SCO vs. IBM looks like it's over for good The long-running SCO vs. IBM case looks like it might just be over. A new filing (PDF) scooped up by the good folks at Groklaw sees both SCO and IBM agree to sign off on two recent decisions in which SCO's arguments advancing its claims to own parts of Unix were slapped down by the US District Court. As The Register reads the …
Not so fast.
Let's wait and confirm that SCO is not getting an injection from a wealthy sailing fan. It took quite a few "charitable donations" to repair the decrepit rigging and outfit the old lady for so many races, it may just get another one you know. After all - anything for the love of sailing.
This post has been deleted by its author
McBride exemplifies monopolist capitalism and should be borken on the wheel then drawn and quartered in a public square on a balmy Summer's day, certainly, but who wound him up and pointed him at Unix right when the Penguin was getting some serious head turning by IT departments because Windows was chronically buggy and hackable? Whatever happened to the purloined smoking gun letter that pretty much pointed at Redmond as the instigator of this hideous attempt at stomping out the competition? Maybe the CIA and NSA were unhappy that they couldn't engineer a back door into open source warez.
Not so fast.
We've all learned from Dr. Who that nuking truly evil things sometimes revives them instead of destroying them.
In this case I think we want the firetruck filled with holy water, the guys with the repeating crossbows firing wooden stakes, and somebody on the machine gun with the belt fed silver bullets all on standby. And keep the Doc's phone number handy in case this is a truly hard case and requires the serious use of the timey-whimey.
Pamela Jones deserves to party now. I started reading Groklaw near the beginning and I learnt a lot there. PJ worked very hard for all of us.
PS: I wonder if my lone downvote is from someone who doesn't know about PJ's famous red dress, or if it was from the last (surely there couldn't be two) SCO supporter. Actually, I can imagine it was Darl McBride.
PPS: For those that weren't there, here is that great cartoon with the dress and the Titanic which nailed it like nothing else could.
"On the off-chance IBM wants to return to court to sue Zombie SCO, that is"
it would be kinda fun to watch IBM try, naming the SCO lawyers as co-defendents?
Get costs from the main cases, but then also go for punitive damages against the lawyers who made it possible for it to go for for so long when any rational human would have given up ages ago ...
Unfortunately they 'bought' their way out of owning any part of the winnings early in the case, leaving no cause to go after them directly. That deal committed the lawyers to continue till the case was won or lost, even after the money ran out. BS&F got up to a lot of abusive and harassing behaviour but it's probably too late to deal with that and the courts allowed it to happen without acting, though it must have badly influenced both the judges and juries.
The good news is BS&F almost certainly lost a lot of money even though the individual lawyers got paid, burnt badly and it damaged the companies reputation. Darl's brother made money but arguably might as well have been working for IBM!
I would have liked to see harassment and libel/slander charges but pj isn't likely to bother and time has probably run out anyway. Maybe now the case is ending someone will leak what they found about funding and Microsoft involvement...
Though they started as Caldera selling Linux long ago
Soon a huge volcanic crater will be all that's left of SCO
No, best to leave it where it's at. If IBM were to own it, some future head of IBM could resurrect it against the rest of the Linux community. (Yeah I know that doesn't make any sense now, but neither did the SCO case.) As is, it's a worthless asset in a worthless company. Since it has zero other assets, you can't ever make a case for buying it which passes the fiduciary requirement of any publicly traded company.
It's not for no reason that their lawyers are referred to as the Nazgul.
I think it's been clear since early on that the entire SCO case was an annoyance case - they merely wanted to be bought out by IBM because they had no ongoing business to speak of[1].
That was a huge miscalculation - for IBM not to have fought the case would be an admission that it had illegally appropriated someone else's technology. For a company that earns its cash by looking after other people's stuff, that would have been commercial suicide. So it fought.
Disclosure: I did attempt to buy some of the debris from SCO from the bankruptcy[2].
Vic.
[1] All they had left was the Unix onselling business - which was supposed to net them 5% of total sales. You can see that didn't pay enough as they ended up just keeping all of that money for some time - and it is to the bankruptcy judge's eternal shame that he made no attempt whatsoever to get them to return the 95% they'd simply stolen.
[2] Unsuccessfully, in the end. Which is probably for the best. When the bankruptcy was initially filed, the HipCheck business was valued at $5m. Towards the end, there was suddenly an announcement that the business was to be sold to Darl for a mere $35k - less than 1% of its previous valuation. As there were already agents for various mobile platforms available, I intended to glue those on top of Nagios to provide something of value. The administrator told me that I would have to pay dramatically more for the business than Darl was getting it for, as they'd already spent more than that sum on the paperwork to sell the business...
I was hoping that my children could inherit my long running interest in this case. I started watching this in 2003 (?) (disclaimer I used to work for Big Blue), our first was born in 2006 and I was hoping she could pick up monitoring this when I popped my clogs.
It certainly looked like I was going to leave this mortal coil before the conclusion of the case.
Bugger, now all I have is the Prenda law case and one of the defendants has died in that one.
Oh well, back to reading Bleak House.
That's a lesser error than the initial deal, where they intended to take part payment in SCO shares. The fixed fee arrangement was what it took to cancel that and SCO were the winner despite contingency fee clauses on winnings and sale of SCO.
It was an incredibly stupid arrangement to make that makes it clear the lawyers believed SCO have a good case at the start. Problem was, SCO lied to everyone including their lawyers. It also became obvious the whole suit was as much a stock scam as about the IP.
Taking a shareholding in such an obvious scam would have exposed them to serious legal risk. Just losing vast amounts of money is the lesser evil.
The time-tested argument "I own everything of value ever, it's written on this little piece of paper" has resulted in SCO shareholders and employees getting rogered good.
I remember some of those employees actually drinking the kool-aid and staging a pro-SCO protest back when people thought Iraq would be over "soon". Where is their job now?
I think the author has the wrong understanding of the document.
SCO isn't accepting the judgement at all. It wants to appeal, and that's why it's filing this.
SCO is just asking the court to certify that the court is finished ruling on SCO's claims. This is pretty much a formality. But SCO needs that before it's allowed to appeal to a higher court. And SCO has already paid its lawyers for the appeals, so there *will* be appeals.
You're generally not allowed to appeal part-way through the case, except in a few exceptional circumstances. You have to wait for the court to completely resolve the case, so the court can dot it's I's and cross it's T's, and *then* appeal. This prevents you wasting the appeal court's time with loads of tiny appeals, instead you have to wait and do one big appeal at the end.
IBM is agreeing with SCO, so it can get the appeal over with. IBM still has counterclaims against SCO, so it *could* try to make SCO wait until those have been decided. But IBM knows that it's not going to get any money from SCO now, since SCO is bankrupt, so there's no point litigating IBM's counterclaims yet - there's nothing for IBM to win and it would cost IBM for its lawyer's fees. If SCO manages to win on appeal, *then* IBM will start to push it's counterclaims.
I think the author has the wrong understanding of the document.
I wonder if the author has read the document...
The second paragraph starts :-
There is no just reason for delaying SCO’s appeal from such Orders
It is very clear that SCO wants to get on with its appeal. As this is a joint motion, it might get its way. That'll be fun...
Vic.
...of wooden stakes infused with essence of pure garlic, with a nice fat core of unadulterated Kryptonite:
We have a great job for you, and will make it worth your while :-)
But seriously: won't this stay dead? SCO has such a remarkable ability to reach groaning from the grave, I'd be surprised if they're not a by-product of HYDRA research (read your Captain America comic-books)...
when the name SCO is no longer there on any register of companies and that has been achieved without transfer of the rights (wrongs) in this case being transferred to any other entity along the way.
Until then -
Zombie Alert Active - Threat Level TBA*
*That Bugger's Active
I think Swift in Gulliver's Travels wrote about some old lady who had five cows, crooks stole three and her lawyer took the two remaining. Yes, I know I am a bit sarcastic and so was Swift, but is it not a bit like if a dentist tried to keep your tooth sic as long as possible, see you next week, and next week, and next week.
wait a bit....... Groklaw... is still being updated ?!
that should be a news article on its own.
i thought PJ & the rest of the team pulled the plug and froze the site to read-only mode years ago...
hxttxp://www.groklaw.net/pdf4/IBM-1162.pdf
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache
Last-Modified: Sat, 27 Feb 2016 01:47:09 GMT
Please forgive me for not putting any faith in such proclamations, they've been made repeatedly before & always turn out to be false.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'll go make up another bunch of popcorn as this glacier-slow FusterCluck continues to play out.
It'll probably still be going long after I've died & started wearing pants.
I remember when news of this originally broke and their claims looked like they may have some credence. I was discussing it with a friend in the pub.
Since then: Been barred from that pub. Pub has closed. Pub has been demolished. Something else has been built in its place. The friend I was talking to has died.
When you connect it to your own life like that, man, that's a long time.
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