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Novell Files for Summary Judgment Against SCO
rm69990 writes "Novell filed a motion with Judge Dale Kimball asking him to grant summary judgment or a preliminary injunction on Novell's claims that SCO wrongfully retained the money it received from Microsoft and Sun for their SVRX licensing and sublicensing agreements. Novell indicated over a year ago, when they initially filed their counterclaims against SCO, that they were planning on asking Judge Kimball to force SCO to turn over these monies. However, Novell only recently received the actual licensing agreements between SCO, Sun and Microsoft through discovery, despite demanding copies of them as early as 2003, and thus was unable to determine that SCO had breached the APA until now, which is why this motion is being filed so late in the case. This motion will likely bankrupt SCO if granted."
Judge K. can decide on the issue of whether SCO has kept Novell's money. It is just a matter of law and there is no realistic dispute over the facts. (If there was a real dispute over facts then it would have to go to a jury.) It's just a matter of reading the contract.
So, Judge K. issues a summary judgement saying that SCO has to give Novell 25 million dollars right now. That bankrupts SCO. That doesn't stop the court cases though. The bankruptcy trustee appointed by the court replaces SCO's management. The bankruptcy trustee then negotiates with the creditors (mostly Novell and IBM). All the cases are settled out of court. My WAG is that the out of court agreements include SCO (as directed by the trustee) admitting that they are wrong about all the cases and all the counterclaims.
The counterclaim we all care about the most is IBM's counterclaim number 10. That's the one that says that there is no copyrighted Unix code in Linux. That will be the end of that particular piece of FUD.
My fondest wish is that Darl goes to jail for Lanham act violations or for something the SEC charges him with.
What, you mean they aren't using MacOS?
I hate printers.