SCO Owes Novell $2.5 Million 174
CrkHead writes "Groklaw has posted Judge Kimball's ruling on SCO v Novell. For those that have been following this saga, we finally get to watch the house of cards start to fall. For those new to this story, it started with SCO suing Novell and having all its motions decided in summary judgement and went to trial only on Novell's counter claims. Cheers to PJ for keeping us informed!"
Not important (Score:5, Insightful)
The question is: Will Novell be able to collect?
Money comes from where? (Score:4, Insightful)
The end? I doubt it. (Score:5, Insightful)
we finally get to watch the house of cards start to fall
Sadly, I think not. More likely, SCO will just find another deck of cards and carry on playing for some time.
This isnt any victory. (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole thing has been a farse from start to end. That SCO has been allowed to continue this long without any evidence to back their claims up are insane. At the very least they should have been compelled to show some tangible evidence before the whole fishing expedition begun. The real stink begun when they could go on even after the extremely deep discoveries couldnt show any evidence at all that any code whatsoever came from SCO, not even "their own" code.
Something is just fishy about how the court system has handled all this.
Re:hmmm, (Score:4, Insightful)
oh, they'll appeal for sure. FUD forever. The really nasty thing is that this ruling sends entirely the wrong message to other SCO-like scum out there. They should have been hung and quartered, instead they only got slapped around a couple of times. The players all made money (except for the parties sued of course).
Re:So SCO stays alive and OpenSolaris dies? (Score:4, Insightful)
The PR damage to Novell's open-source customers from "Novell sues Sun for releasing OpenSolaris" would be substantial--more harmful to their reputation than the potential money they might collect here. Having gone through the PR wringer after their deal with Microsoft, I would doubt Novell wants to look like the bad guy here again. SCO will fall apart quite nicely without needing to do that.
I wonder what were they thinking (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, it still makes me wonder what were they thinking.
"seeing their x86-UNIX business sinking, sued their former development partner, IBM, assuming they'd get a quick payoff to shut up and go away. Big surprise when IBM unleashed their lawyers right back at them." is _weird_ plan, considering that IBM actually prided itself on not giving in to such claims. IBM's lawyers have been at various times compared to the Nazgul, or it was claimed that IBM could darken the skies with them. And it's shown before that it's not affraid to use it. In fact, that it makes a point to use them to maximum devastation effect, to discourage other parasites from trying to extort them. It's not even a matter of conjecture or correlation, it's IBM's policy.
So hoping that IBM would just fold down is... surrealistic. It's a bit like me taking my scrawny nerd ass to the heavyweight boxing champion and going, "hey, pretty boy, hand over the wallet or I'm punching you in the nose." And hanging around to insist on it, instead of scramming while he's laughing his ass off.
And if it were just Darl, I'd probably reach for good ol' Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity." But his legal council also seemed to have no problem with it, and at least two different investor groups paid good money to fund this farce. Even if it were just PHBs who got wooed by being shown "#include " lines as infringing code in Linux, they have legal departs they can go and ask first. It just doesn't add up.
Were those contracts _that_ ambiguously written, that _nobody_ knew who really owns Unix until a judge scratched his/her head and decided it? I doubt it.
So I'm wondering what was the _real_ game there. The whole legal farce was probably just means to the real end, or maybe just a diversion. So what was it? Who made a buck out of it, and/or who paid for this expensive distraction?
To spread FUD on MS' behalf against Linux... (Score:5, Insightful)
Given the money funneled in from Baystar on the recommendations of someone at MS, given the barely-disguised FUD money paid by Sun, who at the time were in one of their Linux-is-TEH-3V1L! phases, the idea of claiming Linux was encumbered and Not Suitable for Business was pretty obvious. Recall this was also the time of the attempt to show Linux was a ripoff of Minix by the opinion-for-hire deTocqueville Institute [wikipedia.org], whose funding also came in large part from MS. The money they threw SCOX to make Linux look bad was chump change. This provided them material to point their potential defectors-to-Linux at with arms-length deniability.
What they apparently didn't plan on was the strength of the grassroots response from the developer community to undo the PR spin. If anything, the result has been to strongly validate the Linux ecosystem as a safe bet.
SCOX DELENDA EST!!
Re:Not important (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, let's hope that no one is ever stupid enough to hire anyone from SCO's management team again. They should instead be employed where their talents clearly lie, in human waste management (no offense to those in that profession now intended).
Deciding that you should change your company's primary product from something that is useful (software) to something that is a leech on others (lawsuits) is moronic. Then suing not only your competitors, but your customers is even MORE moronic. Doing all of this while having no case is even more so. Realizing your stupidity halfway through but then continuing to fight in every way possible just throws stubbornness after stupidity. I only wish there was a way to put the SCO team into prison for their actions, because the malice they showed clearly deserves it...
Let's hope this cautionary tale prevents any other company from being so imbecilic in the future.