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SCO Files To Amend Claims To IBM Case, Again
UnknowingFool writes "SCO filed a motion to allow it to change its claims against IBM. Again. A brief recap: In December 2005, SCO was supposed to finally list all claims against IBM. This was the Final Disclosure. In May 2006, SCO filed its experts reports to the court which discussed subjects beyond those in the Final Disclosure. Naturally, IBM objected and wanted to remove certain allegations. Judge Wells ruled from the bench and granted IBM's motion: SCO's experts cannot discuss subjects that were not in the Final Disclosure. Now, SCO wants to amend the December 2005 Final Disclosure to include other allegations."
"oh, your Honor, we are but mere idiots drooling on our papers, we just want money. grant us our relief and give us lots of everybody else's money. also, your wallet and watch, hand 'em over."
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
That may be what Sco wants...to be so aggravating that you give them money....
Besides who would want to buy a sinking ship with a huge hole in the bottom?
No.
The SCO Group (NOT the Santa Cruz Operation, by the way, they're now called Tarantella) must be crushed into an unrecognizable mess of lies and hopelessness. There is no other way. Their attorneys should be disbarred, their officers should all spend a few decades in Federal prison, and anyone who bought stock in them because they saw the hope of a payout from this extortion scheme should rot in hell.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
Maybe we're just seeing what kind of lawyers you get when all you can pay them with is stock in a company whose assets consist solely of a huge scam lawsuit against IBM.
One of the precedents that IBM should produce by seeing this travesty trial to its just conclusion is penalties for the SCO lawyers who have been wasting court time with this obviously frivolous lawsuit. Why should taxpayers subsidize those lawyers with free access to the courts for their stockmarket scam? The SEC should look at their brokers, too, to see whether they are in on the deal - almost certainly they are.
This case shouldn't end with only strong precedents clearing Linux developers and distributors from the FUD SCO has pumped into the market for years now. It should end with disbarred lawyers and delicensed brokers, and probably punitive damages (paid to the court, compensating taxpayers) exceeding the profit those professional crooks have made from the stock transactions their work has been the smoke and mirrors to produce.
--
make install -not war
The hero keeps firing his gun at the oncoming zombie, shouting "Why... wont... you... DIE!"
They're using Square's definition of "Final" arn't they...
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
I don't have detailed knowledge of the US legal system, but isn't SCO stretching it beyond it's limits in a way rarely seen before. And certainly with such high profile cases with companies of these sizes?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
"I don't know why some company doesn't just put up a few Million dollars (or 10s of millions) to buy SCO and put all these stupid legal battles behind us."
Why would they do that?
What benefit would they get?
SCO hasn't stopped Linux so Linux companies would gain very little. IBM would gain nothing since it is getting all the good will it would ever want by standing up to SCO.
The one really big possible PR left in all this is one for Novell.
IF Novell gets to foreclose on SCO for none payment and gets back all the rights for Unix they could turn the Unix code base over too the FOSS community.
Of course if they did that then they would miss some of the nice checks from Sun and IBM.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
This has been one big nuisance suit by SCOX *HOPING* IBM would pay them off or buy them out to silence them. IBM's attitude has been "millions for defense, not one cent for tribute". They know paying SCOX off would prompt a flood of copycat suits from other busted vendors.
At this point it's pretty well proven (a) there's no infringing UNIX code in Linux (b) SCOX likely doesn't hold the copyrights, Novell does (c) SCOX' reading of the contract they inherited from AT&T & Novell is in conflict with their predecessors', and both have said so in depositions and (d) this has been a last-ditch attempt to keep their company afloat.
SCOX DELENDA EST!!
on what grounds?
on the grounds that it's disasterous to my case.
sarcasm:
-noun
1. harsh or bitter derision or irony.
SCO paid cold hard cash for their lawyers. Cash from Microsoft and Sun that Novell is claiming should have been forwarded to Novell. But it was cash. There was an early move to make BS&F get paid in shares and a percentage of an SCO buyout. BS&F dropped that very quickly, either because they got a good look at SCO's case or because it would put them in co-conspirator type position with respect to Lanham act and racketering charges for being a direct benefit from the false valuation.
SCO paid a "fixed fee" to BS&F to manage all cases through appeals, I believe it was $29M. There is also a refillable misc-costs bucket of $5M that has already been topped up twice. The misc-cost bucket sort of puts a lie to the "fixed fee" handling of the lawsuit.
In any case SCO is now facing Novell asking for a lot of cash that SCO no longer has.
I read a quote from Darl somewhere a good while ago saying that in all honesty, when they started their legal endeavours, they fully expected IBM to just buy them out. Guess IBM decided that it'd be more fun to bury them. Big time. And in the long-run of course, the case has actually done a good deal to strengthen the GNU/Linux community.
Even without a buyout, those involved in this nonsense have actually made a good deal of money - the lawyers, Darl and the other execs (who are on hefty salaries) who have done rather well from all this, thank you very much. The people I feel sorry for the actual engineers at SCO, as there can be no doubt the company won't come out the other end of this in any fit state to carry on. It used to be a damn good little company, providing a good product at sensible prices. Now look at them. They're just a bad joke.
... then I realised I was just flogging a dead horse
I wonder. if a quick buy out of the company would enable the buyer to see all paper work? It may be useful for IBM and Novell to have the goods on MS and Sun for damages as well as perhaps put those at the top who perpertraited this crime in prison. I wonder how Gates (or Balmer) and McNealy would do in a federal prison?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
SCO is essentially saying the following:
Your honor, since the trial date has been postponed to after Novell (September 2007), let us amend our "final" disclosure. IBM has lots of time to respond to this, so it causes no harm.
SCO obviously doesn't understand the word final. They also say (this is a quote):
The public interest is in having this matter resolved in a reasonable time frame. SCO had 3.8 years (from when they filed in March of 2003 until when final disclosure happened in December of 2006) to assemble their evidence. The longer this charade goes on, and that Linux is under SCO's cloud of FUD, the more damage SCO is doing.
SCO has tried to delay at every turn during this trial, so this comes as no surprise. It now seems obvious that this whole lawsuit was an attempt to delay Linux adoption by destroying Linux credibility in the marketplace. This whole thing was about delay.
Don't forget the bit about "the lamentation of their women", that really needs to be worked in there somewhere.
I'm from Europe and have witnessed this case being mentioned every once in a while. It seems like some kind of virus; the thing which you cannot kill and it just pops up every once in a while.
/change/ those laws or is this something people weren't hired to do or set in motion, resulting in nothing ever changing?
What I fail to understand is that the American justice department is allowing all this to continue. To which I'd like to immediatly add that this whole ordeal is more damaging than people might realize. For me its also portraying the whole justice system as something which you really can't take too seriously. Jury courts? Sure, try to work on their emotion. Trials with no end because no evidence is being produced what so ever? Sure; only in America so it seems.
What makes me look upon this with a little disdain for this, arrogant if you will, IMO display of incompetence is the sheer fact that SCO has also tried this in Europe just once. The only thing they ended up with was a threat for some major fines (due to plain out slander) if they pulled a stunt like that again.
What is it with these people? If they need to apply the law and it allows for grand mockeries like this wouldn't it make sense to get something in motion to actually
Guys, this isn't only hurting business. Its hurting your credibility too!
The consensus from those following this circus is that the reason the judges have let this run on as long as it has it exactly to scuttle attempts at appeal; they've given the SCOundrels every opportunity to come up with some credible evidence, IBM has produced their entire source repository for them to look for infringing code in, and still the judge's comment at the end of discovery was "is this all you've got?". At this point they're trying hard to get any sort of disputable points into the record to keep this thing going. When the IBM counterclaims kick in there's going to be a glowing greasespot in Lindon where once stood Caldera, er, SCOX.
SCOX DELENDA EST!!
Someone with big buckets and a lot of arms?
Of Code And Men
All of the money made by the insiders is public knowledge. I quickly looked through the records last week (you can just do a google search for "insider trades SCO" and you will find a service that will list them all). From what I can tell, Baystar dumped about a million shares or so at between $3.50 and $4.00 at the end of 2004 (They were making 5 or 6 sell trades a day for months). I'm not sure if this ended up being a profit or a loss though (I forget the details... and the whole Bank of Montreal involvement made everything kind of complicated anyway).
The executives exercised stock options all the way up until the end of 2004. It seems they were mostly granted at between $1 and $2 and excercised for between $10 and $20, but there are some exceptions. I didn't add up all the money, but it was definitely in the multi-millions of dollars.
There are huge stock grants to a law firm (about 10 million shares), which I think is the law firm representing them (I assume for services rendered). So the absolute big winners seem to be the lawers, but the executives and Baystar seem to have made millions as well. The losers are the people who invested at anything over $4 (or the morons who sold short, not understanding that it takes *time* for a stock to fall).
As a disclaimer, I only quickly reviewed this material, so there may be errors in my summary. If you care about this stuff, I suggest you compile it properly yourself.
OJ Simpson is hot on IBM's trail, won't be long till they find the smoking gun.
SCO is paying him in stock
Just for what it's worth old SCO did become Tarantella, but they are not called that any more. Sun bought them about a year and a half ago. So Tarantella, aka old SCO does not exist anymore. They were completely assimilated into Sun.
--- Tolerance is the axiomatic "virtue" of those without convictions ---
They're using Square's definition of "Final" arn't they...
Appropriate since their entire case is "Fantasy".
There's no rule, nor should there be, that attorneys should be punished for representing jerks. Chances are, SCO engaged their services without telling them everything they needed to know, things like "we don't actually own Unix." Now the lawyers are stuck riding this out, because if they walk away, or even slack off, that could get them disbarred, censured, or on the wrong end of a malpractice suit.
These big-dog lawyers are no fools. Undoubtedly they have a pretty good idea of where their case is going. But if they don't go down swinging, they'll never get another client.
This is not my sandwich.
Actually there is a law. Or rather, a rule of the legal profession and the courts: lawyers are officers of the court first, advocates for their client second. When BSF realized SCO had no basis for their case, if SCO wouldn't listen to reason they should have asked the court to permission to withdraw. Failure to do so is a violation of professional ethics, and I believe a gross violation of both Bar Association and judicial rules. The defendant in a criminal case has a right to representation, the plaintiff in a civil lawsuit does not.