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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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Good thing I paid my $699 License Fee to SCO. Who is laughing now???
please tell me this is just the legal system grinding out the last little bits of this farce??
message to the 4 interns and junior lawyer that SCO has
You are Going Against THE NAZGUL bail now and you might be able to continue in the legal field someday.
You ain't Hobbits and you do not have the ONE RING
Pamela Jones, please return to the Groklaw desk
Well this appeal was lodged while they still had a few pennies left, so although there's an order now that allows the appeal, whether or not they can actually do it is a very different question.
Most (all?) of the SCO core have been disbarred, and most of the lawyers that have helped them in the past have been threatened by judges, so them finding someone to go in front of a judge with a straight face could be challenging.
The problem here all along has been one of odds. If you have a 1 in 100 chance of winning, but the reward is more than 100x your cost of litigation, AND you have enough of a warchest to file hundreds of lawsuits, you go for it. That's what they've been doing the last few years. That's why big companies like MS and Apple and IBM are frequent targets... not because their complaints have merit, but because of the slim chance of a huge payout. If they can win 1 in 100 and get enough of a win to refill their warchest, they just keep it up. This continues until they empty their warchest by either a long string of losses or a few major countersuits.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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.
http://saveie6.com/
Does this mean Groklaw is coming back to cover this mess again? :-)
Well, I guess its still not time to say "Goodnight PJ, wherever you are."
Owing for the most part to this ongoing SCO saga, the web was once gifted with the presence of Groklaw and the inimitable Pamela Jones, who brushed aside direct and very personal attacks from Darl McBride, Maureen O'Gara, and others as she provided insights and clarity for computer geeks on what tends to be a quite opaque judicial system. The comfort bar amongst FOSS supporters was raised significantly by her.
Now please, SCO, die already. Just die.
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
Now is not the time for zombies to rise from their graves.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I have yet to see anything that unequivocally states what you are repeating throughout this discussion. Links, please.
Fortunately it's not hardly this bad. That decision was made by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, a court that was created in 1982 and that is very biased towards rights holders. They are the court of appeal for patent issues, and Oracle was able to go directly to it because they had both patent and copyright issues in their appeal.
So the "you can copyright APIs" precedent they established isn't binding on any lower courts, excluding of course the court for the Oracle case for just that case.
But it does show how absolutely sociopathic Oracle the corporation is, they were sanguine with the prospect of catastrophic damage to the US software industry as long as they could squeeze billions out of the Goolag, in fact, far more than they bought Sun for.
The question has more to do with legal agreements between SCO and IBM. And the code is not something that is strictly defined as infringing SCO, as the code in question that is present in the Linux kernel (or as patched from IBM) was authored by IBM and copyright by IBM. That aspect the non-infringing nature of the code in Linux is not disputed.
SCO asserts they have every one who has agreed to their Unix license to be under a non-disclosure agreement. And that by releasing code to open source, IBM has violated an NDA. This isn't copyright law, and Linux is still clean. But it does mean that if IBM has violated the NDA that they could be paying some penalties and at the extreme end of what is possible IBM may be prohibited from distributing Linux further.
But you and I can still distribute Linux, including IBM's code. As we are not party to the agreements between IBM and SCO. And because we are following copyright laws to the letter, and IBM still has the right to license software they have authored even if distribution of that software violates an NDA agreement that none of us have signed.
(IANAL; but I can legally practice in Nevada)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
> ruled against SCO (whose original name was Santa Cruz Operation)
There was a company called "SCO (whose original name was Santa Cruz Operation)" but this isn't them, they changed their name to Tarantella when they sold the business to Caldera. Caldera changed their name to 'The SCO Group'.
SCO did not litigate against IBM, that was TSG.
My first thought this was one of the randomly generated Slashdot stories from last week from, say, 2006.
Of the 294 items in the Final Disclosure there are only 10 left in the case. Items 194-203. All of them deal with parts of SVR4 that IBM had put into AIX. The Appeals Court does not say that SCO's claims have been proven; they are saying that the claims should be heard in court as they were previously dismissed by the district judge. The items are:
From what I can tell some of those are needed for compatibility like ELF and header files. Korn shell, SVR4 print, and man pages are things that are way older than SCO's provenance.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.