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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."
But is this something that IBM even wants?
You'd think that Novell could have filed this lawsuit a year or three ago instead of waiting till right before SCO vs IBM goes to trial (in a few months).
Why try to kill the lawsuit at this point?
It's already imploding under the weight of SCO's garbage.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Can't you see the logic? Novell *waives* IBM's transgression rather than letting the court prove there wasn't one in the first place. Now, coming as it does after the MS deal and the spectre of patent issues, does something not smell a little like a rotten herring?
There's enough conspiracy theory to go around, by the way. Just grab a chunk and go make your own post. This one's mine...
Resistance is futile. Reactance buggers it up.
Judge K said he wouldn't accept dispositive motions before the end of discovery so Novell couldn't have filed this before now.
Judge K can decide this one without going to a jury because it can be settled as a matter of law. All he has to do is read and interpret the contract. The contract is pretty unambiguous so my guess is that Judge K will grant it.
What effect will this have? Novell told SCO that it couldn't cancel IBM's license. Judge K's decision may be limited to just that matter. This probably won't end the whole IBM case and certainly it won't end IBM's counterclaims.
Where are their opinions on this matter now? Mr. Enderle was a very vocal person on this subject at one time for example. There were others of course but he stood out being one of the most vocal with how malicious OSS community is and how IBM has its days numbered if for no other reason than previous evils it has committed along with Groklaw being devoid of any substance or meaningful insight on this subject. Credibility is inversely proportional to actually being correct it would appear in this light, so why aren't these people talking now?
BSD is designed. Linux is grown. C++ libs
Except no one, not even IBM would willingly walk into a lawsuit between two other parties where the outcome could be that they are thrown out of the lawsuit as irrelevant to the issues (explain the tie between IBM patents and MS suing another company over IP in the Linux kernel), and at the same time they face expending tens of millions in legal fees, preparing for depositions, locating and preparing documentation/exhibits, etc. Novell got involved over a third party lawsuit because their expenditures would be low (they own vs. SCO sells for them in their mind) and the risks of SCO winning anything IP related against IBM would be too high considering Novell's new business model. The existence of Novell itself was at stake in this lawsuit, while IBM will be IBM regardless of the outcome, as they sell hardware and services, with many OSs, and the OS making up a tiny part of the overall sales revenue for them.
Once you get to the size of IBM and MS, patents are basically irrelevant. Patents will protect larger companies from bottom feeders. There's no doubt in my mind, nor should there be in yours since this has been covered in stories and television episodes and elsewhere, that IBM and MS have a cross-licensing agreement on patents, where as long as they don't go after each other's core business lines, they release each other from the possibility of patent suits against each other. Some of this info on cross-licensing came out when there was a slight between IBM lawyers and IBM employees, over OpenOffice.org and licensing of MS Office, where MS was attempting to change the language in their enterprise agreement which seemed to pave the way for MS to be able to initiate lawsuits over OpenOffice regardless of the patent crosslicensing that was in effect, and over the new crosslicensing agreement which apparently, iirc, from this episode, is renewed yearly, or every couple of years.
What I'd find more interesting is the tax IBM is hammering motherboard manufacturers, video card manufacturers, sound card manufacturers, laptop oem's (quanta and such), and others over the patents IBM holds.
That would be pretty difficult considering they'd have to rewrite a lot of GPLed code so they could close it up for their version of Windows. Besides, why bother when Cygwin is already available for free? Not to mention that VMWare can run Linux in Windows, (or Windows in Linux).