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Novell Wins vs. SCO

Aim Here writes "According to Novell's website, and the Salt Lake Tribune, the jury in the SCO v. Novell trial has returned a verdict: Novell owns the Unix copyrights. This also means that SCO's case against IBM must surely collapse too, and likely the now bankrupt SCO group itself. It's taken 7 years, but the US court system has eventually done the right thing ..." No doubt this is the last we will ever hear of any of this.

36 of 380 comments (clear)

  1. Seven years for eight hours work by symbolset · · Score: 5, Insightful

    But at least that part is over. There's still a little cleaning up to do but this one could be over and done with finally this summer. If you like Groklaw, head over and give PJ a pat on the back for her long perseverence.

    Congrats to Novell's legal team.

    /SCO die,die,die!

    --
    Help stamp out iliturcy.
    1. Re:Seven years for eight hours work by MightyMartian · · Score: 4, Insightful

      PJ did the FOSS community an extraordinary service. I suspect she also did IBM a great service. One thing is sure, whatever her motives, she's ten times the person a worthless little apologist like you is. Go away you piece of garbage.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    2. Re:Seven years for eight hours work by adwarf · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Shorts closing their position?

    3. Re:Seven years for eight hours work by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      So... "reasonable people" are either trolls or bat-shit crazy?

    4. Re:Seven years for eight hours work by _Sprocket_ · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I can't prove that you exist.

    5. Re:Seven years for eight hours work by NickFortune · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I am pleased to see you taking this with such good grace. A lesser man might well come across as bitter and vindictive under such circumstances as these. How nice that you found it within yourself to rise above all that.

      --
      Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
    6. Re:Seven years for eight hours work by spun · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Who the fuck cares what you say or what your lame ass rationale is? You're an SCO shill because I say you are, bitch.

      --
      - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
    7. Re:Seven years for eight hours work by idontgno · · Score: 3, Insightful

      What position?

      Ownership of Unix copyrights?

      What happens if they start abusing it? Let's see... who's infringing on the Unix source code copyrights... Oh, yeah, no one.

      So, um... nothing happens. No one is trespassing on the sacred Unix Copyrights, so Novell can yell at no one to get off their lawn.

      --
      Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
    8. Re:Seven years for eight hours work by tomhudson · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You're a jerk.

      Shameless publicity whore. She profited in a grand way from this too-doo. Point. Of. Fact.

      Absolutely false. Groklaw doesn't run ads, and the donations go to things like court transcripts.

      And "who is PJ"? Just some Small Town Paralegal *that just happened to be interested in Linux*? - YEAH RIGHT. I got a bridge.

      ... because a woman can never grok linux ... riiiight. Go back in your basement.

    9. Re:Seven years for eight hours work by jcochran · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Oh? Let's see you draw a triangle on a globe. Place 1 vertex at the north pole. Draw a line from there to the equator. Now go back to the north pole and draw another line starting there at 90 degrees from the 1st line. Draw that line also to the equator. Finally, connect the 2 endpoints sitting on the equator together with a 3rd line.

      Now measure the angles at each vertex of the triangle you just drew. Add up the angles and tell me what their sum is.

      270 you say? How about that. Seems that not all triangles add up to 180.....
      Now go away troll.

    10. Re:Seven years for eight hours work by Nefarious+Wheel · · Score: 2, Insightful
      I'd be happier if I personally held the wooden stake and watched SCO turn into a cloud of dust.

      Congratulations to all, with special mention of honour to PJ and Groklaw.

      --
      Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
  2. Novell Wins by Prien715 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Novell wins...fatality!

    Hopefully they'll finally die. But surely they'll be back in a George Romero movie.

    --
    -- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
  3. More Than McBride by Frosty+Piss · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Remember, It's not *just* Darl McBride, it's also the people that allowed him to do this. That includes the rest of the board and the stockholder of SCO. McBride might be the public figure-head, but he didn't do it on his own.

    --
    If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
    1. Re:More Than McBride by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Aaaaand we shouldn't forget the other interested parties. Who knows why Microsoft would fund a litigious shell of a company, but those who forget it are likely to suffer if they start trusting Microsoft too much.

      --
      Qxe4
  4. What? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "It's taken 7 years, but the US court system has eventually done the right thing..."

    This. Is a contradiction. Justice delayed is justice denied. Always.

  5. Who's next? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Microsoft got good mileage out of SCO in their attack on Linux. Wonder who will do their bidding next?

  6. Re:Winning in this case... by durdur · · Score: 3, Insightful

    IBM almost certainly doesn't care about the cost, which isn't even a day's worth of revenue for them. They have filed counter-claims against SCO, and in theory could win damages, but since SCO has few assets and many creditors, they won't get paid. In a fairer world, SCO would have had to answer for its baseless campaign against Linux users much earlier. But they didn't - they got to put the victims of this campaign on the defensive, first.

  7. Re:Doubt it by Abalamahalamatandra · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "finds a way to remove Darl's vocal cords"?

    There are several ways to do that which are quite well known. It's a testament to our community that no-one has implemented any.

  8. Re:More Microsoft Than McBride by walterbyrd · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This has been a Microsoft smear campaign again Linux all along, and it's not over. Why do you think that MS has been funding the entire thing?

  9. No doubt this is the last we will ever hear... by Ralph+Spoilsport · · Score: 3, Insightful
    of any of this?

    No! You must kill it! Kill It With FIRE!!!

    --
    Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
  10. Re:Not completely over by mapsjanhere · · Score: 2, Insightful

    All appeals are paid for, SCO can sue until the SCOTUS tells them to get lost. Even if the bankruptcy court now moves them to chapter 7, some mystery buyer can still pay $1 for the rights to the lawsuit, and pursue it as successor in interest. The fat lady is hoarse from all the singing she's done in this case.

    --
    I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
  11. Re:Winning in this case... by Volante3192 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yep: even if it is technically cheaper to play ball with an extortionist, neither IBM nor Novell will do this.

    Open the doors to one, and you'll have others knocking on the door. Pound that first one into a fine powder, the survival instinct of the others will kick in.

  12. Why does PJ matter so much to you? by walterbyrd · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Fuck PJ. She's a publicity whore no better than Darl. Shameless publicity whore. She profited in a grand way from this too-doo. Point. Of. Fact.
    And "who is PJ"? Just some Small Town Paralegal *that just happened to be interested in Linux*? - YEAH RIGHT. I got a bridge.
    Reasonable people understand that PJ works for IBM. Reasonable people understand that there is no "PJ", that IBM spun up a screen name and went to town.

    Even if your claims about PJ were true (and I do say if) what difference would it make? Why do you care? Why are you so angry?

    Can you point out anything that PJ posted that is not true, or not fair?

    1. Re:Why does PJ matter so much to you? by davidbofinger · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Reasonable people understand that there is no "PJ", that IBM spun up a screen name and went to town.

      In this forum PJ is defined by her work on groklaw so she can't help being real. What's really claimed here is that her biological component is other than we'd thought, but her biological component isn't something we've ever interacted with so why should we care? It's probably a big deal to PJ's personal friends, lovers, family, church choir colleagues, volleyball team and pets but to people who know her only through the web it's not clear it means anything. If PJ was a dog, and for all I know she is, would it change anything about her work?

      It's a lot like the old claim that The Iliad and Odyssey were written, not by Homer, but by another Greek of the same name.

  13. Re:Horray! by coastwalker · · Score: 3, Insightful

    All that we can be sure of is that several million dollars of Microsoft money will be going to a few private individuals for the fantastic work they have done in destroying the reputation of the open source concept.Ask any drone in a large company, Open Source is bad news because there are law suits against it. I expect that they can get pretty well paid jobs with Scientology next.

    --
    Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
  14. Re:More Microsoft Than McBride by RobKow · · Score: 3, Insightful

    That's what we've been asking SCO for the past 7 years.

  15. Re:Horray! by NickFortune · · Score: 3, Insightful

    All that we can be sure of is that several million dollars of Microsoft money will be going to a few private individuals for the fantastic work they have done in destroying the reputation of the open source concept

    Waste of money if they do. All this has achieved is to clearly establish that SCO has no claims against Linux users. Well, that's not entirely true; it's also given rise to Groklaw and generally raised awareness of legal matters in the Free Software community. But maybe you're right. Maybe this is the best they could hope to achieve...

    Ask any drone in a large company, Open Source is bad news because there are law suits against it.

    Which is why those misty-eyed dreamers at the London Stock Exchange recently dumped Windows for Linux. But what do they know about the realities of modern business?

    --
    Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
  16. Sorry, gotta disagree.. by schon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    While it may hold true for quick-change artists, it won't stop true sociopaths like Darl McBride.

    Scammers like McBride believe that everyone is as evil as they are, and that if someone else failed, that they just weren't smart enough. Their rationale goes something like "I can see what they did wrong, so therefore I'm smarter than they are, so *my* scam will succeed!"

    Just like career criminals - fines, prison sentences etc. don't act as a deterrent - they do it because they don't believe they'll be caught.

    To this day, Darl believes that IBM is guilty of *something* - and that he only failed because IBM played dirty (see this troll for the "dirty tricks" that IBM used.) The dirty tricks that Darl himself used? (Lies, threats, the entire lawsuit) He believes they were justified because he needed something to fight IBM with.

    There is nothing that will stop a sociopath from being a sociopath. If there was, they wouldn't be sociopaths.

  17. Re:Winning in this case... by MMC+Monster · · Score: 2, Insightful

    First of all, it's practice for the next time.

    Second of all, it's a warning to all others, so there won't be a next time.

    --
    Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
  18. Re:Doubt it by NickFortune · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I still think you're giving him way too much credit. Microsoft found a greedy, overambitious nitwit, dumped a ton of cash on him, and hooked him up with (at the time) the best lawyers money could buy.

    There's nothing admirable about McBride, but let's not go giving him super powers

    --
    Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
  19. 8 hours of jury deliberations means... by christian.einfeldt · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...that even a lay-person jury could see that SCO's case was worthless. I'm a lawyer, and I'm here to state the obvious: juries take longer than 8 hours to decide many petty theft cases. Trustee Cahn, who is effectively running SCO, needs to wake up and smell SCO's dead feet. SCO is dead, dead, dead I say!

  20. So, what does this mean for Solaris? by SEE · · Score: 3, Insightful

    1) The 1994 Sun-Novell license agreement prohibited Sun from disclosing SRVX code for a period of 20 years. It's not 2014 yet.
    2) The jury just said Novell retained copyright to Unix, so SCO had no title to SVRX, and so no power to license SVRX except as provided in the Novell-SCO APA.
    3) Under the APA, SCO "shall not, and shall not have the authority to, amend, modify, or waive any right under or assign any SVRX License without the prior written consent" of Novell.

    As a result, SCO neither had the contractual right (under the APA) nor right of title in SVRX necessary to license the release of any SVRX code by Sun prior to 2014. If there is any SVRX in OpenSolaris, then, Oracle is in violation of its SVRX license agreement with Novell, and its right to distribute Solaris (assuming Solaris contains any SVRX) is, as a result, questionable.

    Now, yes, the 2003 SCO-Sun agreement requires that SCO indemnify Sun against any claims arising under the agreement . . . but SCO is too bankrupt for that indemnity to have much value.

  21. "There is nothing that will stop a sociopath..." by DamnStupidElf · · Score: 3, Insightful

    A bullet.

  22. Re:Pedantary by Bigjeff5 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Three fragments, actually. "Justice delayed is justice denied." was the only complete sentence.

    "This." "Is a contradiction." and "Always." are all fragments.

    --
    Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
  23. Re:Horray! by fwarren · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Which is why those misty-eyed dreamers at the London Stock Exchange recently dumped Windows for Linux. But what do they know about the realities of modern business?

    They know not to trust their data to a system built with Microsoft Technology. Even if the "stellar minds from Microsoft" come and help fine tune it.

    --
    vi + /etc over regedit any day of the week.
  24. Re:Winning in this case... by tcgroat · · Score: 4, Insightful

    For IBM this isn't about winning a settlement. It's about making a public stand: you won't get Big Blue to back down by filing a flimsy lawsuit, and IBM will indemnify and defend their users against such claims even at great expense to themselves. Both IBM's customers and their would-be antagonists will remember this case for a long time to come.