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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!
http://finance.google.com/finance?q=SCOX
And just throw out the case. Court cases have been dismissed because of much smaller irregularities. SCO kept changing its claims, making unreasonable evidence requests and then failing to produce their own part of evidence. They are trying to profit by presenting an undecided court case as fact and selling their "indemnity licenses". Let them appeal if they want - either they'll get their shit together and be clear on what they are claiming that didn't get heard, or the appeal will be thrown out as well.
Ever wonder if this was MS's plan all along? Not to win?
.... so why not toss some serious FUD into the market as long as possible until they could get their new platform to market? Vista comes out, SCO goes down the tubes. It's win-win for MS.
By funding this charade via SCO, they bought themselves time.
Linux had been gaining server market share, and they knew their new product was going to be severely delayed
I'm not usually in the tinfoil fedora (pun somewhat intended)camp but this thought came to mind this morning.
- Roach
gg? Good game? Are you kidding, SCO was totally hacking, and we still pwned them. [IBM] and {NVL} FTW!!
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
Novell's waiver was over 3 years ago and has been public knowledge for most of that time. All that's happening now is that Novell are asking for a judgment declaring that their waiver is valid. IBM's motions for partial summary judgment on the copyright issue are all ready on the table. Chance are the judge will find that the 300 odd non-contiguous lines of allegedly infringing code don't amount to infringement of a protectable element anyway even IF they turn out to have been copied verbatim from SysV (very unlikely) and even if SCO is eventually ruled to own SysV (very unlikely). This is at most a back up motion in case the judge isn't convinced by everything else.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
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
Consider this.
M$ is now getting Vista out to businesses and to the public in a couple of months.
M$ now has a deal with Novell, and with Novell now showing strength in this ongoing matter with SCO, it is only helping M$.
Novell now will fight with SCO in court while M$ works on its next OS which will work with Linux.
My thought is maybe M$ wants to find a way to get Linux software to run natively in the windows environment allowing M$ to say, 'Look, we can run Window and Linux software at the same time with just one OS. Why get a Linux OS that can only run Linux software when you can get Windows OS and run both Windows and Linux software?'.
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.
It's not a lawsuit, it's a "motion for summary judgement". It's a request for the judge to decide the case himself, on the grounds that the case is so one-sided that it would be a waste of a jury's time. But for obvious reasons you have to wait until the other side is done trying to build their case before you can file this. Standard legal practice. Not a conspiracy. Nothing to see here, move along.
I think SCO is gonna get a nice visit from Robot Santa this year. They've been naughty.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.