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IBM Caldera The Courts

SCO Zombie Creaks Into Motion Again 208

Posted by timothy from the senile-courtroom-opponent dept.
phands writes "SCO has moved to partially reopen their 10 year old lawsuit against IBM. Unbelievable! Details at Groklaw." From the article, quoting SCO's filing: "SCO respectfully requests that the Court rule on IBM’s Motion for Summary Judgment on SCO’s Unfair Competition Claim (SCO’s Sixth Cause of Action), dated September 25, 2006 (Docket No. 782), which motion is directed at the Project Monterey Claim, and IBM’s Motion for Summary Judgment on SCO’s Interference Claims (SCO’s Seventh, Eighth and Ninth Causes of Action), dated September 25, 2006 (Docket No. 783), which motion is directed at the Tortious Interference Claims."
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SCO Zombie Creaks Into Motion Again More

SCO Zombie Creaks Into Motion Again

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  • License fee (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 05, 2011 @10:32AM (#37957714)

    Don't forget to pay your $699 licensing fees you cock-smoking teabaggers!

    • I'd have sworn that Abbott and Costello are dead. Then SCO surprises me.

    • I called scox two times, a few months apart, and asked to be sent an invoice. Scox refused to do so.

      The first time I called, scox seemed bewildered that anybody would even call about it.

      • I emailed them telling them I was running linux and refused to pay, and to please sue me ... total silence.
      • Here, you're supposed to go here [sco.com] to make sure you're legal..

        How the hell that is still up is bewildering.
  • SCO keeps coming back just like herpes. How is it that they can continue to pay lawyers (or find fools greedy enough) to fund their 'Hail Marry' legal crap?

    • Re:SCO = Herpes (Score:5, Informative)

      by sgt scrub ( 869860 ) <[saintium] [at] [yahoo.com]> on Saturday November 05, 2011 @10:49AM (#37957848)

      How is it that they can continue to pay lawyers

      The company is nothing but lawyers. They stopped being a tech company a long time ago. As long as a lawyer has not been beheaded/disbarred it will keep finding ways to troll. "It" being the only non-vulgar way I can think of to describe a lawyer.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Troy Baer ( 1395 )

        As long as a lawyer has not been beheaded/disbarred it will keep finding ways to troll.

        My vote is for "beheaded" in this case.

      • Re:SCO = Herpes (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Z00L00K ( 682162 ) on Saturday November 05, 2011 @11:14AM (#37958080) Homepage Journal

        Isn't what happening in the US right now similar to situations where some animals kills their own offspring in order to survive themselves?

        But when that happens it can also be damaging to the future survival since what's culled may actually have a better opportunity and be better adapted to survival in the long run.

        Being a patent troll is not that different from being a cannibal.

      • Re:SCO = Herpes (Score:5, Insightful)

        by femtoguy ( 751223 ) on Saturday November 05, 2011 @11:47AM (#37958284)

        As a person living in Utah, I can attest that there is an inordinate number of out of work lawyers here. Not only that, we have a lot of lawyers here that are very entrepreneurial. That is a very bad combination, and there are lots of silly legal things happening here. So, if your choices are to take on a potentially hopeless law suit or collect up shopping carts at Walmart, stupid law suits don't look to bad.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

          Just wait until Walmart realizes that they can get the customers to do the shopping cart work too - like we have here. Deposit coin, get cart, return cart get coin back.

          But maybe that won't happen until there's a $1 coin.

      • >> 4,143,077 Texans live in poverty. 1,655,085 of them are children. http://www.census.gov/

        The other some odd 2,487,922 are paying Texas traffic ticket SURCHARGES.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by hxnwix ( 652290 )

          >> 4,143,077 Texans live in poverty. 1,655,085 of them are children. http://www.census.gov/ [census.gov]

          The other some odd 2,487,922 are paying Texas traffic ticket SURCHARGES.

          I hadn't heard of this, so I googled "texas ticket surcharge."

          If you go to Texas, you'll pay for it the rest of your life [state.tx.us].

          Unreal. I don't even have it in me to make a jab at Republicans over this. I mean... holy shit, Texas. Holy fucking shit. I'm not mad, or angry, or even disappointed. I'm stunned.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by tmosley ( 996283 )
            I live in Texas, and have never heard of that. But then, I haven't had a traffic ticket in ages.

          • I'm struggling to see the bad in that. It just looks like your run-of-the-mill speeding fine to me.

            What's the difference in this case?

            • I'm struggling to see the bad in that. It just looks like your run-of-the-mill speeding fine to me.

              What's the difference in this case?

              In most states, (Ohio and Arizona are the two I'm most familiar with. Don't ask...), money collected from traffic tickets goes to the community. These surcharges go directly to the State of Texas. And it doesn't matter if you're an out of state resident who has points on his license, if convicted in Texas, you get to pay on all the points for 3 years. To Texas.

      • It's doom for sure. The only way to kill a zombie is to shoot it in its brain. But Zombie SCO has no brain!

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      How is it that they can continue to pay lawyers (or find fools greedy enough) to fund their 'Hail Marry' legal crap?

      The general belief is a certain company whose popular acronym starts with an "M" and ends with an "S"...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mikael ( 484 )

      I hope they turn this saga into a horror movie. This is like the corpse still banging on the cofffin cask door, even when sprinkled with holy water, surrounded by crucifixes, shot with silver bullets, packed in with garlic and exorcised by an entire busload of priests working shifts 24/7.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sconeu ( 64226 )

      Because when this whole fiaSCO started, they paid a lump sump to their attorneys to cover the ENTIRE suit through all appeals.

      They're NOT paying their attorneys, they've already been paid.

  • Reminds me of the old Russian bonds (Score:3)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Saturday November 05, 2011 @10:39AM (#37957770)

    They are still traded, believe it or not. The bonds issued by the old Czarist regime from almost a century ago. Every time it seems like Russia might ponder thinking about picking them up and honoring them, their value goes up. Mind you, from zero to near zero, but still.

    I guess SCO is aiming for the same gambit.

    • But at least in Soviet Russia, Bonds redeem *you*.
    • Somebody found some old paper bonds from the Weimar Republic a few years ago and found investors who were willing to invest in them in the hope that Germany might honor them. I think Germany had already paid them off and they were worthless or something like that, but I'm sure people will continue buying and selling them anyway.

    • Ah yes - my grandmother's family invested heavily in the Trans Siberian Railrway - evidently most of their life savings. When the Bolsheviks repudiated those bonds, it changed my ancestor's lives, not for the better.

  • Keep moaning and looking for brains SCO (Score:3)

    by evanism ( 600676 ) on Saturday November 05, 2011 @10:46AM (#37957814) Journal

    In 100 years when Linux rules all, the name SCO will be uttered in hushed tones like an unmentionably profane word, told to naughty children by mothers to warn them against Bad Things, and the generic name for products that burned into a black hole of public hatred... "did you see that BeegleSearch did a SCO?".

    Time for the cricket bat to put this zombie down for good.

    • Re:Keep moaning and looking for brains SCO (Score:5, Funny)

      by Dunbal ( 464142 ) * on Saturday November 05, 2011 @10:49AM (#37957846)

      In 100 years when Linux rules all,

      Dude I don't normally say this, but today I have a real bad back-ache and I'm in a lot of pain. So could you give me some of what you're smoking?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )

        A hundred years is a very long time. In many ways the computer industry is still young, things keep changing all the time at least on the hardware and interface level. Right now it's mobile devices, multipoint touchscreens and so on but there's been plenty others over the last decade, people are still finding reasons to upgrade from XP and OS X 10.0 that was state of the art 10 years ago. Is operating in 2021 going to look that much different from 2011? 2031 to 2021? ...and so on. I'm not going to pretend I

      • In 100 years when Linux rules all,

        Dude I don't normally say this, but today I have a real bad back-ache and I'm in a lot of pain. So could you give me some of what you're smoking?

        It's probably just Mike & Ike.

    • In 100 years when Linux rules all, the name SCO will be uttered in hushed tones like an unmentionably profane word, told to naughty children by mothers to warn them against Bad Things, and the generic name for products that burned into a black hole of public hatred... "did you see that BeegleSearch did a SCO?".

      Time for the cricket bat to put this zombie down for good.

      "You mean Valdemort?"

      "Shhh!"

      No doubt your right. Sort of a negative take on "Doing an Apple."

    • I'm pretty sure saying SCOX at school can get you that reaction right now.

    • You-know-who, who-must-not-be-named?

  • Linus's view on the scox-scam (Score:5, Interesting)

    by walterbyrd ( 182728 ) on Saturday November 05, 2011 @10:48AM (#37957834)

    In a recent interview, Linus expresses his opinions on patents and copyrights and made the following remark about SCO and the US justice system

    "SCO was a classic example of that. Where they tried to use copyrights, which turned out to be completely bogus in so many ways, and made it into a nasty legal battle. They lost badly. What was irritating about the whole thing, as an insider knowing about what they claimed was completely bogus, was that it took them 10 years to lose. It is scary. 10 years! I don't know how many hundreds and millions of dollars IBM and Novell spent on fighting completely bogus crap stuff; fighting lawsuits that made no sense. Literally it made no sense what so ever. To the point that it ended up turning out that they did not even own the copyrights that they were claiming, never mind the copyrights they were claiming weren't actually true. Christ what a chaos!"

    http://www.muktware.com/news/2866

  • ... No problem, L4D taught us how to deal with this: AIM FOR THE HEAD.

  • Shotgun blast to the head, right? But what kind of shotgun do you use for a corporation?

  • It's not really scox, it's Microsoft (Score:5, Informative)

    by walterbyrd ( 182728 ) on Saturday November 05, 2011 @10:54AM (#37957894)

    "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!"

    Microsoft financed the entire scam. And doesn't it fit the MS MO perfectly? MS is always abusing the legal system to hurt it's competition.

    It also fit's the MS MO to pull these legal system scams by proxie. A US federal judge once accused MS of using "Tonya Harding" tactics. At least somebody in the US justice system gets it.

    • With all the license fees MS are collecting for Android, MS was able to do directly what they were unable to do via SCO. This is about the SCO henchmen getting their cut after MS finally found an M.O. that worked.

    • Two man scam. Darl deliberately drove somebody else's car (SCO) into a brick wall (IBM) and took it to his brother's panel shop. I've got no idea how many millions were funnelled out of SCO into his brothers legal firm but that's the way the cash was channelled.
      Of course there's also stock manipulation, resume building (I'm the guy that took on IBM and would have won too if not for those meddling kids and their penguin!), relatively small amount of money coming in from Microsoft who saw they could get a b

  • Rule #2 (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bragr ( 1612015 ) * on Saturday November 05, 2011 @10:58AM (#37957926)

    Double tap.

    For exactly this reason

  • Siblings are using their mom's old car. She doesn't care what any of them do with it. The youngest used it to sell and deliver pizza. His older brother let his friends use it to deliver free pizza in return for free pizza and free recipes. The youngest complained to dad. Dad tells him to GFY. So he complains again, and again, and again. If we are lucky we will get to watch dad beating the shit out of him on youtube.

  • ... is that Cahn (the trustee) found there was still some loose change floating around, and he can continue to grind out trustee fees by demanding BSF continue to litigate for free as per the agreement.

    Not that anyone else even cares any more. Even if SCO were to somehow win everything they ask for in some parallel universe, it wouldn't affect anyone outside the USofA, and there's enough connectivity now that all the data centers running linux could just move north and south of the borders.

    So who would that leave? Pretty much nobody.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Fished ( 574624 )
      This. SCOx is bankrupt, and the trustee is obligated to conserve their assets. Arguably, this would include pursuing this case into the ground, so long as there's ANY chance if settlement, especially since the legal fees are (maybe) already covered.
      • Not when the estate is responsible for all other costs of pursuing litigation, such as transcripts, witnesses, etc. Look at the bills over the last couple of years - millions blown even after the supposed fee cap.

        He would have done better spending it on booze and hookers, and returning the empties for a refund.

        • Not when the estate is responsible for all other costs of pursuing litigation, such as transcripts, witnesses, etc. Look at the bills over the last couple of years - millions blown even after the supposed fee cap.

          He would have done better spending it on booze and hookers, and returning the empties for a refund.

          Even given that blowing all that cash on booze & hookers and returning the empties would have brought in more cash than continuing the pursuit of the suit, it wouldn't have been legal under the bankruptcy laws for him to do this. By law, the trustee(s) is/are obligated to continue pursuit until a final judge drops the final hammer for good or evil.

          • Not when the estate is responsible for all other costs of pursuing litigation, such as transcripts, witnesses, etc. Look at the bills over the last couple of years - millions blown even after the supposed fee cap.

            He would have done better spending it on booze and hookers, and returning the empties for a refund.

            Even given that blowing all that cash on booze & hookers and returning the empties would have brought in more cash than continuing the pursuit of the suit, it wouldn't have been legal under th

  • SCO resulted in some good (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Henriok ( 6762 ) on Saturday November 05, 2011 @11:26AM (#37958156)
    The whole SCO story isn't all bad, perhaps not bad at all. It has resulted in some pretty important stuff like auditing the Linux code for copyrighted stuff, keeping developers and contributors honest to the code, and really putting these legal issues to test so the rules are clear and hardening Linux while showing that it is a serious player and that large companies can get involved. Linux as a project is absolutely better off for it. Hard times makes does that to stuff, if it doesn't kill you. I thing the battling with Apple will result in the same thing: Less copying/imitating/plagiarism and more innovating. That's what we want, isn't it? New great products, not more of the same?

    • I'd mod this comment up. Though I might nitpick the spelling. :)

    • Way more bad than good, IMO. Now, Microsoft used their lessons from the scox-scam to file bogus IP lawsuits all over the place. It's practically all MS does anymore. Bogus lawsuits work, they work like all hell.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jbolden ( 176878 )

      I think it did a lot damage for over a year or two during a crucial period of time when companies were seriously about possibly switching it created legal doubt as to Linux's standing. The legal issues were 2nd to the failure (with a few exceptions) of all but Unix shops transitioning in having killed corporate desktop Linux.

    • It has resulted in some pretty important stuff like auditing the Linux code for copyrighted stuff, keeping developers and contributors honest to the code

      Meanwhile, it's proprietary competition has no such scrutiny required, and is even more likely to be able to hide such instances, as their source is not publicly available.

  • Grasping at straws and nitpicking at details (Score:5, Informative)

    by UnknowingFool ( 672806 ) on Saturday November 05, 2011 @12:17PM (#37958506)

    The new round of SCO claims is more laughable than the original claims. These new claims deal with the ill-fated Project Monterrey.

    Way back in the late 1990s, Project Monterrey was an effort to bring a single Unix that ran on 32-bit and 64-bit. It was supposed to run on POWER, PowerPC, x86 and Itanium. IBM would work on the PowerPC part, Sequent was supposed to bring in multi-processor support, and Santa Cruz would work on IA-32. Intel would help develop Itanium support. The project became large and unwieldy at the same time Linux started gaining traction. IBM bought Sequent in 1999. IBM seeing that the future was Linux and not Project Monterrey declared the project dead in 2000 but not before making all the contributions they felt necessary to complete their end. Itanium was delayed and thus never got much traction. Santa Cruz was bought out by Caldera in 2000 and renamed themselves SCO.

    As part of the agreement, all the partners would share in any development efforts. According to SCO, IBM took the Project Monterrey parts and put it in Linux. I think they may even allege they took the Santa Cruz parts. They also accuse IBM of interfering with their efforts in Project Monterrey.

    Unfortunately for SCO, there isn't much evidence to support them. Project Monterrey failed because Linux was a far more attractive project with more support and more partners. Project Monterrey would at best be a niche platform especially since Itanium never took off. IBM only sold a few dozen licenses from the project where they normally sell hundreds of thousands of licenses.

    Also there is no evidence that IBM took any part of PM and contributed to Linux much less Santa Cruz parts. Again SCO is vague about what parts but SMP, NUMA, and JFS are possible candidates. However all these predate PM with SMP and NUMA coming from Sequent and JFS coming from IBM's OS/2 efforts. The disagreement if the parts don't involve these revolve whether the PM license allowed IBM to take. SCO first has to identify the parts and then place them as originating from their part of PM.

    To show how misguided SCO's claims are they have this bit.

    The fact that Novell waived those contract claims years after the disclosures started does not diminish the impropriety of the disclosures or the damage they caused to SCO.

    In laymen's terms, SCO says just because Novell waived any IBM transgression in 2003, that doesn't SCO wasn't hurt when IBM transgressed on Novell's rights. So SCO is forgetting again the fact that SCO never owned the copyrights so they absolutely no complaint in the matter between IBM and Novell. Only Novell does and they waived it. It doesn't matter when as SCO is not a party to it.

    Indeed, insofar as IBM requires the waiver to avoid liability for breach of contract, Novell's waiver only highlights the wrongfulness of IBM's conduct. In addition, the Tortious Interference Claims are also based on IBM's disclosure of confidential UnixWare technologies that SCO developed after 1995 and that are unrelated to IBM's AT&T licensing agreements for UNIX.

    SCO tries to imply that IBM may have transgressed on Novell thus they are likely to transgress on their claims. The problem is that SCO never had any proof that IBM transgressed on Novell at all. Novell never considered what IBM did to be a transgression. Also any transgression IBM did to SCO must be proved. They keep forgetting the "proof" part.

    • Scox-scam continues to be a great success for MS (Score:5, Interesting)

      by walterbyrd ( 182728 ) on Saturday November 05, 2011 @01:21PM (#37959056)

      The idea of the scox-scam was never to win a jury verdict. Nor was the idea to collect fees for Linux (I called twice, and asked to be invoiced, scox refused to do so).

      The idea behind the scox-scam was to smear linux, and intimidate some people away from using linux, and to scare some companies away from contributing to linux.

      Think about it: why did scox (really Microsoft) sue IBM? Why not redhat? IBM is not even have a linux distribution. The reason is: IBM had just contributed a file system to Linux. And Microsoft wants other companies to know that if they contribute to Linux, they better be ready to spend $100 million defending that decision. I would bet this tactic actually worked.

      Follow the money. Who stands to benefit from smearing Linux? Caldera/Scox was a linux company. But scox made a lot more $$ accepting MS loot, than from trying to sell Linux.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Phrogman ( 80473 )

        I have to agree. The only people who benefit from this in any substantial way is Microsoft, and the legion of lawyers their money paid for to run this lawsuit for 10 years. The purpose was to tarnish Linux and Open Source in general. Now someone at MS has ponied up some more cash to run a second scam, ^H^H^H lawsuit and they will likely try to drag it out as long as possible.

        I would love to see some company buy up SCO then opensource all their code, and publicly display all their documents, all their bankre

    • I'd like to get my hands on Monterey... for reference, it'd be nice to have an AIX that ran on a vm in i386/x86_64. But with it being very expensive, and less than 40 licenses ever sold, I wonder if it even exists anywhere anymore. I haven't checked usenet, but I see no torrents for it at tpb. IBM ought to release it as OSS on x86... with a fork, it could compete with Linux, as difficult or unrealistic as that sounds today, it would have crushed Linux back in 2001.

  • Surely a corporation that is literally not able to do anything but dredge up old lawsuits that have already been adjudicated to death cannot be seen as being for the public good. Just revoke the charter and be done with it.

    Besides that, shouldn't they have already put everything including old business cards and leftover trade show swag up on ebay to pay their existing debts? Where/how does SCO have any money to pay someone to oversee this crap? Surely at most they should have one person (working from a home

  • Will some IBM lawyer kindly put a shotgun shell through this zombie's head once and for all?

    Buy SCO's client list, disband SCO's board, take away their DNS entries and set Derle's tomb on fire so we can be done with this crap.

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