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SCO vs. IBM Battle Over Linux May Finally Be Over (networkworld.com)
JG0LD writes with this news from Network World: A breach-of-contract and copyright lawsuit filed nearly 13 years ago by a successor company to business Linux vendor Caldera International against IBM may be drawing to a close at last, after a U.S. District Court judge issued an order in favor of the latter company earlier this week.
Here's the decision itself (PDF). Also at The Register.
Here's the decision itself (PDF). Also at The Register.
Groklaw is not completely closed down - just running in stealth mode. All the recent court filings still show up there. Other updates show up now and again. Note that the link in the summary to the decision itself takes you to ... groklaw. Commentary and discussions do continue on other boards and forums, but not with the same focus that groklaw brought.
Ah, here it is, from 2008. However my memory didn't completely serve - this was PJ warning us that it wasn't over, even though most of the net thought SCO was toast.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...
#DeleteChrome
OH COME ON INTERNET. The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Operation) that produced SCO Xenix, SCO OpenServer, and SCO UnixWare is TOTALLY UNRELATED to the SCO Group (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_Group), except they have three letters in common.
Posting anonymous - though I worked quite happily for the former and left a few years before the latter came into existence.
You're collective lack of understanding is most dispiriting, given that there's plenty of facts available with very minimal research or brains required to find.
Hang your collective heads in shame.
Damn it is that what happened? I had no idea.
I thought it was just too much work for too little return.
Copied straight from Wikipedia for those like me who didn't know.
Jones was widely respected by journalists and people inside the Linux community. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols wrote, "Jones has made her reputation as a top legal IT reporter from her work detailing the defects with SCO's case against IBM and Linux. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that her work has contributed enormously to everyone's coverage of SCO's cases." [23]
Despite the high regard of Jones' peer journalists and the Linux community (or possibly in part because of it), a number of prominent attacks against Groklaw and Jones occurred. These attacks were documented and addressed in detail, on Groklaw and other web sites and also in court as part of the SCO litigation.
During the first week of May 2005, Maureen O'Gara, writing in Linux World, wrote an exposé claiming to unmask Jones. Two weeks before O'Gara's publication, McBride said that SCO was investigating Jones' identity.[22] The article included alleged, but unverified, personal information about Jones,[24] including a photo of Jones' supposed house and purported addresses and telephone numbers for Jones and her mother.[25] After a flood of complaints to the publisher, lobbying of the site's advertisers, and claims of a denial-of-service attack launched against the Sys-Con domain,[26][27] Linux Business News' publisher Sys-Con issued a public apology,[28] and said they dropped O'Gara and her LinuxGram column. Despite this assertion, O'Gara remained with Sys-Con; as of 2009, she is the Virtualization News Desk editor at Sys-Con Media, who describe her as "[o]ne of the most respected technology reporters in the business" and has her work published in multiple magazines owned by Sys-Con Media.[29]
SCO executives Darl McBride and Blake Stowell also denigrated Jones, and claimed that she worked for IBM.[30] Jones denied this allegation,[31] as did IBM in a court filing.[32] During an SCO conference call on April 13, 2005, McBride said, "The reality is the web site is full of misinformation, including the people who are actually running it" when talking about Groklaw, adding also "What I would say is that it is not what it is purported to be". Later developments in the court cases showed that McBride's statements to the press regarding the SCO litigation had limited credibility; very few such statements were ever substantiated and most were shown to be false. For example, McBride claimed that SCO owned the copyrights to UNIX, and SCO filed suit to try to enforce these claims.[33] The outcome went against McBride's claims. The jury found that SCO had not purchased these copyrights.[34][35] SCO appealed this ruling and lost.[36] McBride also made a claim to the press that there was a "mountain of code" misappropriated to create Linux.[37] When SCO finally presented their evidence of infringement, which centered on nine lines of error name and number similarities in the file errno.h, Judge Wells famously said "Is this all you've got?"[38] Professor Randall Davis of MIT later made a convincing demonstration that there were no elements of UNIX which might be copyright protectable present in the Linux source code.[39]
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Damn it is that what happened? I had no idea.
Yes, it happened (though the investigators found the wrong Pamela Jones). The reason PJ closed down Groklaw was because of NSA spying. The general supposition, based on her final Groklaw article, is that she received an NSA demand to spy on her users, but her conscience would not allow her to do so. So she stopped doing Groklaw so she wouldn't have anything to spy on.
It is nice to see scox lose, even if it is over a decade after it has any relevance.
As I have been saying for a long time, this is much more a msft scam, than scox scam. For msft, $100 million to stomp (if not eliminate) a competitor is money well spent.
Let's not forget that some scox insiders, like Riamondi, were selling their shares when scox was at $16. None of the guilty have been really punished, and they never will be.
As to insiders losing everything, and scox becoming worthless: scox lasted a lot longer, and scox's shares went up a lot higher, than would have happened without the scox scam.
Msft is still doing the same IP scamming. Only now it may be more effective. Msft and redhat have partnered. This makes redhat - and only redhat - immune from patent infringement lawsuits from msft. Sound familiar? It should. It is the scox extortion racket all over again - only this time with more credibility.
> "Only Days After Red Hat Legitimised Microsoft’s Patents Against Linux Another Linux-Using Company Falls Victim to Microsoft’s Patent Extortion"
http://techrights.org/2015/11/10/star-micronics-and-patents/
Of course, msft rarely sues in court, they don't have to. You either quietly settle, or get sued out of existence.
Once non-redhat distros become irrelevant, msft may turn on redhat. Or, maybe not. I think msft is okay with competitors, as long as those competitors can be dealt with, and are not too threatening. In 1998, Apple seemed to be okay as a competitor.
The court has already decided many of the claims against SCO including copyrights and ownership. The claim in this order was about tortious interference: Did IBM, by hardening Linux and porting code over to Linux, maliciously interfere with SCO's customers and business relationships?
Like many of SCO claims, the tortious interference were ambiguous and ever changing and lacked any detail. The number of parties that SCO alleged that IBM had caused interference changed by the month despite IBM asking repeatedly (and the court ordering SCO to respond repeatedly) to name the parties and the detail the interference. It was as low as 3 and as high as 150 with 150 being a number that SCO only claimed because one IBM email mentioned that it had 150 new customers on Linux.
Similarily to other claims, SCO brought almost no evidence to the case despite years of discovery. In fact it was often contradicted by indisputable evidence that IBM brought. For example, SCO claims that IBM damaged SCO's Unix by communicating to their third parties like their investor, Baystar, that IBM was supporting Linux and that the third parties should abandon Unix. Almost all customers third parties swore to the court that they never had communications with IBM on the topic. The only party that acknowledged it had any discussions with IBM was Hewlett-Packard and they testified that the discussion did not change their relationship with SCO so there was no damage.
The theory that SCO offered as motivation was that IBM wanted to damage SCO by hardening Linux and porting Unix code. Former SCO employees testified against SCO in that they did not believe damaging SCO was ever the motivation for supporting Linux. Their analysis was that IBM was competing against the likes of Sun and Microsoft by offering a cheaper Unix-like OS on cheaper Intel hardware that was nearly as good or better than Unix.
There are still a few claims left but at this point the pattern keeps repeating: SCO loses on summary judgements because they never had a case.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.