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SCO Zombie Creaks Into Motion Again
phands writes "SCO has moved to partially reopen their 10 year old lawsuit against IBM. Unbelievable! Details at Groklaw."
From the article, quoting SCO's filing: "SCO respectfully requests that the Court rule on IBM’s Motion for Summary Judgment on SCO’s Unfair Competition Claim (SCO’s Sixth Cause of Action), dated September 25, 2006 (Docket No. 782), which motion is directed at the Project Monterey Claim, and IBM’s Motion for Summary Judgment on SCO’s Interference Claims (SCO’s Seventh, Eighth and Ninth Causes of Action), dated September 25, 2006 (Docket No. 783), which motion is directed at the Tortious Interference Claims."
Don't forget to pay your $699 licensing fees you cock-smoking teabaggers!
SCO keeps coming back just like herpes. How is it that they can continue to pay lawyers (or find fools greedy enough) to fund their 'Hail Marry' legal crap?
They are still traded, believe it or not. The bonds issued by the old Czarist regime from almost a century ago. Every time it seems like Russia might ponder thinking about picking them up and honoring them, their value goes up. Mind you, from zero to near zero, but still.
I guess SCO is aiming for the same gambit.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
In 100 years when Linux rules all, the name SCO will be uttered in hushed tones like an unmentionably profane word, told to naughty children by mothers to warn them against Bad Things, and the generic name for products that burned into a black hole of public hatred... "did you see that BeegleSearch did a SCO?".
Time for the cricket bat to put this zombie down for good.
Just bought a new quantum computer, but I'm uncertain how it works.
In a recent interview, Linus expresses his opinions on patents and copyrights and made the following remark about SCO and the US justice system
"SCO was a classic example of that. Where they tried to use copyrights, which turned out to be completely bogus in so many ways, and made it into a nasty legal battle. They lost badly. What was irritating about the whole thing, as an insider knowing about what they claimed was completely bogus, was that it took them 10 years to lose. It is scary. 10 years! I don't know how many hundreds and millions of dollars IBM and Novell spent on fighting completely bogus crap stuff; fighting lawsuits that made no sense. Literally it made no sense what so ever. To the point that it ended up turning out that they did not even own the copyrights that they were claiming, never mind the copyrights they were claiming weren't actually true. Christ what a chaos!"
http://www.muktware.com/news/2866
... No problem, L4D taught us how to deal with this: AIM FOR THE HEAD.
They are just bored! who knows, world's been kind of dull lately.
Shotgun blast to the head, right? But what kind of shotgun do you use for a corporation?
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
"Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!"
Microsoft financed the entire scam. And doesn't it fit the MS MO perfectly? MS is always abusing the legal system to hurt it's competition.
It also fit's the MS MO to pull these legal system scams by proxie. A US federal judge once accused MS of using "Tonya Harding" tactics. At least somebody in the US justice system gets it.
Our legal system is truly broken.
Broken? I don't know: we give everyone a chance to have their day in court ... multiple chances even. You don't want justice (or whatever passes for it nowadays) to be too swift. But you're right: SCO had their chance, they blew it (because they were wrong) and they should just go away. Fact is, had they been left to themselves, they'd have been cremated years ago. The problem is, there are too many powerful entities (Gates, Ballmer, Hell & Co, for one) who see a strategic advantage in continually resurrecting this particular corpse.
I'm sure the Nazgûl are probably thinking "Oh, please. Not again!" right about now.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Double tap.
For exactly this reason
Siblings are using their mom's old car. She doesn't care what any of them do with it. The youngest used it to sell and deliver pizza. His older brother let his friends use it to deliver free pizza in return for free pizza and free recipes. The youngest complained to dad. Dad tells him to GFY. So he complains again, and again, and again. If we are lucky we will get to watch dad beating the shit out of him on youtube.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
You believe that our legal system is broken, based on what? Reading even just the introductory paragraphs of SCO's brief on its motion to reopen the case, you will see that the judge ruled in closing the case that "When the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals has issued its decision in the Novell litigation (No. 10-4122), either party may move the court to re-open the case." SCO is doing exactly what the judge ordered it to do. Groklaw and Slashdot may sensationalize this all they want, but don't let two sensationalist, biased websites convince you that the legal system is broken.
A little more understanding will help, as well. The court in SCO v. IBM did not rule on IBM's motions for summary judgment, by which SCO's claims would be extinguished. It chose not to rule on them until the Novell case was finally decided, on appeal or otherwise. SCO is asking for the court to rule on IBM's motions for summary judgment. It of course wants them to be denied, but how does it prove to you that our legal system broken when someone asks a judge to consider the merits of the opposing party's motions (which has not been done yet) and does exactly what the judge ordered them to do, moving to reopen the case after a related case was over with?
This isn't a case where someone has completely and finally lost and keeps scrounging up cash to pay lawyers to fight. It only looks like that because the people reporting on it haven't bothered to read and understand what is going on before telling you what is going on.
SCO U-Boot has just fired its submarine software patent torpedo..
Not that anyone else even cares any more. Even if SCO were to somehow win everything they ask for in some parallel universe, it wouldn't affect anyone outside the USofA, and there's enough connectivity now that all the data centers running linux could just move north and south of the borders.
So who would that leave? Pretty much nobody.
The whole SCO story isn't all bad, perhaps not bad at all. It has resulted in some pretty important stuff like auditing the Linux code for copyrighted stuff, keeping developers and contributors honest to the code, and really putting these legal issues to test so the rules are clear and hardening Linux while showing that it is a serious player and that large companies can get involved. Linux as a project is absolutely better off for it. Hard times makes does that to stuff, if it doesn't kill you. I thing the battling with Apple will result in the same thing: Less copying/imitating/plagiarism and more innovating. That's what we want, isn't it? New great products, not more of the same?
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
You're missing the point. Lawyers do that all the time because they get caught up in technicalities, and it's why they are so despised. Back away from the case, look at it objectively, and you can see that the legal frameworks surrounding patent and copyright are fundamentally broken. Laws are supposed to come into existence because of a fundamental need to protect. When they become subverted and abused, like the entire "intellectual property" industry has done, they start damaging far more than protecting. In the same way that the First Amendment does not protect you yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater, or threatening to kill someone, patent and copyright law should not protect trolls or obvious implementations.
Your argument largely consists of "this is legal", and while that may be true, that was not the point of the parent post. The point of the parent post was that for this nonsense to continue provides evidence of a fundamentally broken system because it has been many many years, and this case has been dealt setback after setback, yet it's not done. If the system is so overly complex and backlogged that it takes, what, almost a decade for this sort of thing to be resolved, that is a massive problem.
There was a period early on where the lawsuits certainly spooked people, but after it became quite clear that SCO actually had nothing, it became more a mix of incredulity and frustration, in large part that a legal system would actually allow a complainant who had no evidence or basis for their claims could actually keep a case going in the courts for years.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
For me it demonstrates a serious problem, in that a complainant who has no evidence to back up their claims is permitted literally years to gobble up time. There should be a mandatory one week preliminary hearing in such a case where both sides have to provide a reasonably large body of their evidence, and if they cannot, the case is dismissed. If you have evidence, you should be able to summarize it in the space of a week.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The McBride of Frankenstein? :)
The new round of SCO claims is more laughable than the original claims. These new claims deal with the ill-fated Project Monterrey.
Way back in the late 1990s, Project Monterrey was an effort to bring a single Unix that ran on 32-bit and 64-bit. It was supposed to run on POWER, PowerPC, x86 and Itanium. IBM would work on the PowerPC part, Sequent was supposed to bring in multi-processor support, and Santa Cruz would work on IA-32. Intel would help develop Itanium support. The project became large and unwieldy at the same time Linux started gaining traction. IBM bought Sequent in 1999. IBM seeing that the future was Linux and not Project Monterrey declared the project dead in 2000 but not before making all the contributions they felt necessary to complete their end. Itanium was delayed and thus never got much traction. Santa Cruz was bought out by Caldera in 2000 and renamed themselves SCO.
As part of the agreement, all the partners would share in any development efforts. According to SCO, IBM took the Project Monterrey parts and put it in Linux. I think they may even allege they took the Santa Cruz parts. They also accuse IBM of interfering with their efforts in Project Monterrey.
Unfortunately for SCO, there isn't much evidence to support them. Project Monterrey failed because Linux was a far more attractive project with more support and more partners. Project Monterrey would at best be a niche platform especially since Itanium never took off. IBM only sold a few dozen licenses from the project where they normally sell hundreds of thousands of licenses.
Also there is no evidence that IBM took any part of PM and contributed to Linux much less Santa Cruz parts. Again SCO is vague about what parts but SMP, NUMA, and JFS are possible candidates. However all these predate PM with SMP and NUMA coming from Sequent and JFS coming from IBM's OS/2 efforts. The disagreement if the parts don't involve these revolve whether the PM license allowed IBM to take. SCO first has to identify the parts and then place them as originating from their part of PM.
To show how misguided SCO's claims are they have this bit.
The fact that Novell waived those contract claims years after the disclosures started does not diminish the impropriety of the disclosures or the damage they caused to SCO.
In laymen's terms, SCO says just because Novell waived any IBM transgression in 2003, that doesn't SCO wasn't hurt when IBM transgressed on Novell's rights. So SCO is forgetting again the fact that SCO never owned the copyrights so they absolutely no complaint in the matter between IBM and Novell. Only Novell does and they waived it. It doesn't matter when as SCO is not a party to it.
Indeed, insofar as IBM requires the waiver to avoid liability for breach of contract, Novell's waiver only highlights the wrongfulness of IBM's conduct. In addition, the Tortious Interference Claims are also based on IBM's disclosure of confidential UnixWare technologies that SCO developed after 1995 and that are unrelated to IBM's AT&T licensing agreements for UNIX.
SCO tries to imply that IBM may have transgressed on Novell thus they are likely to transgress on their claims. The problem is that SCO never had any proof that IBM transgressed on Novell at all. Novell never considered what IBM did to be a transgression. Also any transgression IBM did to SCO must be proved. They keep forgetting the "proof" part.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
By popular demand!
Jack Thompson is not allowed to practice law anymore so it will be interesting to watch if they did.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
This is NOT a drill !
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
With all the license fees MS are collecting for Android, MS was able to do directly what they were unable to do via SCO. This is about the SCO henchmen getting their cut after MS finally found an M.O. that worked.
The idea of the scox-scam was never to win a jury verdict. Nor was the idea to collect fees for Linux (I called twice, and asked to be invoiced, scox refused to do so).
The idea behind the scox-scam was to smear linux, and intimidate some people away from using linux, and to scare some companies away from contributing to linux.
Think about it: why did scox (really Microsoft) sue IBM? Why not redhat? IBM is not even have a linux distribution. The reason is: IBM had just contributed a file system to Linux. And Microsoft wants other companies to know that if they contribute to Linux, they better be ready to spend $100 million defending that decision. I would bet this tactic actually worked.
Follow the money. Who stands to benefit from smearing Linux? Caldera/Scox was a linux company. But scox made a lot more $$ accepting MS loot, than from trying to sell Linux.
I called scox two times, a few months apart, and asked to be sent an invoice. Scox refused to do so.
The first time I called, scox seemed bewildered that anybody would even call about it.
I don't understand why anyone sane would pay Microsoft one cent for using Android.
MS simply has nothing on that system. It's a signal of how broken the system is. If you are a big enough bully, you can get paid for other people's work!
And that is scary.
That they both are of a darker hue than I am makes not a jot of difference.
Along the lines of George Costanza's script where a guilty party was sentenced by a judge to be a butler, the judge in this case should sentence SCO or UnXis to complete Monterrey on just the Itanium. After all, everybody has been deserting that platform in droves, just like they've been deserting SCO, so SCO should be asked to port every piece of software they own - SCO OSE, Unixware, Monterrey, Vision and everything else - to the Itanium. In fact, sentence them to developing software for only Itanium all their lives. So that the platform, instead of being restricted to just HP/UX and Debian, will get another Unix to run on it. Oh, and make sure it's all native EPIC code - no x86 emulation or anything of that sort.
I can't think of a more fitting punishment for SCO
Where is SCO/UnXis based? Wasn't it in Santa Cruz (hence the name)?
Who would that be? Everyone currently running for the whitehouse has a political agenda, including Cain.
Back away from the case, look at it objectively, and you can see that the legal frameworks surrounding patent and copyright are fundamentally broken.
That would be be hard to see in this case because there are no patent or copyright issues involved.
TSCOG (SCOX) hold no patents and own no copyright to UNIX code.
SCO as a company has sold most of its assets, fired most of its employees, and changed its name. They've been litigating now for nearly 10 years, with little to show for it. During this period McBride ran a previously well-regarded company in to the ground. Here the thing I find most strange is that the owners didn't step-in earlier to remove McBride and his army of cunts. How do companies have any reasonable expectation of reclaiming costs of such an extended period of legal bullshit when the plaintiff appears willing to continue suing while they still have enough money to buy tea bags for the office? IBM can absorb this, smaller business could not. Where does this end? Can a judge at some point tell SCO's lawyers to fuck off. For bonus points, is there a legal way to have McBride kicked to death by his own grandchildren?
Surely a corporation that is literally not able to do anything but dredge up old lawsuits that have already been adjudicated to death cannot be seen as being for the public good. Just revoke the charter and be done with it.
Besides that, shouldn't they have already put everything including old business cards and leftover trade show swag up on ebay to pay their existing debts? Where/how does SCO have any money to pay someone to oversee this crap? Surely at most they should have one person (working from a home office) part time to oversee the shutdown.
Will some IBM lawyer kindly put a shotgun shell through this zombie's head once and for all?
Buy SCO's client list, disband SCO's board, take away their DNS entries and set Derle's tomb on fire so we can be done with this crap.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
For me it demonstrates a serious problem, in that a complainant who has no evidence to back up their claims is permitted literally years to gobble up time. There should be a mandatory one week preliminary hearing in such a case where both sides have to provide a reasonably large body of their evidence, and if they cannot, the case is dismissed. If you have evidence, you should be able to summarize it in the space of a week.
Depends. One week simply might not be enough time to determine the merits of a case that involves thousands of pages of contracts and involves multiple facts of the law. If SCO had happened to be in the right, we'd would have wanted them to have every chance of success.
Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that the legal system doesn't have any real defense against large-scale corporate abusers. The can bury their opponents and the court in paperwork. At a certain point, though, I agree. Enough is enough.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The McBride of Frankenstein? :)
Well, if you consider Microsoft to be an unstoppable abomination that stumbles around crushing everything in its path, all the while moaning, "Linux ... baaad!" then yeah. Pretty much.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Groklaw merely reported what SCOX did. One of the main reasons SCOX lost was because GL kept exposing their lies to the cold light of analysis and logic. If that hadn't happened, it's quite possible that SCOX may even have got away with some or all of their extortion scam. Instead of that, SCOX is dead, and GL is archived at the Library of Congress. And, if you are unhappy with lots of discussion and dissection of this news here, why did *you* contribute to it?
multiple facts of the law.
Facets, dammit. Facets.. Where's the damn "edit" button when you need it.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
You-know-who, who-must-not-be-named?
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
SCO has never had trouble providing evidence. Every time they file, they provide reams and reams of evidence. All of their evidence is garbage, but it requires the court to *read* and *understand* all that garbage in order to rule it so.
Nobody's done business with them for a decade already. There's nothing left except lawyers and the only reason they're there is because SCO bought their services until this is resolved, back before they ran out of money.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
http://spotibot.com/track/3Be6KHyD9kmAaLVoW3itWV
After your comment, its kinda obligatory. Couldn't find it on Youtube, what is the world coming to?
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
I have to agree. The only people who benefit from this in any substantial way is Microsoft, and the legion of lawyers their money paid for to run this lawsuit for 10 years. The purpose was to tarnish Linux and Open Source in general. Now someone at MS has ponied up some more cash to run a second scam, ^H^H^H lawsuit and they will likely try to drag it out as long as possible.
I would love to see some company buy up SCO then opensource all their code, and publicly display all their documents, all their bankrecords, employee histories, legal documents, business agreements etc. Then we could see all of the machinations behind the lawsuits, and perhaps follow the money back to Microsoft.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Two man scam. Darl deliberately drove somebody else's car (SCO) into a brick wall (IBM) and took it to his brother's panel shop. I've got no idea how many millions were funnelled out of SCO into his brothers legal firm but that's the way the cash was channelled.
Of course there's also stock manipulation, resume building (I'm the guy that took on IBM and would have won too if not for those meddling kids and their penguin!), relatively small amount of money coming in from Microsoft who saw they could get a bit of advantage out of the chaos - plus Amityville Horror and Fake Steve Jobs "journalists" stirring the pot for hire. Give it a few years and we'll see Darl pull a similar stunt elsewhere.
Interesting to get on mod up as interesting and one mod down as a troll. :-)
Anyway, for the software development community to move forward, we need to really wrestle with these deep design issues. Can't we eventually somehow move beyond "worse is better" as a community?
Especially now that computers have gotten so fast?
At what point do we prioritize the user (and/or the maintainer) experience?
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Project Monterrey was an effort to bring a single Unix that ran on 32-bit and 64-bit. It was supposed to run on POWER, PowerPC, x86 and Itanium.
That sounds like Debian, Gentoo, or NetBSD.
Maybe you meant that SCO is burying the courts in paper Feces.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Please feel free to submit your proposal for a legal system that solves the problems you perceive with our existing one without introducing more critical problems. Complicated cases take a while to resolve because they are complicated. This case, notwithstanding the general feeling among Slashdotters that SCO is evil and should just die already, is a complicated one. The time it has taken to resolve does not demonstrate any flaw in the legal system.