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SCO Having a Hard Time In Court
jamienk writes "The beginning of the end is in sight. SCO has been reprimanded for the second day in a row by a second judge in their campaign against Linux. Basically, Judge Wells ruled that SCO's vague claims of IP infringement will not be allowed to be heard in court, since it was all clearly a poor attempt at avoiding showing any evidence. Next, SCO will face compelling counterclaims against it by IBM." From the article: "At issue was whether SCO would be allowed to sneak in new allegations and evidence in its experts' reports that it failed to put on the table openly in its Final Disclosures, in effect, as IBM described it, reinventing its case at the eleventh hour. The answer today was no, it won't be allowed to do that. IBM had asked for this relief: 'Insofar as SCO's proposed expert reports exceed the Final Disclosures, they should be stricken.' More details will be arriving in a while, but assuming the early reports are accurate, we may assume that this is what the Judge has ordered." This is a follow-up to a story we discussed yesterday.
The current SCO is a different company than the the old SCO (Santa Cruz Organization) to which you refer.
http://www.answers.com/topic/tarantella-inc-1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarantella%2C_Inc.
The new SCO is pure evil and I would not be surprised to learn that Darl McBride is a pedophile and baby eater, and that he kicks newborn puppies for fun.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
No, no dupe. First story was about Judge Kimball affirming an order Judge Wells maid (the striking a lot of evidence) and this story is about a hearing that Judge Wells held today.
1:06 EST SCOX 1.21 Down 39.50%
SCO's stock went into a screaming dive today. It's down 40% today on heavy trading, about 20x the normal volume. The mainstream business press has picked up the story, and, this time, there's no ambiguity.
Forbes seems to have really had it with SCO. Much of SCO's early FUD appeared in Forbes articles, which now makes Forbes look bad.
I was a Caldera employee up until the acquisition of SCO. After the acquisition, SCO was used to remove most of the redundant departments at Caldera. I jumped ship when I realized SCO was taken over. Along with Ransom Love and many of my former coworkers, we saw what was happening. SCO was struggling with declining revenue and it led to an easy acquisition by Caldera. Once that happened, the old Caldera was mostly gutted and replaced by the newly acquired SCO employees. The few Caldera employees left were of the quality that you see now. With the declining revenue of the new Unix kernel and the slow decline in popularity of OpenLinux (eDesktop, eServer, etc.), it appears that those left chose to try litigation as a business model.
Posted A/C for the obvious reason...
While the old SCO certainly wasn't as bad as the current one, they were still bad. The Michels boys were just as crooked as they could be. For years, they didn't issue stock, until they had products and cash coming in. Instead, they just issued promises that they'd "take care of you". That they did, by issuing significantly less stock to the original employees than is normal for a startup. But they didn't care. Once they had product, they didn't need the orginal employees as much, and so they gave the original crew the shaft.
n s
This is also the second time that SCO has worked with Microsoft to shut down *NIX competition. Here's a link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microport#Applicatio
Fortunately they failed, as Microport later helped the FSF put gcc on the 386 by giving them a free copy of UNIX.
Then there was the sexual harassment which went one (resulting in two lawsuits, as reported in the Press), and the guy they drove out of business who was dumb enough to give them an exclusive - after which they deliberately refrained from selling the software or letting him out of their contract. And the CEO saying that they'd steal as much as they wanted from Linux. And more and more.
The point is that crooked business practices has been the norm for SCO throughout its history, with few exceptions.
It's far more honest to say that the original SCO was rotten too; just not as rotten as the current version.
Compare that article to this one from when the whole SCO fiasco was getting started. Same author, you'll note - very different attitude. I love the hilarity of juxtaposing the titles of the two articles. Back then Lyons was calling Linux advocates and users "crunchies" - now he just calls them "fans" and says things like "companies... have built booming businesses around Linux."
Not that he'll get called on the hypocrisy or anything.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Um. Boies prosecuted Microsoft in the anti-trust trial. He didn't get reprimanded in that trial, but there are other trials where he ran afoul of ethics and was called on it.
There is NO "new material".
What SCO tried to sneak in after the close of the discovery phase was "expert" witness reports that broadened the scope of the original claims, to which IBM objected and Judge Kimball ruled on (in IBM's favor) yesterday.
What Judge Kimball correctly recognized was that trying to nail down SCO's claims was like trying to hit a moving target. The evidence that Judge Wells disallowed was ingeneously called "claims" by SCO in order to get past the fact (ie., evidence) discovery deadline.
If SCO has any new real evidence, they will have to ask for a new trial, not an appeal. Judge Kimball is working his hardest (de novo review) to make sure that there can be no appeal.
Even if SCO lasts that long.
They don't need to dump their stock at this point in time. They never paid for it in the first place, so there isn't any loss.
Remember that the principles involved are mostly trading "stock options". They are granted the right to buy stock at a certain price, and can then sell it for whatever the market will bear. They don't, however, *have* to pay for it at all if the stock isn't "in the money" (i.e., selling for more than the option strike price).
No, the time to dump the stock was at 14 or 15 dollars (and there was *plenty* of dumping going on). At $2, it's hang on until the inevitable crash.