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Darl McBride Takes the Stand In Novell v. SCO
UnknowingFool writes "Everyone's favorite CEO Darl McBride took the stand on Wednesday April 30 in Novell v. SCO. Chris Brown has posted his account on Groklaw of the 2nd day of trial. The first day's account can be found here. To refresh your memory in this ongoing case, Judge Kimball has already ruled that Novell owns the copyrights to Unix and has practically dismissed all of SCO's claims. This portion of the trial is about Novell's counterclaims that SCO never paid them the money from the Sun and MS deals. What is to be determined in this trial is how much of the money from the deals were for Unix licensing (SVRx) and how much were for SCO's server technology (Unixware)."
(Read on for the rest, below.)
UnknowingFool continues:
"Reading the account, it seems that the SCO folks are currently trying to delicately separate Unixware and SVRx. However Novell's lawyers are quickly pointing out in the past where SCO made no distinction between SVRx and Unixware in their literature or press releases. In day 1's account, SCO's tree picture shows Unix as SCO IP (Unix).
Also SCO's position is that it owes Novell nothing because the deals to MS and Sun were Unixware deals and not SCOSource deals (the much despised Linux licensing program) or SVRx deals. Novell points out fatal flaws in SCO's arguments. Sun wanted the ability to open source some of their Solaris code (which became OpenSolaris). Solaris and Unixware both branched from SVR4 so they would need permission from the owner of SVRx copyrights, not the Unixware owner. That owner is Novell. The MS deal is a little different in that MS wanted Unixware rights AND rights to legacy Unix (SVRx).
The best part of the cross-examination was Darl refusing to admit that the MS and Sun deals were not SCOSource, but Novell showing SCO's financial statements (10Q) where both deals were listed under SCOSource and not Unixware revenue."
"Reading the account, it seems that the SCO folks are currently trying to delicately separate Unixware and SVRx. However Novell's lawyers are quickly pointing out in the past where SCO made no distinction between SVRx and Unixware in their literature or press releases. In day 1's account, SCO's tree picture shows Unix as SCO IP (Unix).
Also SCO's position is that it owes Novell nothing because the deals to MS and Sun were Unixware deals and not SCOSource deals (the much despised Linux licensing program) or SVRx deals. Novell points out fatal flaws in SCO's arguments. Sun wanted the ability to open source some of their Solaris code (which became OpenSolaris). Solaris and Unixware both branched from SVR4 so they would need permission from the owner of SVRx copyrights, not the Unixware owner. That owner is Novell. The MS deal is a little different in that MS wanted Unixware rights AND rights to legacy Unix (SVRx).
The best part of the cross-examination was Darl refusing to admit that the MS and Sun deals were not SCOSource, but Novell showing SCO's financial statements (10Q) where both deals were listed under SCOSource and not Unixware revenue."
... many Linux contributors were originally UNIX developersAlso, as to his book remark, he didn't look very hard!
Mmmmmm, that's some good perjury!
My work here is dung.
Here's hoping he performs better than Hans Reiser ... no, on second thoughts cancel that.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
can't you just strike them down and put an end to our misery?
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
The section logos beside the article text, in order, read as follows:
... CCUNT.
Caldera
the Courts
Unix
Novel
Tux
All together now
I guess you couldn't really leave this one out of "the courts". Either way, well done.
I'm pretty sure that CEO of a $1M market cap company doesn't qualify him for rich and powerful status.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
your*
..UnixWars Episode V..Novell Strikes Back.
I'm not exactly sure how best to implement it; but it seems to me that more of our public social processes need a formal mechanism whereby blatantly factually incorrect statements can be challenged and amended. In situations like courtrooms, political debates, news shows, and whatnot, people can and do just say things that are trivially, demonstrably wrong all the time. Sometimes, their opponents call them on it; but that ends up degenerating into a game of "he said-she said". Surely it wouldn't be that hard for a venue moderator of some kind to step in and issue factual corrections. This is particularly true with media reports about such events. It should be really, really easy for a writer to do basic fact checking and, in addition to quoting the characters involved, note their factual accuracy(yeah, yeah, I know "fair and balanced" means finding two people who disagree and letting them both talk, truth is a matter of opinion, blah, blah...)
This sort of moderation wouldn't be suitable for matters of opinion or debate; but there are really a lot of things that are knowable with a high degree of confidence, particularly given our access to vast databases and recordings of past events:
Politician: "I never said "foo", I said "bar".
Moderator: "This clip is from our interview three weeks ago"*plays clip of Politician saying "foo".
It is good that we have (some) journalists who write followup articles and a bunch of bloggers who are willing to go digging after the press loses interest; but that just shouldn't be necessary for trivial falsehoods. They just aren't that hard to detect in near-realtime.
Does anyone know if the trial is being broadcast anywhere? If it is, torrents would sure be appreciated.
I don't care why you're posting AC
By God, we hangs OS Rustlers around these here parts. Someone git us a rope and we can commence with the hangin'!!!
Perhaps the judge will find it in his heart to jail this Team-Killing FuckTard, or at least fine him all his assets. Truthfully he is as bad as any spammer.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
I thought that this was all over with. Or was that just some other aspect of it?
Unpleasantries.
I'm sure this is meant to be taken ironically.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
...who's a cocksmoking teabagger now Darl?
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
It is good to see my Mickey Mouse Death star logo on the front page again.
It may be they listed it under scosource to show that scosource wasn't an unmitigated failure. A public relations stunt that is backfiring on them badly now.
Whatever, doesn't matter anyway, they are rapidly heading towards history and a fabulously lucrative book deal for PJ when she writes her history of the event.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Oh wait, I just did. SCO has to be the ultimate metric of when a struggle has just gone on for too long.
(By the way, I don't really hate Hillary, and I don't like Obama all that much. I preferred Edwards quite strongly, and McCain is a kind of insult to the intelligence of the voters--but look at Dubya. I'm evidently wandering--but I did think of another point of comparison. Hillary has too many negatives--rather like Darl McBride, whereas I think Obama can generate the kind of positive enthusiasm I associate with Ubuntu Linux.
So now I've just donated to Obama (2nd donation--but never to Hillary), and I'd like to put it all behind me... Have I missed offending anyone yet? If you're a religious lunatic, how about if you just designate me as your "foe" now and save time?)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Where are my mod points when I *need* them? :)
Tweet, tweet.
While the train-wreck that is Darl is becoming more amusing by the trial, $CO's tactics are just getting silly. In Ars Technica's write-up of this trial, not only do they mention some of Darl's more interesting statements (such as him saying that "Linux is a copy of UNIX"), but the author also points out that SCO's current strategy seems to be that, while it doesn't own the trademarks it claimed it did, all its blustering that led to Microsoft and Sun coughing-up licensing cash was erroneous and the licenses were invalid, and therefore Novell isn't entitled to any of the money $CO collected. The only recourse Microsoft and Sun would then have would be to sue $CO over their losses.
I'm inclined to hope that tactic works. Does it seem to anyone else like $CO's execs may be on the hook for committing fraud by selling things they didn't own? In the real world, most times you sell stuff that doesn't belong to you (like counterfeit or pirated software), you go to PRISON for your efforts. So why shouldn't Darl and his pals wind up behind bars for extorting money out of companies for licenses they didn't own the rights to sell?
Salt Lake City?!
Get a rope.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
Transcripts are being purchased with the combined contributions of Groklaw readers, and will be available soon (apparently the first day's has issues with floppies). Reading is going to be better than watching days worth of trial at any rate, plus it will be court produced public record.
I am, and always will be, an idiot. Karma: Coma (mostly effected by
I'm not exactly sure how best to implement it; but it seems to me that more of our public social processes need a formal mechanism whereby blatantly factually incorrect statements can be challenged and amended. In situations like courtrooms, political debates, news shows, and whatnot, people can and do just say things that are trivially, demonstrably wrong all the time.
There are already some fine mechanisms in place that have been tested for centuries.
In courts: Cross-examination, witnesses for the other side, contempt-of-court citations, perjury charges (to name just the big four). This is what a court is ABOUT - holding an argument between two opposing sides to get to the truths that have a bearing on the issue in question.
In political debate and public political statements: Rebuttals by opponents, fact-checking and follow-on stories by a free press.
A free press is not intended to promote every press outlet getting all the facts right (even if what is right WASN'T subject to disagreement.) It's about eliminating governmental roadblocks to publication of varying points of view, in the hope that, among these biased outlets, most information and viewpoints of significance will find an outlet somewhere. (Unfortunately the dreadfully-expensive former mainstream media has fallen into a very few hands - and thus shows very few viewpoints and interpretations, and filters out or distorts much of the information of interest. But that's why the internet is replacing it.)
Just as the price of freedom is letting other people do things you like, the price of free speech is letting other people SAY things you don't like. That happens to include spin, euphemisms, and outright lies.
Restricting the debate to some perception of "truth" implies having a group of people who make the call on what is true, with the power to interfere with the publication of information and opinion that does not agree with their call. Oops!
Meanwhile, since people will continue to lie, IMHO it's just as well that they often do so in public, where others can sometimes identify their "errors" and publish them as well. This lets those watching get practice at detecting and rejecting such lies.
A successful truth-squad scheme would be like protecting your kid against contagious diseases - only to have him fall seriously ill when he finally leaves home due to an inadequately trained immune system.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Just as the price of freedom is letting other people do things you [DON'T] like, the price of free speech is letting other people SAY things you don't like.
(GOTTA hit "preview" more often....)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
IANAL - this is an ignorant question -
If SCO is under bankruptcy protection (which I think they are?) then if the decision in this case goes against them will they have to pay any money or will Novell be spending attorney fees for bragging rights alone?
Thanks in advance to whomever answers.
I get it! I GET IT! Zarro Boogs found!
BOFH: On the brink
Always makes me laugh!
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
Speaking of that, I'm of the opinion that Hilary Huckabee's primary purpose to ensure that McCain wins if Obama wins the nomination. She's dividing the party much as Huckabee divided the Republicans forcing Romney out. I think that she'd rather have McCain win than Obama if she is not nominated.
go figure.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
UnixWare is just another flavor of Unix, like SCO OpenServer, IBM AIX, or SUN Solaris. SCO's problem is that they totally realized this, that is why they always maintained they owned the SVRX copyrights. I think they should be locked up for perjury. Now after the court ruled that Novell retained the copyrights, SCO is still trying the same deal by claiming that UnixWare is just the next version of SVRX. It's absurd.
Here's how it plays out.
Tomorrow, trial ends. In a few days or weeks, Judge Kimball renders a decision, which will be some dollar amount SCO has to pay to Novell.
The payment issue goes to bankruptcy court. Novell is now the lead creditor and can strongly influence the bankruptcy process.
SCO management tries something else in bankruptcy court, and it goes nowhere. The U.S. Bankruptcy Trustee is already fed up with SCO. The trustee's representative actually said "I don't think this case can take a fourth act", and started talking about plans to kick SCO management out and put a court-appointed fiduciary in.
The bankruptcy judge pulls the plug and puts SCO in liquidation. SCO management is fired. The U.S. Trustee puts a receiver in. The creditors divvy up the assets. SCO ceases to exist.
Suddenly a little window into the MS-Novell cross-licensing deal opens just a crack. Something has always scratched a little in the back of my mind about how it came to pass that MS agreed to endorse & distribute Novell's Suse... ...& send Novell regular fat cheques for the privilege.
oops! did someone back the wrong horsie? Bill's Hollywood buds really should have said something don't you think?
Always root for the ones with the white hats. They get to ride off into the sunset with the girl.
thx e
If it quacks like a duck . . .
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
"Singing hi, hi, hey, it's a watery day
"On my way to an unhappy grave."
- Iggy Pop, "The Ballad of Cookie McBride"
You'd have to show that he deliberately lied
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