Slashdot Mirror
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!
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
How is it that they can continue to pay lawyers
The company is nothing but lawyers. They stopped being a tech company a long time ago. As long as a lawyer has not been beheaded/disbarred it will keep finding ways to troll. "It" being the only non-vulgar way I can think of to describe a lawyer.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
"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.
How is it that they can continue to pay lawyers (or find fools greedy enough) to fund their 'Hail Marry' legal crap?
The general belief is a certain company whose popular acronym starts with an "M" and ends with an "S"...
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
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.
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.
Isn't what happening in the US right now similar to situations where some animals kills their own offspring in order to survive themselves?
But when that happens it can also be damaging to the future survival since what's culled may actually have a better opportunity and be better adapted to survival in the long run.
Being a patent troll is not that different from being a cannibal.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I think you're being hasty. I say we bury him alive and see if he rises from the dead. Worst case scenario you then have to behead him.
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.
As a person living in Utah, I can attest that there is an inordinate number of out of work lawyers here. Not only that, we have a lot of lawyers here that are very entrepreneurial. That is a very bad combination, and there are lots of silly legal things happening here. So, if your choices are to take on a potentially hopeless law suit or collect up shopping carts at Walmart, stupid law suits don't look to bad.
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.
drive a wooden stake through it's heart
That part would be a problem... we're talking about a lawyer here...
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.
a "woosh" sound is made by a stake as it tries to find a heart in a lawyer...
Rich
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.