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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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
"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.
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?
No! You must kill it! Kill It With FIRE!!!
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
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.
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?
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.
That's what we've been asking SCO for the past 7 years.
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...
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!
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.
...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!
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.
A bullet.
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 +
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.