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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.
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.
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*
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.
This ain't it.
Novell is done (modulo appeals and the arbitration -- see below).
Still pending
* Bankruptcy
* SuSE UnitedLinux arbitration (stayed pending resolution of BK)
* IBM's counterclaims (stayed pending resolution of BK)
* RedHat (stayed pending IBM)
* AutoZone (technically still alive, don't believe anyone's ever going to finish it. Stayed pending IBM, I believe).
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
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
Many times when companies die (for legal reasons) the Management just creates a new company.
You mean like when SCO setup a company in the far-east and tried to transfer their assets to it?
Or like when SCO proposed splitting its company in two, with one part taking all the assets, and the other part taking the legal claims?
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.
On error resume next
I can't call that English
And that pretty much wraps it up. Now I need a new name...
0xB315AA8D852DCD3F3DCA578FD2E0BF88
Back then, 50M bucks was a lot of money.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This is close to being it...they're guilty of conversion. That transforms them into a priority creditor with a 3.5 million dollar claim to things before anything else.
I doubt SCOX could mount an appeal effort. If they could, it's going to have to be something where they had some tidbit of the law overlooked where they didn't get a fair trial, because there's nothing else for them to actually appeal otherwise.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
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.
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.
In 2002, SCO had a new CEO, Darl McBride. SCO wasn't doing so well; their primary product was a version of Unix that ran on Intel machines, but they were competing with Linux for that same market. And Linux is free, and the new hotness in Unix-style operating systems.
Somehow Darl learned that SCO owned Unix, i.e. the copyrights to the source. And he was led to believe that the code in Unix had leaked into Linux. So he came up with a new money making plan:
This wouldn't work very well for most customers, since SCO's market was mostly small businesses.
But there was a big fish he could go after: IBM. You see, IBM was a licensee of the AT&T Unix that SCO owned. IBM derived its own versions of Unix from it. And as part of that, IBM enhanced its own Unix with new technologies. And IBM also contributed those same new technologies, which IBM had developed on its own, to Linux.
So Darl's theory was that SCO not only owned the rights to its own Unix, and to the AT&T Unix that it had acquired, but also to every version of Unix that was derived from them by a licensee. So, he could sue IBM for leaking SCO's property to Linux, and he could sue any company that used Linux (unless they paid SCO an extortion fee not to).
The SCO Group sued IBM for $1 billion dollars!
(A common theory is that SCO expected IBM to just buy SCO to make the problem go away, thus enabling Darl and the other SCO executives to cash in their SCOX shares at a profit.)
We'll skip all the counter lawsuits, ridiculous claims by SCO, Microsoft's part in it, the suits by SCO against other customers, and get to the best part:
Remember that it all started because the SCO Group's predecessor (The Santa Cruz Operation) had purchased the AT&T Unix copyrights from Novell. Well it turns out that they didn't. What they purchased was the right to market and license it. And to collect licensing fees, for which they had to pay Novell a portion. They did not actually own the copyrights or any substantial amount of intellectual property.
So Novell sued SCO, claiming that a) SCO didn't own anything, and b) SCO owed Novell money, because the SCO Group hadn't been paying Novell their share of the licensing fees.
Novell won, and SCO went bankrupt.