Appeals Court Rules: SCO v. IBM Case Can Continue (arstechnica.com)

Long-time Slashdot reader Freshly Exhumed quotes Ars Technica: A federal appeals court has now partially ruled in favor of the SCO Group, breathing new life into a lawsuit and a company (now bankrupt and nearly dead) that has been suing IBM for nearly 15 years.

Last year, U.S. District Judge David Nuffer had ruled against SCO (whose original name was Santa Cruz Operation) in two summary judgment orders, and the court refused to allow SCO to amend its initial complaint against IBM. SCO soon appealed. On Monday, the 10th US Circuit Court of Appeals found that SCO's claims of misappropriation could go forward while also upholding Judge Nuffer's other two orders.
Here's Slashdot's first story about the trial more than 14 years ago, and a nice timeline from 2012 of the next nine years of legal drama.

Comments

Re:SCO still in business?

[Billly Gates]

They sell licenses for $699 each. That can buy some lawyers.

Anyone besides 10 people bought them? I realized Microsoft 13 years ago funded them but ironically Windows 10 and Azure would have to pay some fees with the WSL Linux subsystem and Azure images so it would not be in there best interests for a SCO win.

My hunch is fucking thank Oracle due to the lawsuit with Android the courts have now interpreted clean room implementations and look alikes as actual derivatives. So Wine is owned by Microsoft even they didn't write it! GNUC is owned by AT&T even if they didn't write any of it. Look Linux has grep therefore it is owned by SCO etc.

I sense desperation, but Novel owns the Unix license so there is hope. This is a very very old argument and flame here from Bush's 1st term of office on slashdot. It comes to show how much corruption and problems with the legal system there is as it is unreasonable for a frivolous 15 year old lawsuit can continue.

Groklaw

[Salo2112]

Does this mean Groklaw is coming back to cover this mess again? :-)

Re:License Fee

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Who is laughing now???

Steve Ballmer is laughing now . . . he totally skanked you!

Ok, I actually need to recuse myself here, because I was required to give a deposition for the case . . . along with a buttload of other harmless developers.

I did development work for IBM's AIX kernel, and then worked for their Linux Technology Center. Just about everyone who was tainted with that experience got nailed.

The deposition was ok . . . the lawyer was on Park Avenue in New York, and I live in Europe, so it was just a pleasant phone call. We tend to rant on about lawyers here in Slashdot, but I was quite positively surprised to talk to the lawyer. He wasn't an IBM employee, but worked for a law office that handled a lot of the "grunt work" for IBM. The lawyer told me ominously that the case would drag out . . . and that someone with a lot of money was sponsoring SCO . . . and that some unnamed executive from SCO got a hefty deposit in a bank account on the Cayman Islands.