The SCO Vs IBM Zombie Shambles On (uscourts.gov)

Long-time Slashdot reader UncleJosh writes: At the end of last October, the 10th Circuit issued an opinion overturning the lower court's summary judgement in favor of IBM on one of SCO's claims, sending it back to the lower court for trial. Shortly thereafter, IBM filed for a re-hearing en banc. On January 2nd, the 10th circuit essentially denied IBM's request, issuing a slightly revised opinion with the same conclusions and result.
The charge being reheard accuses IBM of "stealing and improperly using [SCO's] source code to strengthen its own operating system, thereby committing the tort of unfair competition by means of misappropriation" -- though that charged is based on an implied duty that SCO says IBM incurred by entering into a development relationship with SCO. "SCO believes that IBM merely pretended to go along with the arrangement in order to gain access to Santa Cruz's coveted source code."

The court's 46-page document adds that "We are now almost fifteen years into this litigation."

Comments

My god

[Vinegar Joe]

Somebody PLEASE put a stake in it.

Re:My god

[Anonymous Coward]

Groklaw.net used to cover this really well, back when PJ was running it.

The trick here is that the judge managing SCO's original attempts put his buddy in charge of managing SCO's bankruptcy, basically on a permanent retaiiner. It was like getting his brother-in-law a job closing an estate: he draws a salary as long as the bankruptcy is in progress, charges by the hour and has absolutely *zero* reason to ever finish the job. If he can scam it right, he can also do exactly what SCO got caught doing: find a shell company from someone who dislikes Linux (*cough* Microsoft *cough*) to provide some weird funding just to keep SCO alive and screw with Linux intellectual property claims.

Re:My god

[TheDarkMaster]

It's a game of lawyers. The only effective way to end this is nuclear bombardment from orbit.

Re:What it should have added...

[Opportunist]

This is the time when it should be legal to harvest the organs of CEOs to compensate the damaged party. The heart's probably unusable (provided it's present) but the rest should be usable.

History of the Zombie

[ytene]

Originally, "The SCO Group" (TSG) that filed suit against IBM (and subsequently Novell) was a commercial company run by then-CEO Darl McBride. The original court case was presided over by Judge Kimball.

During that case there was a great deal of fancy footwork by TSG's lawyers (Boies, Schiller and Flexner LLC), who were hoping to get the case to a jury trial without having to turn over the specifics of their "evidence" to the Court and thus to IBM. Their tactic of not showing their hand had two aims: to bluff IBM into thinking that their case was stronger than it really was - and to hold back the most damaging accusations until they could be delivered in front of a jury without giving IBM the ability to prepare a response.

Duelling motions came to a head and eventually, after giving TSG all the lattitude he could, Judge Kimball announced that he would rule on an IBM motion to compel TSG to pony up their evidence. Before that could be discussed in a hearing [literally just a couple of days before] TSG filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy. It is worth noting at this point that when TSG filed for bankruptcy they were technically and legally solvent, but the Bankruptcy Court accepted their petition regardless.

At that point everything on this thread of the story went a bit strange.

The Bankruptcy Court appointed one Judge Kevin Gross to preside over the bankruptcy. Judge Gross then appointed a Trustee to be the caretaker for the Chapter 11-protected TSG - and this Trustee was himself a retired Judge. [Sorry, this gentleman's name and that of his company escapes me].

From this point forward, the Trustee continue to try and fight the court case, all the while submitting invoices to TSG for their services. Although there was quite a bit of noise from this point forward, nothing substantive came of the appointment of this Trustee other than - in the opinion of this observer, anyway - the Trustee being able to milk the last of the liquid assets out of TSG and to push the company from not-quite-Chaper-11 through to brink-of-Chapter-7 bankruptcy.

At that point, with no more juice to suck out, the Trustee seemed to lose interest and the whole thing went quiet.

Until now, that is.

It's probably worth pointing out that the Trustee is itself a law firm, staffed, of course, with Law Clerks and Lawyers. Such an entity does of course go through brief periods of time when there is not enough work to keep every employee engaged on client-funded business. Rather than lay off an employee when that happens, the Firm will of course assign them activities which it hopes might have a future beneficial value. If miracles could happen and if TSG could prevail in even the tiniest part of an argument against IBM, then there would be a payout from IBM to the corpse. At that point, the Trustee would be able to reactivate any deferred invoices that they had accrued during the time that TSG has spent as a zombie.

In other words, the original gang of SCO Group folk (Darl McBride, Sanjay Gupta and friends) that filed the original complaint are long, long gone. The zombine is now being prodded along by the company of the Bankruptcy Court-appointed Trustee. Finally, this looks to have become nothing more than a time-card-filler for that law Firm, who occasionally have enough spare time on their hands to write another motion and prod the zombie...

Let's all hope a Court gives them a nice big slap for wasting Court time...