SCO Hints at *BSD Lawsuits Next Year, And More 971
osullish writes "The Financial Times reports that SCO is indicating it will sue an as-yet un-named Linux-using corporation within the next 90 days. Also mentioned in the article is possible action against Novell, which recently purchased Ximian and SUSE Linux."
Iaitos points to this rather stiffly-worded notice from Novell (on their site) regarding the non-compete agreement SCO claims would taint Novell's acquisition of SUSE:
PROVO, Utah Nov. 18, 2003: Novell has seen the November 18 InfoWorld article in which SCO CEO Darl McBride refers to a supposed non-compete agreement between Novell and SCO. Mr. McBride's characterization of the agreements between Novell and SCO is inaccurate. There is no non-compete provision in those contracts, and the pending acquisition of SUSE LINUX does not violate any agreement between Novell and SCO.Novell has received no formal communication from SCO on this particular issue. Novell understands its rights under the contracts very well, and will respond in due course should SCO choose to formally pursue this issue."
slavitos points to a ZDNet article covering the same ground, writing: "A characteristic SCO twist in the story: "McBride added that lawsuits likely will be preceded and possibly prevented by communications offering businesses an opportunity to get right with SCO. "We'll be communicating with users what our expectations are," he said.". Oh, that's helpful, Darl - and no, we didn't really expect you to be any more specific."
If your lips aren't yet too tired, ansak writes "PJ has done it again -- okay, "co-ordinated it" would be the better phrase. The transcript of SCOG's conference call is now available (and in danger of being slashdotted without slashdot's help, even!).
#include <std.thanks.to.volunteers.h>"
Another legal theory being thrown about is that SCO's lawsuit (the one against IBM, that is) all leads back to Sequent. Petrol writes "The Inquirer has a story about SCO's action against IBM. 'Sources close to the action describe a trail of code that might well be the target of SCO's ire against IBM and the Linux community.'"
Re:Apple? (Score:5, Informative)
OS X was based off NEXTSTEP, which was based on Mach, which was a completely new kernel, with BSD ported to it.
But compared to Linux, i'd say it's less of a stretch to say that OS X is UNIX than Linux.
I don't mind if they go after Apple.. just one more company joining in the fun of beating SCO up.
Re:Sig (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Apple? (Score:3, Informative)
However, it did base off of BSD. "Mach" is not a full kernel. It's something called a "microkernel"-- a very thin abstraction layer that rests between the hardware and the real kernel, so that the real kernel is more easily portable to different hardware. It's like the Windows NT HAL. On top of Mach, NEXTSTEP had to have an actual kernel, and for this they used BSD. Plus, as I'm sure RMS would tell you, an operating system is not just a kernel, and the base associated tools (cp et al) that allow you to actually do things with NEXTSTEP were taken from BSD.
Moreover, Apple has been continuously merging in code from more recent versions of FreeBSD ever since they took the project over. So even if NEXTSTEP weren't "contaminated" with BSD before Apple bought it, it definitely is now.
Re:I wonder what the airspeed velocity... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:This must be the new SCO business model (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Important rule of litigation: (Score:5, Informative)
Absolutely not.
The case would be brought on the basis of the same copyright claim as the earlier AT&T case. That claim has been rejected by the courts. The fact that the underlying copyrights have since been sold do not allow the new owner to re-open prior litigation. The copyrights were bought with the constructive knowledge of the previous litigation and its result.
If the courts did allow this type of claim they would never be able to get rid of copyright claims and defendants could never obtain a final judgement in their favor.
Peculiar and mercenary though David Boies may be, I think you can fairly safely assume that he has a pretty good grasp of the rules of civil procedure in the US courts.
Which is probably the reason why he is talking trash, threatening to sue rather than issuing a writ. He knows that if he was actually to make a claim he could get slapped really, really hard.
Given Boies ludicrous efforts in the Napster case it is safe to assume that Boies is capable of making legal claims in court that the courts rapidly reject as unfounded. Let us see if he goes one stage further in this case and makes a claim that is sanctionable.
I strongly suspect that attempting to relittigate AT&T would be considered sanctionable, there is absolutely no reason that a lawyer should believe a claim that was littigated and lost nine years earlier to be winnable without a material change in the circumstances. I don't see the sale of the copyrights to SCO through Novell as a material change here.
If Boies goes ahead with this it could cost him his license. The sums demanded are very significant.
Re:BSD Code Settlement (Score:5, Informative)
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AT&T had a fairly weak derivative code claim
(surprisingly like the current SCO one, actually)
saying that even though all of the actual AT&T code
had been removed from BSD's Net-4 release, somehow by a process of transitive derivation it was still a
derivative work.
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Berkely had a much stronger, classic copright case on the printed manuals for vi, netstat, etc. that would have required AT&T to apologize publicly, and hunt down and destroy all System V based User Guides (i.e ones for AT&T System V, IRIX, HP-UX, etc. etc.)
Berkely really didn't care to press their case except to make the AT&T one go away.As somone pointed out earlier, never sue a University with a good law school.
Re:Heed my words (Score:3, Informative)
Re:BSD Code Settlement (Score:4, Informative)
The exact terms of the settlement remain secret, but Marshall Kirk McKusick wrote this nice history summary [oreilly.com].
If SCO really has any way to re-start the proceedings on this, I somehow feel Berkeley lawyers will have none of it...
Microkernel (Score:3, Informative)
It's a kernel that has a limited set of base functions (usually thread/process scheduling and communication). Other services (device drivers and even filesystem) are run as seperate processes, and the kernel provides a means for such prosesses to communicate.
- Ost
Finally, the mainstream is slamming SCO (Score:5, Informative)
Under technology's top stories:
Novell slams latest SCO claims
SCO Hints at *BSD Lawsuits Next Year, And More
SCO CEO claims top spot on Forbes List of World's Most Hated Business Leaders
SCO doesn't have much longer to live. They've managed to get on not only techies' shit lists, but now the presses'
McBride was VP of Novell's Embedded Systems Div. (Score:1, Informative)
"From 1988 to 1996, Mr. McBride worked at networking leader Novell where he was responsible for growing Novell Japan's growth to more than $100 million in revenue. Mr. McBride concluded his tenure at Novell as vice president and general manager of Novell's Embedded Systems Division (NEST)."
View Entire Article [forbes.com]
Re:Heed my words (Score:5, Informative)
I hate to hit you with this, Perry Mason, but copyright violation cases do not get tried in small claims courts. Furthermore, unless you registered your copyright with a form TX at the Copyright Office, you can't sue for punitive damages, so you will have to demonstrate actual monetary losses in order to sue for compensatory damages, and since you are, presumably, not being paid royalties on non-existent sales of the kernel, you have no grounds for a suit.
And "lose" has only one 'o'. "Loose", as in "loose legal reasoning" has two.
yeah, IBM made Linux grow (Score:2, Informative)
Yeah. That was fake SMP before IBM came along. Beowulf was all IBM too, right?
McBride must be some Linux history expert, or something.
Untrue. (Score:5, Informative)
Not true.
The NORC study shows that under the state-wide recount oredered by the FL SC, Gore would have won.
Under other, partial, recounts Bush won. Ironically, under Gore's prefered recount method, Gore would have lost.
You probably saw this in the news as "Recount Shows Bush Would Have Won", with perhaps a footnote at the bottom about how actually Gore would have won, unless you used one of the recount methods that was never seriously considered.
I think this is strange.
Re:Next on COPS (Score:3, Informative)
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=
+1 off topic here we come! you know you love it!
Re:Important rule of litigation: (Score:4, Informative)
Forgive me but a blanket negation of an argument accompanied by abuse is hardly a good way to convince others.
If this is true, you'll have no difficulty providing me with case law in support of your argument.
I would not expect anyone to be idiotic enough to try litigating it. If indeed it is the case that you are correct then there should be many cases of people trying this dodge and succeeding because it would be a pretty useful one.
1.) The original case was settled out of court, therefore there is no case law or court decision to refer to.
Settling a case out of court would make the argument much stronger since it is a contractual agreement (actually stronger than a mere contractual agreement) that is independent of the fact being claimed. SCO's claim to the copyrights is the result of a later contractual agreement which is inevitably a weaker claim.
Under what circumstances do you believe that AT&T could enter into a contract that would invalidate rights that AT&T had already granted under an earlier contract?
3.) I'm not arguing that SCO's case is necessarily winnable. Simply that it's actionable and that they'd have a right to bring it before the courts.
The term actionable is meaningless. There is no legal claim imaginable that is not 'actionable' in the sense that it is possible to commence an action by issuing a writ. The only way that a claim could not be actionable was if SCO were declared to be a vexatious litigant and barred from access to the court in question.
archive of wmv stream of McBride's speech (Score:3, Informative)