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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."
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."
Somebody PLEASE put a stake in it.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
"We are now almost fifteen years into this litigation and still neither side is broke, like seriously wtf!"
Erm, according to the plaintiff's sorry excuse for a blog, the legal counsel has pledged to continue until they are disbarred or they make a "success" of the case, whatever that means.
You know what's funny...and I'm going to be modded down for this...but if you look at the millions of man-years spent wasting everyone's time on the litigation versus how much time it would take to write a *decent* OS entirely from scratch, you're looking at a 1000000:1 effort.
This is like spending 50 years in the court system over someone jaywalking when he never jaywalked in the first place.
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...
if you look at the millions of man-years spent wasting everyone's time on the litigation versus how much time it would take to write a *decent* OS entirely from scratch, you're looking at a 1000000:1 effort.
Yes but that's 1000000 lawyer hours compared to system programmers. They have a negative effect on the actual production of anything useful
The site's not loading, but I'll take your word for it.
This is not about justice. That's not how the American legal system works anymore. This is about going after people who have deep pockets, like Autozone, over a line or two of code, and continuing over and over and over again until they're disbarred.
It is a true disgrace to humanity.
... the legal counsel has pledged to continue until they are disbarred or they make a "success" of the case, whatever that means.
Legal fees == "success".
That's all.
Erm, according to the plaintiff's sorry excuse for a blog, the legal counsel has pledged to continue until they are disbarred or they make a "success" of the case, whatever that means.
Although IANAL, perhaps we should talk about exactly what that means.
At this point, is legal counsel even representing those of the long-defunct SCO corp? Other than these idiots taking some kind of blood oath to ride this case all the way to Hell and back, I'm failing to see how there's a point to continuing this. And by that, I mean even a legal point that any judge would give a shit about.
If anything, this case serves as a prime example of laws that likely need to be changed. You know, like a law that threatens disbarring those in the legal community for repeatedly regurgitating zombie cases.
Thank you! I really should have looked that up...
> versus how much time it would take to write a *decent* OS entirely from
> scratch, you're looking at a 1000000:1 effort.
That is also the ratio of the amount of money one makes in the legal system to the amount one makes selling a Unix-like OS.
Companies exist to make a profit. Any legal way of doing that is acceptable, even if it has nothing to do with your original business plan. Normally we applaud companies that do a "pivot", but here we have one that we hate because they are attacking the sacred cow.
Don't worry, they'll loose.
If you are serious when you say that "Finland was a WW2 ally of Hitler" and "they fought against the USSR" as if there would have been anything wrong about those actions, then you know nothing true about WW2 and all that you know comes only from deceitful propaganda written by those who have won the war.
USSR was as guilty for starting WW2 as those who are usually incriminated by UK & USA, i.e. Hitler, Mussolini & Japan.
During the first 2 years of WW2, while Germany was occupying many of its neighbors, USSR was doing exactly the same, occupying the Baltic countries and parts of Poland, Finland and Romania.
Moreover the Russian occupation was far more oppressive than the German occupation, because a large part of the civilian population from the occupied zones was sent to work camps in Siberia, where some were murdered and many others have died from diseases caused by cold and hard work. Very few have succeeded to return.
These are facts that I know directly, having 2 grand-grandfathers murdered by the Russians in 1940, one because he was a school teacher in a village school and the other because he had an insignificant function in the local public administration of the village, but nonetheless, both were distinguishable from the majority who were peasants and any such people were the first to be sent in Siberia to die there.
The people of USA, UK & Western Europe have bought their freedom after WW2 not with their own money, but with the money of the people of Eastern Europe, who were offered to the Russians to be robbed, for the alliance between USA, UK & USSR to be able to defeat Germany & Japan.
Finland and Romania who were previously victims of the Russian aggression, have tried to use the war between Germany and USSR as an opportunity to recover their own territories from the Russian occupation.
Of course they failed because they did not foresee that USA will enter WW2 and change the balance of power.
So the Russians kept after WW2 the occupied territories and their propaganda continues until now to claim that whoever tried to protect their properties and the life of their relatives against the Russian invaders were fascists, "Hitler allies" and so on.
If your profession is to spread Russian propaganda, e.g. about Finland being guilty of having been a "Hitler ally", then good for you.
But if you sincerely believe such junk, I can only pity you.
I get that at one point SCO had assets worth plundering and probably some recurring income from licensed patents. But hasn't all of that basically been drained off?
I'm wondering what motivates anyone TODAY to sink money and resources into this case. It looks like it requires a multi-million dollar up front commitment to continued litigation combined with a very low chance of a significant payout.
The backers seem like they would be better off just investing those resources in equities. If there's any equity holders left, they seem like they would better served by liquidation. I doubt any of the IP is worth anything anymore, either.
The site's not loading, but I'll take your word for it.
Probably for the best, it was a goat.cx clone.
SCO v IBM is Oak Island for lawyers.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
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.
Sorry, the only revisionist history is in the phrases written by you, e.g in "Romania was not occupied by the USSR until the Soviets made their final push through Europe to Berlin", which contains two lies in a single phrase.
1. A large part of Romania was occupied by USSR in the summer of 1940. The Russians waited until the Germans completed the defeat of France, which was the last remaining ally of Romania. Immediately, a week later, the Russians invaded Romania. The official reason was that they want to reconquer a region that was occupied for one hundred years by the Tsarist Russia in the 19th century, after a war with Turkey, but even that reason was a lie, because the actual territory occupied in 1940 by the Russians was much larger than that ruled for some time by the Tsars.
My mother was 6-year old in 1940 and she escaped the Russians by being carried by a 20-year old cousin during the night, through some forests and marshes, across the new border, before it became impenetrable.
About 40 to 50 relatives that remained in the occupied lands were sent to Siberia a few months later, during the winter of 1940 to 1941. Russian colonists were brought and they received the houses and the lands of the natives. The Russians have lived in those houses ever since.
After one year, in the summer of 1941, Germany broke its former alliance with USSR and attacked it. Only at that point in time, Finland and Romania made a deal with Germany, to fight together against Germany, in order to get back their territories occupied by the Russians one year before.
2. There is a second lie in your phrase, Romania was not occupied when "the Soviets made their final push through Europe to Berlin".
In 1944, after Normandy, it became obvious to anyone that Germany will lose the war, sooner or later. Then Romania attempted to obtain better conditions at the end of the war. They broke the alliance with Germany and became allies of USSR and USA.
This allowed the Russians to pass through Romania without fight (not counting various robberies, rapes and murders of the civilians). Then Romania fought together with USSR until the end of the war and the war effort of Romania against Germany in 1944-1945 was actually about equal to the war effort against USSR during 1941-1944.
Nevertheless, that effort was useless, because the Western allies accepted the Russian wish and refused the cobelligerant status to Romania, even if that status was given to Italia, which was much less entitled to it.
That allowed the Russians to continue to steal a huge amount of goods during the next 20 years as "war reparations".
While Romania was not occupied until the end of WW2, the Russian army remained there at the end of the war as "allies". In the next 2-3 years, the "allied" army succeeded to install a puppet government after fake elections, which lead to complete dependence of the USSR, as in all the other Eastern European countries.
Beware your own ignorance before complaining of "revisionist history".
If you read the original post, it states that "parts of Poland, Finland and Romania" were occupied by the USSR.
If you read history, you might have noticed an item called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which Romania was forced to sign under threat of invasion by Russia in 1940, ceding Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina to the USSR. Over 50,000 people were deported from those formerly Romanian areas in 1940-1941.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_deportations_from_Bessarabia_and_Northern_Bukovina
The problem isn't the law, it is lawyers and judges. The law is fine. (Some) Lawyers and Judges are known to bend over backwards to present and form opinions that aren't actually based on anything reasonable. To the point of ridiculousness.
As long as One Lawyer, can find One Judge that will hear the case, the case continues. In criminal lay there are appeals processes in place, and and eventual end to the process (sort of). In Civil Tort, there is no end to the process, as long as there is a court to hear what crazy idea the lawyer has dreamed up. And here, the lawyers know it. Which makes this whole thing about as crazy as the whole Twinkie Defense; silly to anyone on the outside, but perfect sense to a lawyer.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Flashback to 2003.
Reading daily updates on slashdot
Reading daily updates and comment threads from PJ on groklaw
I can't believe that 15 years later this lawsuit lumbers on.
How many tens of millions of dollars (hundreds of milions?) have both sides spent on this lawsuit?
No, Microsoft isn't the only one, but they're relevant in this case because they appear to have been the instigator and source of funds. The evidence *doesn't* seem to be conclusive, but it's considerably stronger than just "highly suggestive".
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
That the Russians were as brutal and a you claim, and they were expansionist appears true. That's not the same at claiming they had equal part in starting WW2, and I find that second claim at best dubious. You might more fairly blame Britain, as they set up Poland to be conquered by the Nazis. Many in the British government considered the Nazis to be better than the Communists, and wanted to use them as a weapon against the Communists. Or consider the affairs around Czechoslovakia, and it's amalgamation with Germany. I've never understood Chamberlain's actions, but they certainly played a large part in causing WW2. Then there's the US, which waffled between supporting the Nazis and being against them, sometimes swinging one way and sometimes the other. The US didn't really decide against the Nazis until Pearl Harbor.
One never knows how history would have worked out had things been different, but if Chamberlain had stood up the Hitler over Czechoslovakia, then it seems plausible that Mussolini would have sided with the allies, and WW2 would have been a "damp squib". I don't think Stalin and Hitler could ever have trusted each other, despite the "pact of steel".
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Third option - legal counsel dies of old age before the case is finished.
The US didn't really decide against the Nazis until Pearl Harbor.
I don't think that's accurate. The Lend-Lease act was signed 9 months before Pear Harbor. Once that happened, any remaining doubts about whose side the US was on would have been dispelled.
Textbooks and Open Educational Resources
Hadn't we decided earlier (like, over a decade ago) that SCO didn't own the rights to the source code, that it never transferred from Novell? Or am I misremembering. This has gone on sooooo loooooong....
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The problem isn't the law, it is lawyers and judges. The law is fine. (Some) Lawyers and Judges are known to bend over backwards to present and form opinions that aren't actually based on anything reasonable. To the point of ridiculousness.
If (some) Lawyers and Judges are able to abuse the law in this way (to the point of ridiculousness), then the problem does in fact lie with the law. Change it, so bullshit like this cannot perpetuate, no matter what lawyer stands in front of what judge. In this case, perhaps something as simple as a statute of limitations applicable to specific situations to establish a time limit on how long it can be drug out could be established.
*Parts* of the government were anti-Nazi, or at least pro-Britain before Pearl Harbor. But only parts. There was significant official disagreement, and also lots of public disagreement.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
This is like spending 50 years in the court system over someone jaywalking when he never jaywalked in the first place.
But that would never happen. Jaywalking is a "civil crime" so there is no right to a trial or jury or any of that nonsense. You get convicted before you show up and that is that.
Avoiding bugs when programming in your favorite programming language is difficult to impossible. Avoiding bugs when making laws in English in a rapidly changing world is similarly difficult to impossible, and there's assorted political considerations when making laws.
What you have proposed is something like bringing in a junior Javascript programmer to fix bugs in your C++ programs.
SCO is a corner case. In most lawsuits, the defense tries to drag things out. Since this was not a lawsuit for SCO to win, but to drag out, the plaintiffs dragged things out, and the legal system was not quite set up for that.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Allying with Germany wasn't Stalin's first choice. Stalin preferred an alliance with Britain and France, but found them frustratingly reluctant to negotiate with. My best guess is that the British and French didn't think there was anywhere else the Soviets could go, and decided to drag things out to get better terms, to the point that the alliance would not be that useful to the Soviet Union. Since that negotiation wasn't working, Molotov negotiated a treaty with Germany.
Stalin knew that Germany wasn't going to stay peaceful, and so took advantage of the negotiated terms to grab as much buffer territory as he could, which came in handy in June 1941.
Finland was a co-belligerent against the Soviet Union, and operated independently (aside from allowing the Germans to attack through Finland in the north). Romania acted as a German ally.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I don't know of any US violations of international law concerning neutrality until 1941. The transfer of old US destroyers to Britain was illegal under international law. The US started to repair and refit British warships (illegal) and by September 1941 was in an undeclared war with Germany, with the US Navy fighting the U-boats (not too successfully, as US anti-submarine equipment and doctrine lagged).
It's pretty clear that Roosevelt chose sides early on, but had to ease the US out of strict neutrality. The Cash and Carry Act, in which belligerents could freely trade in the US as long as they picked up their materiel from the US, was pretty flagrantly pro-belligerent-with-financial-reserves-and-merchant-shipping-and-the-means-to-protect-it.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes