninth inning in hopes of gaining an unfair advantage despite being repeatedly told to put 'all the evidence... on the table' ... given SCO's own public statements... it would appear that SCO had more than enough evidence to comply with the court's orders." Groklaw has coverage of the decision, and the complete text from the judge. Update: 06/30 15:14 GMT by Z : This story bears more than a passing resemblance to this one from Wednesday. Sorry about that.
This case was lost in the public court of opinion long ago, I'm kind of surprised it's even still going on. Apparently the judge is of the same mind.
Too bad Darl and friends have already made their millions from SCO's little stock kiting scheme, but it'll at least be a small comfort to see SCO finally begin to implode. I think I'll be checking the Salt Lake Tribune (I live here) for the eventual bankruptcy sale... maybe buy one of their logoed signs and mount it on a trophy plaque. (well, a man can dream, can't he?)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
You can see lots of insightful comments in the other story about this.
I thought that US law requires the defendant to provide reasonable amount of evidence in order to get a court case started in the first place.
No, it's more like a store manager stopping someone who owns a competing business leaving the store, accusing them of shoplifting with no proof of anything being stolen, and then giving them the catalog to sort it out simply to harass them and take up their time.
What you may have missed is that SCO's parent company released a lot of source code under the GPL- and once released they can't 'unrelease it' later. As a result it was perfectly legal to use a lot of those files in Linux. Besides, don't you think that SCO would have shown this source code to the Judge if they had a case at all?
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
And I agree it's sad that a co. can game the system this much for this long, without providing detail about the alleged wrongdoing. It's basically a Gitmo approach to suing.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Fuck off, troll.
Since nobody outside SCO except perhaps the MoGTroll, Didiot, and a few people who were paid to look at it, have seen it, I call bullshit - or should I say backinfullforce-shit.
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Both SCO and Linux can legally take anything they want from the BSD code base - so they would have the exact same comments, etc.
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The LKP module that SCO had to yank is a good indication that copying went from Linux to SCO Unix, and not vice versa;
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Header files? Sure, for things like POSIX, they WOULD be the exact same. No copyright infringement.
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Those "millions of lines of code" in Blepp's suitcase seem to have disappeared.
Stock scam. That's all it ever was, after the extortion attempt failed.Anybody here think that this resembles some guy dealing with his girlfriend/wife who is mad at him..
Him: What did I do?
Her: You know what you did, and if you don't know, I'm not telling you.
So if even the court believes that SCO has abused the legal system for unfair gains - will there be any punishment for that? Can the judge declare such punishment or does it have to go through a seperate case? Does the court system even have a way to send the message that it doesn't like being abused?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
In quick summary, SCO did not provide line number, VERSION and FILE information for many of it's claims. Some of their claims they did not even find source code for (roughly 2/3rds of claims). IBM warned them very early on that if they didn't receive these specifics, they would seek court intervention.
SCO also claimed that "methods and concepts" do not need source code to back them up. However, the Judge decided that this was incorrect and that methods and concepts could, in the most basic of terms, be boiled down to source code. Even the SCO technical witnesses attested to this, and furthermore SCO repeatedly requested the SAME LEVEL of specificity from IBM when requestiong source codef regarding AIX, LINUX and other products throughout the trial.
Basically the Judge finds it unacceptable that even though SCO has had since 2003 to substantiate it's claim with LINE, FILE and VERSION numbers for each claim, it has failed to do so.
I would now like to see the SEC and/or the major SCO stockholders (non-MS obviously) hold the executive team accountable for this major company loss of money, business, and most of all CREDIBILITY in the technology market. Those Linux-using companies that SCO intimidated into buying indemnity licenses should further pursue legal action to get their costs back, with punitive damages to boot.
In my mind, this strategy of theirs fits right in line with the same kind of covert accounting strategies that Enron/Worldcom/etc were investigated for, where the EXECUTIVES themselves were held accountable to the tune of big $$$ and jail time.
Let me introduce you to my very own DMCA-protected encryption key: BC 1B 64 4A 8D DE 49 E8 C3 7D CC EE 1A AD EE
Only Microsoft's contribution had positive impact on 95% of the world's PC users ....
My Starcraft 2 Blog
The shoplifting analogy isn't quite there.
Actually, it's as if you walked out of Neiman Marcus, a security guard accused you of shoplifting, and then refused to tell you what you shoplifted.
Then, the guard pulls over his buddy, respected Yankee Group Laura Didio. She looks in your bag, then looks at the Neiman Marcus catalog, and announces on national media that you have stolen something from Neimann Marcus but she won't say what it is.
Three years later, during trial, the guard is still unable to explain what you stole from the store.
Laura is such a two-faced windbag! She spends months berating Linux and IBM -- hell, she's seen the supposed evidence, and now she's doing an about-face so she can proclaim that as an industry analyst, her forcasts are "spot on".
The Yankee Group (and especially Laura) wouldn't know their own asses from a hole in the ground.