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Final Judgment — SCO Loses, Owes $3,506,526
Xenographic writes "SCO has finally lost to Novell, now that Judge Kimball has entered final judgment against SCO. Of course, this is SCO we're talking about. There's still the litigation in bankruptcy court, which allowed this case to resume so that they could figure out just how much SCO owes, which is $3,506,526, if I calculated the interest properly, $625,486.90 of which will go into a constructive trust. And then there's the possibility that SCO could seek to have the judgment overturned in the appeals courts, or even the Supreme Court when that fails. Of course, they need money to do that and they don't really have much of that any more. Remember how Enderle, O'Gara and company told us that SCO was sure to win? I wonder how many people have emailed them to say, 'I told you so.'"
Good DAY, sir!
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
There is no "finally" with SCO
Can't wait to hear the last SCO story. Barring appeals, I really hope this is it.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Seriously... isn't SCO just like the Energizer Bunny. I keep hearing that we've heard the last of these pukes, and then I hear it again, and again, and again...
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
Of course, they need money to do that and they don't really have much of that any more.
They could always apply for a government bailout package.
Now can we dismember the corpse, seal it in a hardwood box, put the box 12 feet under ground, cover it with at least a couple of tons of concrete, and then build a parking lot over the spot?
I don't want any chance of this zombie coming back again and demanding royalties.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
Anyone that would write an article extolling his Ferrari branded laptop and how the prancing horse logo adds raw ultimate power should never be taken seriously.
I guess some people do listen to that hack.
Well, perhaps a few less are listening to him now.
*shrug*
What about SCO's suit against IBM which started this entire mess? I assume that that is still going on.
SCO gets a final judgement and loses $3.5m. Someone (Missouri) finally files a RICO suit against the RIAA. Our do-nothing Congress actually gets the balls enough to stand up to the automotive industry.
At this point I'm halfway expecting to see a copy of Duke Nukem Forever in my stocking.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Don't forget the garlic you need to put in the coffin.
And make sure and kill any ghoul servants. They're always trying to resurrect their masters.
I suggest you start by a scheme of napalm applied liberally to the offices of their legal representation.
I've been waiting such a long time to afford one of these to try that Linux thing legally.
@neonux
I wonder about those companies who paid the SCO license fees to use Linux? Are they free now to sue SCO for the license fees they have paid?
Proverbs 21:19
I am sure it does sting, considering they have spent quite a bit of that money on lawyers, corporate executive benefits, etc.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
How much did it cost to defeat SCO and stop their nonsense? I'd be shocked if the legal bills on just the Novell/IBM side were under $10M.
The system worked once, at least in rendering the right decision. But few can afford to spend the amount of money this took.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Shampoo invented sliced bread and the wheel. Everything that Shampoo has invented is just in thought and is not produced for lack of money. These inventions are property of Shampoo and are to be patented, copyrighted and trademarked under the name: Shampoo.
I thought it was extremely gratifying to look at the graph of the stock price and see that Yahoo had thoughtfully provided some space on the y axis for negative values.
Find free books.
So they now owe Novell $3.5 million or so. A look at their June '08 financials ( http://finance.google.com/finance?hl=en&fkt=917&fsdt=2133&q=SCOX&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=we ) makes it look like SCO is currently worth $8.96 million. Of course, then they have $5.85 million in current liabilities. Add in this $3.5 million and SCO's wallet runs dry (and then some). Of course, this doesn't take into account liabilities that they don't need to pay back immediately. Things like that will come up in any bankruptcy hearing.
The end result is that the amount of the award is basically meaningless. Novell may not see that entire figure (if anything) due to SCO going bankrupt. It's the ruling itself that is important. All of SCO's claims were knocked down. Novell's claims were either upheld, made moot by further developments, or voluntarily dismissed. SCO got beat down hard and I don't think they'll be getting back up anytime soon.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
YAY! :D
I wonder if there will be a point that Novell can force SCO into an involuntary Chapter 7 (liquidation) bankruptcy? Especially in light of the ruling that this money isn't a "normal" debt but a "conversion" - does that take it outside of what the bankruptcy court can protect?
Nuke them from space... It's the only way to be sure.
The sad part being that the old SCO and its UNIX had to be affiliated with the litigation hound that SCO is today...or was yesterday.
The $3.5M exceeds their current market cap. which appears to be only $2.81M. (pretty far fall from the $2.54B they had in 2000.)
Don't quite know what that means but I'm hoping it means the judgment effectively wipes them off the map entirely.
I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
Remember how Enderle, O'Gara and company told us that SCO was sure to win? I wonder how many people have emailed them to say, 'I told you so.'"
Agreed - these tech pundits were complete tools. O'Gara was shallow enough to stalk Pamela Jones of Groklaw in 2005 and publish alleged photos of her apartment. Only Daniel Lyons (he of the Fake Steve) later admitted he was wrong.
But this gets into a bigger pet peeve of mine: the tendency of people to disregard details in pursuit of what they wish were true. These pundits really wanted Linux to fail massively, either because their bread and butter was covering the developments of Microsoft and other proprietary OS vendors or because they equated Linux and free software with anti-capitalism. This led a lot of these shrills to cling to a very silly, unsubstantiated lawsuit long after it became clear that SCO had no concrete evidence to present in court and clearly hadn't thought through licensing considerations (BSD-licensed code in both Linux and System V, for example).
Many people really don't like delving into the details before forming an opinion and sticking to it. See also: religion, politics.
And that pretty much wraps it up. Now I need a new name...
0xB315AA8D852DCD3F3DCA578FD2E0BF88
McBride and his cronies my be at the moment... but SCO the organization is not. SCO has been bleeding worse than a freshly-amputated pig, with no signs of slowing down its losses. Nobody (especially in this economy) would want to buy such a toxic and radioactive property.
I also suspect that whoever is left holding the by-now worthless SCO stock would have little trouble in finding a contingency lawyer willing to sue McBride (and his buddies) personally for fiscal irresponsibility.
There is also the chance that the SEC may get in on the act as well.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Thank you for wasting five years of the Linux community's time and casting a shadow over the legitimacy of the world's countless open-source projects.
I think that was the point. B-(
(Or what became the point after they got caught in their own legal machine and people whose business models were threatened by Open Source saw the opportunity to hurt the competition by funding the suit to keep it alive. IMHO it started as a rent-seeking extortion scheme by people who bought into a dying company and picked the wrong victim.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
What about all those companies that paid those don't-sue-us fees to SCO back in 2002? Are they going to step forward and demand their money back, now that the entire basis for this shakedown has been invalidated? And what about companies like Chrysler which also won against SCO? It seems to me they didn't get as much press as the IBM-SCO case did.
One might also ask, whither Microsoft, now that their $86 million investment in Baystar has turned out to be a complete waste. Shouldn't some executive's head roll for this? God, if someone can waste that much money at Microsoft and get away with it, they must be either Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates, either of whom is too powerful to reprimand.
I will say, SCO in its day was very intimidating, with Darl Bride as an eloquent and persuasive spokesman. His pronouncements sounded factual and reasonable, until people like Groklaw looked behind the curtain and showed us the truth. Well, it's just a testament to the power and resiliency of the open source community that Linux and friends will be around long after the world has forgotten what SCO was.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Back then, 50M bucks was a lot of money.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This time for sure, really really, we promise after burring them 9 feet under, just this last little side arm remaining..
whither Microsoft, now that their $86 million investment in Baystar has turned out to be a complete waste.
Ummmm, that $86 million was the best money MSFT spent since the $50,000 for QDOS. The chilling effect that the SCO suit produced for the Linux community was huge, and bought MSFT a lot of extra time. And you can't even begin to imagine the degree to which it has slowed innovation in IBM Software Group. IBM engineers can't post without 10 person-months of review from Legal.
Would that be jail time calling? Here's to hoping.
I want to know how much these pirates bilked Joe Investor for. Furthermore, I hope both IBM and Novell are interested in cooperating with bodies such as the SEC in holding SCO and Canopy management personally responsible for any and all wrongdoing, including both legal malpractice and stock manipulation, during the SCO race towards infamy.
A constructive trust is a trust (a legal duty to a beneficiary by the person in possession of something) that has been created by a court. There are many types of trust, but they all essentially mean the same: There is something (in trust) that you never had the authority over in the first place because it belonged to someone else (the beneficiary).
As an example, in many places a constructive trust in bankruptcy exists over employee wages such that employees have a superpriority over other creditors (i.e. employees get all their money before creditors get any), but further a the thing held in trust (wages) that was previously given away (to pay creditors) can actually be taken back from subsequent possessors ("restitution"). In other words, anyone given anything by an insolvent (that state of not being able to pay bills that typically precedes a declaration of bankruptcy) company may have to give it up so that employees can get their wages held in trust. Employment law varies wildly- many jurisdictions don't enact a trust- but it's a decent example, easy to relate to.
In the SCO case the trust is over funds, meaning the court has said (by declaring the construction of a trust) that the beneficiary (Novell) of the trust can "follow the money" from SCO to whomever may now hold it because SCO never had a right to the funds in the first place. That may include wages to directors, bank transfers, rent, etc. Further, if SCO is unable to pay the money, and it cannot be traced, anyone that encouraged SCO to spend money that SCO didn't have a right to may have committed a wrong (intentionally, having been complicit or willfully blind) related to the breach of trust.
These are just common law principles for the edification of anyone interested, and the law may very well be quite different in Utah (or most anywhere else). But it's also an oculus into why a constructive may be relevant- and it's not well explained in the article.
For trying to sell us "Linux Licenses" in order to use Linux legally. Turns out they had no legal basis for those licenses, which is of course "fraud" via a civil court lawsuit.
Now how many Linux users are there? Let's get $1000 each.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I don't know this "hp" metric you are referring to.
Horsepower.
Can you explain it in Library of Congresses (LOC)?
It depends on how many BD-Rs you can fit in a covered wagon.
Well, no, not finally. They've got more losing to do in the Suse arbitration. And they've got a lot of losing to do yet in the IBM case, as well as the Autozone and Red Hat cases.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
There remain a few dedicated and extraordinarily talented kernel engineers embedded within the parasitized husk that now goes by the name "SCO". Among them are people who started work at Bell Labs decades ago, and have thereafter worked continuously on the same evolving UNIX code base through numerous renamings and acquisitions. They have been ill-served by their management for years, and while some ignoramuses will consider them tainted by their association with SCO, they have my greatest respect.
I now return you to the usual hate-fest already in progress.
None of this matters: Darl McBride et al were still personally enriched by all this shenanigans, and they are all still alive and able to run off somewhere else and pull yet more shenanigans.
The bad CORPORATION was slapped, but its ORGANS still won and will get "transplanted" somewhere else. Until we get rid of the ethical shield that corporate law provides, people like this will still rule the roost.
Not even Henry Paulson?
Squirrel!
At long last Novell and Sun have the opportunity to kiss and make up over their little Open Solaris argument. Or not.
Will they? Sun paid millions for the right to open Solaris to a company that was suing Novell. That money was rightly Novell's, as the right was theirs to sell and not SCO's. That money prolonged the unjust suit for a long time, costing Novell more than just the lost revenue, but also legal fees for their own lawyers to defend against the very lawyers funded by Sun's investment.
This should be interesting, but we're not going to get the real story - just the announcement. How forgiving is Novell?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Most of the engineers did find jobs elsewhere. Those who remained did so despite salary cuts and other hardships, including the knowledge that basement-dwellers everywhere scorned them for their association with the corporate raiders and lawsuit-happy lawyers who had taken over the company.
Perhaps after having spent decades of their life putting heart and soul into something they were proud of, they were hoping against hope that it could be kept alive, instead of walking away and watching their legacy, the direct descendent of the original Bell Labs UNIX, get flushed down the toilet.
SCO isn't dead until someone drives a wooden stake through it's heart.
Novell actually countersued SCO. SCO had sued them first for publicly contradicting SCO's claim to hold the Unix copyrights.
Oh, and Novell's countersuit included the claims that SCO did not have the rights to make the deals they did with Sun and Microsoft without Novell's approval.
The judge agreed with Novell on the copyrights, the license payments, and the Sun deal, but not the Microsoft deal.
SCO lost a lot of ammunition against IBM due to the Novell rulings as well as rulings in IBM itself, but not all the claims have been lost yet, and IBM has also countersued.
So, don't put the popcorn away yet. More smackdowns of SCO are yet to come.
"I am sure it does sting, considering they have spent quite a bit of that money on lawyers, corporate executive benefits, etc."
That's not the definition of "sting", if spending that money before the ship sank was one of the objectives in the first place. Companies aren't "people", they are an utterly expendable construct. Accomplish objectives, get paid, move on. A few million dollars seems like a lot to the peasantry, but for real players it's pocket money.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."