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

A short history of Russia and Finland

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

I'm American, not Finnish, so corrections from Finnish people are welcome.

Finland was conquered by Sweden until the Russians took it in the early 1800s. Finland became a Grand Duchy and my understanding is that legally this made it something like the personal property of the tsar of Russia. Finland wasn't really enthused about this arrangement despite the fact that the tsar did institute special rules for Finland to give them a bit more autonomy than places in Russia got. Finland became somewhat restive. During the overthrown of tsar Nicholas II, the Russian Revolution basically gave Finland independence because Finland was threatening to take advantage of the chaos and declare a war for independence. It got Finland to stand down and not be a distraction and honestly the area was never really very heavily Russianized anyway.

Stalin decided in the late 1930s that he wanted to get back every bit of land that got lost as a result of the formation of the USSR, so the deal with Hitler was perfect. The Soviet Union not only immediately invaded independent countries who were formerly part of the Russian Empire, they even pushed into Poland into territories that never belonged to Russia. Finland was invaded and a combination of fierce Finnish resistance and Soviet military incompetence made the invasion take a lot longer than Stalin expected, but eventually the Soviets started winning. Finland signed away about 10% of its territory to make peace and when Hitler double crossed Stalin, this looked like a great opportunity to reverse those losses. Keep in mind that the Soviet Union was pretty brutal under Stalin and Ukrainians also viewed the original Nazi invaders as liberators from Soviet rule, not new oppressors.

The Nazis weren't very nice to Finland and they became problems so by 1944 what happened was that Finnish soldiers were fighting to kick the Nazis out on one hand and simultaneously fighting new Russian invasion forces on the other hand to prevent Finland from again becoming part of the USSR. Eventually Finland and the USSR reached a peace treaty, but Finland had to surrender a really big chunk of its eastern territory and in exchange, Finland had to adopt neutrality. Putin with his Cold War mentality and his cronies still view Finland as "lost territory" so that's part of why they continually bully Finland with border incursions and so on and then flip out when Finland threatens to join NATO for protection as a direct result of Russian provocations.