Slashdot Mirror
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."
Mmmmmm, that's some good perjury!
;)
Except, to prove perjury you would have to prove that he was knowingly making false statements, or in other worlds that he knew what he was talking about and just chose to say the opposite of what's true.
So basically you would have to prove that Darl is not an idiot. Good luck with that
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."
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.
True, but thanks to Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, as CEO he had to attest to the truthfulness of any financial statements. So as Novell pointed out, he was lying then or he's lying now.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
..UnixWars Episode V..Novell Strikes Back.
Actually, Darl managed to sell quite a few shares between the time the lawsuit was announced and when the stock tanked. That is, during the time when he was telling the press about the "rocket scientists" who found the "millions of lines of code".
--- http://davidnehme.blogspot.com
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.
No they can't.
The enemies of Democracy are
We can issue everyone in the court one of those little suction cup guns and put color coded flags on the end of the cup. When you shoot the person on the stand with the gun, you have to present irrefutable proof that they are wrong in what they said. If that person gets too many hits, they are asked to stand down.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
...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
The part where they determined whether or not (and how much) SCO owned Unix is over. Now that it has been determined that Novell owns the copyrights, the questions are:
1. Did SCO sell Unix licenses and keep money that should have gone to Novell?
2. If so, how much of this does SCO owe Novell?
The main sales in this trial are the Microsoft and Sun ones. There's something like $20 million that SCO might owe Novell. (Money that SCO doesn't have even if they sold every last chair in the office.)
SCO insists, however, that the licenses weren't SCOsource licenses and thus weren't ones that Novell would be owed money for. Darl testified to this on the stand. However, SCO's own SEC filing insists that the money was SCOsource. So either SCO lied in an SEC filing or Darl perjured himself. Either way, Darl and SCO have only the barest shreds of a case left. (Unfortunately for them, that "barest shred" relies on the past few years of case history vanishing magically.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
So now we understand the motives behind his actions for all this time. He wanted us to all scream about how stupid he is, and then submit the comments from /. as evidence that he didn't perjure himself.
My God, he is a genius.*
* this is the first step of destroying this evil plan
Sorry if I seem insensitive. I do not wish rape - prison or otherwise - on anyone. I am only wishing federal prison upon him for the (apparent) perjury and insider trading.
... well, that's not up to me.
I'm not saying that I want him to *literally* get screwed. Metaphorically, sure. It's about time he and the other greedy, souless suits at SCO receive a taste of what they dished out in their vicious, deceitful battle against Linux and the software industry in general. "We can only hope" they see prison time, because I think these millionaire weasels will probably wriggle out of it one way or another. What happens after they get there
Anyway, since I assume you didn't see the movie, the pound-you-in-the-ass bit is a quote from Office Space. I probably got it a little wrong. If I did, I'm sure a trivia nazi, er, I mean, helpful slashdotter, will show up and correct me.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
You're close, but you're overlooking one detail. The minute the judge in Utah uttered the word "conversion", SCO went rushing off to the bankruptcy court as fast as they could scuttle in the hopes of more delay. Novell isn't going to get in line as a debtor. They are, basically, the victims of theft; the money in question was never SCO's to begin with. The resulting scenario will probably play out fairly close to the way you described, except that repaying Novell is going to be a much higher priority that any mere debtor, and there's a good chance that liquidation will follow almost immediately. Criminal charges are not out of the question either.
If you go to Vegas and blow your life savings, then file bankruptcy, your mortgage company and credit card company will appear as debtors, and will try to get whatever they can. If you also took the contents of your employer's safe before heading out to the desert, though, your employer is not going to appear as a creditor--not even as the "lead creditor"--and things are going to be a whole lot more serious.