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Novell Files New Summary Judgement Motion
rm69990 writes "In yet another piece of SCO news this week, Novell has filed a new motion for partial summary judgment, asking the court to declare that Novell is entitled to direct SCO to waive its claims against IBM, that Novell has the right to take these actions on SCO's behalf if SCO refuses to comply and that SCO is obligated to recognize Novell's waiver. Since SCO's case against IBM is primarily a contract case, this issue affects the IBM case far more than the ongoing copyright issue between Novell and SCO. This bad week for SCO just got even worse."
IBM doesn't go to trial in a few months. Judge Kimball has just postponed the trial date. Hearings on the summary judgment motions will be in March. Rulings on them probably a few months after that. Actual trial, if ever needed, maybe 2008. Part of the reason for that schedule is because Judge Kimball ruled that the Novell trial should proceed first. It's worth noting that when he asked the lawyers for IBM and SCO, IBM's lawyers argued that Novell should go first.
So that's one reason for 'why now' - because it's recently been held that the Novell case proceeds ahead of the IBM case.
Another reason? Because of the recent rulings limiting SCO's list of infringing materials in the IBM case to that which they disclosed by the deadline. So that's 300 odd lines of code potentially subject to copyright infringement. When there were still wild claims of millions of lines SCO might have had better luck arguing that the contract terms just COULDN'T have been meant to allow Novell to waive such a massive breach. Now that argument just looks silly.
Last reason I can think of off hand, as noted IBM's motions for PSJ have their hearings scheduled for March. Ideally, Judge Kimball will rule at that point that there is no copyright infringement, and not just because of the Novell waiver but because there was no breach needing to be waived. If he doesn't feel that he can rule that then all the arguments from all parties are on the table to rule on the waiver instead as a second best option (from the viewpoint of Linux supporters).
There are a lot of pieces falling into place right now.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
http://finance.google.com/finance?q=SCOX
They'll be in court for a while yet anyway. The sooner the SCO-vs-IBM case is over, the IBM-vs-SCO case can get underway. That's the one I want to watch.
No need for a conspiracy theory at all. This is just an extension Novell asking the court to enforce their direction to SCO to waive dropping IBM's Unix license back in June 2003. It's long, LONG overdue IMO.
You're confusing SCO v IBM with SCO v Novell. Discovery is ongoing in the Novell case. In fact there's a motion by Novell to compel discovery from SCO coming up for hearing soon. Agree with everything else you say though, and yes this is just one more motion in an ongoing case. It's not like Novell have been sitting on their hands until now as some people seem to think.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2