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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."
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.
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.
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.