Not Quite Dead: SCO Linux Suit Against IBM Stirs In Utah 170
An anonymous reader points to a story in the Salt Lake Tribune which says that
The nearly defunct Utah company SCO Group Inc. and IBM filed a joint report to the U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City saying that legal issues remain in the case, which was initiated in 2003 with SCO claiming damages of $5 billion against the technology giant, based in Armonk, N.Y.
That likely means that U.S. District Judge David Nuffer, who now presides over the dispute, will start moving the lawsuit — largely dormant for about four years while a related suit against Novell Inc. was adjudicated — ahead. What kind of issues? In addition to its claims of IBM misappropriation of code, SCO alleges that IBM executives and lawyers directed the company's Linux programmers to destroy source code on their computers after SCO made its allegations.
The company's other remaining claims are that IBM's actions amounted to unfair competition and interference with its contracts and business relations with other companies.
IBM has remaining claims against SCO that allege the Utah company violated contracts, copied and distributed IBM code that had been placed in Linux and that SCO created a campaign of "fear, uncertainty and doubt" about IBM's products and services because of the dispute over Unix code.
Throwback? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Throwback? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Throwback? (Score:5, Funny)
SCO is like some old guy in the mountains with his mule panning for gold. He just knows he'll strike it rich one day.
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He's mighty lucky... My goddamn mule just stands there and eats!
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I still own some SCO stock, but I wish someone would just drive a stake through this.
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Throwback Tuesday on a Wednesday, dont make those sorts of recommendations here, they may listen.
Throw Up (Score:2)
somebody take a wagon load of hickory stakes and a box of silver bullets to Utah and kill that vampire once and for all !
Re:Throwback? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does the summary fail to mention the many outstanding charges that IBM has against SCO, some already decided against SCO, with hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties on hold while SCO works through its bankruptcy?
As soon as SCO pokes its head out of bankruptcy court the Nazgul will be there, waiting for the payment owed. Do those silly bumpkins in Utah think IBM is going to not notice? Darl and his telemarketing scheme buddies are scam artists with a long history of swindling people (check out IKON Office Supplies). SCO is a bunch of petty criminals with no moral integrity, very small pea brains and only the ability to annoy people until paid to go away. If Martha Stewart was sent to a tennis-club prison for her 'crimes', these people should be doing hard time. They should certainly be shunned by the people of Utah, for their long history of immoral criminal activity.
Red Hat case also (Score:2)
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Where is TJ when you need her?
That's PJ, son.
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Perhaps, but she shut down Groklaw because she realized that she couldn't manage secure communication with people who wanted to send her information. See the NSA, et al.
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I agree: systemd has damaged Linux far worse than scox.
IMO: both systemd, and scox, stem from the same idea: companies like Linux being free, but dislike not being able to own Linux.
IMO: Red Hat, the company behind systemd, is much smarter, and is much more likely to successfully steal Linux.
Re:Was SCO really that bad? (Score:4, Insightful)
Your arm must be really tired from painting with that broad brush. As for those who oppose systemd being Microsoft ``agents'', the feature usurpation being done by the systemd developers seems to show just the opposite.
But... WTF does any of this have to do with SCO and their ridiculous legal arguments rising from the dead? Again?
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You appear to have misinterpreted what "most of the squabbling" is actually about.
who if they wanted to could simply tailor Debian to use their own init system, so if they dont like systemd, why dont they just put in their own init program after they install debian?
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Why feed the troll?
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Like O.J. and and V. Putin vowing to find the "real killers."
Whoa, whoa - WHOA. They're going after Lennart Poettering?
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The modding here is screwed up. The GP's comment is insightful and probably correct, yet it's at -1. Then there's the parent comment, which is obvious nonsense from top to bottom, at +1, Insightful. The unsubstantiated "agents of Microsoft" jab is particularly pathetic. Come on, /. mods. You can do better.
While he may be correct about most of the squabbling over systemd, accusing systemd detractors of being agents of Microsoft is a pretty quick and easy way to minus-one-land.
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This past week, I turned on a 400 CPU HPC cluster running CentOS 6.6 without systemd. It worked flawlessly! On my desktop with Mageia4, I made *ONE* change to the systemd and had to reinstall the rootfs. I'm a very experienced sysadmin and I can tell you, I hate systemd with a passion! Not only do I have to re-learn a bunch of crap, but it's the most inflexible, inhospitable, terse, bloated, and obnoxious system I've ever had the "pleasure" to work with. What a crash prone evil joke the distros have push on us. Thank god for Slackware and the few sane distros out there.
Why don't you tell us which change it was that made you have to reinstall the rootfs and/or point to the systemd bug report?
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I'm a very experienced sysadmin
Not anymore. Things change.
terse, bloated
Terse _and_ bloated?
Oh, for Pete's sake. Not again! (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously, is there no limit to this barratry-fest? Surely the judge must tire of it eventually.
Re:Oh, for Pete's sake. Not again! (Score:5, Interesting)
They have had like 4-5 judges in this case already.
The judges has done alot to try and get away from this case.
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It will become a mark of incompetence. If you weren't resourceful enough to avoid being selected as an SCO case's judge, you don't deserve your position.
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...just to put SCO out of our misery.
Aptly put :)
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This is the Nazgul financially sodomizing SCO's shysters.
They are required to do all legal work for SCO, for which they got a big old block of SCO stock.
They want SCO to be put out of their misery. Suffer bitches! Perhaps the Nazgul would like some ghost pepper lube?
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The article says that this will be judge #7.
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That's the technical truth, although it is qualified. Judge Dale Kimball was the primary judge that heard the consolidated cases. There were 4 other earlier cases against RedHat, AutoZone, and DaimlerChrysler that were initially heard by other judges but didn't go anywhere in SCO's favor. There was at leats one magistrate judge I thought that dealt with some procedural and "lesser" matters on Kimball's behalf. There is also a federal bankruptcy judge and then this new judge. There's even more if you include
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The magistrate judge was Judge Wells.
Re:Oh, for Pete's sake. Not again! (Score:5, Insightful)
Judging can be hard work, it's not all bribery and good ol' boyism. Sometimes you have to sit through some real snoozefests.
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Didn't SCO already file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy? If I'm not mistake, unlike Chapter 11, it pretty much means "I give up" as a company, right? How do you file Chapter 7 and still exist as a company in order to press on with lawsuits?
I'd love for someone to explain this one to me, because that sounds like a hell of a deal: erase all your debts, continue with the lawsuit (no doubt on contingency), and if you just win big: jackpot! You won't even have to pay back your original debtors!
Re:Oh, for Pete's sake. Not again! (Score:5, Informative)
They filed they aren't threw the bankruptcy yet. A trustee has been appointed and the trustee decided there still are outstanding legal issues.
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whoever ends up controlling the mess left behind can still push through the lawsuits. the property(imaginary as well) doesn't just disappear into a black hole, unfortunately.
Pining? (Score:5, Funny)
I didn't realize that there were fjords in Utah.
NUKE IT FROM ORBIT (Score:5, Funny)
It's the only way to be sure.
OK, that was easy, but, seriously? SCO is still... acting up? Moving? I thought that thing (and the other... er... thing) and the one before that were settled?
Like, drive a wooden stake through its heart? Bury the head and body separately? What is wrong with the world when fsck SCO is still at large?
Come on, IBM, do everyone a favor: crush them like a bug. Please. I don't know, open a Kickstarter or something, I'll send you money and you a send me a Big Blue T-Shirt with little penguins on it. Please, make it stop. Please, I beg you. Pleeeeeeaaaaaaseeeee, I can't take it anymore! It's not the suspense, it's just the sheer idiocy of it all.
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You win the Internets for today, Sir. That is all.
IBM should put SCO out of misery (Score:5, Interesting)
Can't IBM just buy whatever remains of SCO for scrap and shoot it down for good ?
Re:IBM should put SCO out of misery (Score:5, Insightful)
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Since SCO consists almost entirely of lawyers at this point, its just a question of which lawyers get paid...theirs or yours. Go for the less-lawyers solution.
Re:IBM should put SCO out of misery (Score:4, Funny)
IBM has Nazgul on staff. SCO's shysters were paid in SCO stock to represent them for the duration.
Let the Nazgul feast on Darl's liver.
Re:IBM should put SCO out of misery (Score:5, Interesting)
Take it over by force, find evidence that it was a sock puppet, sue the lawyers
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sorry, all evidence is already destroyed - SCO got permission to shred all their documents as part of the bankruptcy.
So how do they prove anything now?
Re:IBM should put SCO out of misery (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:IBM should put SCO out of misery (Score:5, Insightful)
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Microsoft also a huge part of this. Those $50M "loans" had to be backed by somebody.
Just a MS smear campaign against Linux.
And Microsoft gets to pretend they had nothing to do with it.
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Big money, no whammies, STOP!
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It is so sad that SCO which was a really good company is going to be remembered for this. Novell on the other hand while also a sad shadow of it's former self at least will be remembered in a good light.
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Re:IBM should put SCO out of misery (Score:5, Informative)
The SCO that is currently trolling IBM is not the SCO that you remember as "such a good company". There are two SCO's:
* The Santa Cruz Operation (1979-2001). This is the SCO that you remember. They brought us Xenix (bought from M$), SCO Unix and Unixware. This SCO sold their rights to UNIX to Caldera Systems (then primarily known for Caldera/Open Linux and OpenDOS (bought from Novell, which had in turn bought it from Digital Research earlier). In those years they were mostly famous for filing an antitrust campaign against Microsoft). After selling their UNIX servers and services division to Caldera they renamed themselves as Tarantella Inc., after the product line they retained. Tarantella was subsequently bought by Sun Microsystems in 2005, which in turn was bought by Oracle in 2010.
* The SCO Group (2005-), formerly known as Caldera Systems / Caldera International. As Caldera they bought above SCO's UNIX servers and services division and subsequently renamed themselves to "The SCO Group". Like an evil David they tried to topple Goliath IBM by (falsely) claiming in court that programmers from IBM illegally copied code from SCO's OpenServer sources (supposedly their intellectual property was so secret that their allegations of verbatim copying code by IBM was "proven" by presentational slides which had the SCO code shown in Greek alphabet). Around the same time they started selling subscription based Linux licenses to large IT companies (which were led to believe that The SCO Group owned the rights to Linux). This ridiculous scheme went on for several years, until a judge decided, once and for all, that enough was enough and told them to bugger off, as in the meantime, it had become clear in a separate lawsuit that Novell was in fact the owner of the UNIX copyrights, not the SCO Group.
Re:IBM should put SCO out of misery (Score:4, Informative)
For those who don't recall Caldera also put out the screwy RedHat derivative/clone that attempted to create a 'registry' for Linux. I once witnessed a Caldera representative visiting a Linux enthusiasts group unable to give away 5 free install CDs. Yes, it really was that bad.
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Meh. The SCO you remember was old SCO, that actually did something besides sue.
Even then, they weren't THAT great. They helped make Xenix with MS help, then that became SCO OpenServer. (Yeah, MS got some cash from UNIX sales, and now gets cash on every Android sale). I actually worked with it. It wasn't that good of a distro, and got killed in the marketplace when Linux got rolling. Eventually they bought out the UNIX copyright/trademark for SVR4. They did eventually release SVR4.2, and SVR5, but nei
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> Can't IBM just buy whatever remains of SCO
That's what the remaining few owners are hoping for. It would be like paying blackmail,and encourage other ambulance chasing intellectual property lawyers.
Does this mean Groklaw will come back? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Does this mean Groklaw will come back? (Score:5, Insightful)
Almost DNF (Score:4, Insightful)
SCO, taking the idea of vaporware to a whole new level.
Comment removed (Score:3)
Destruction of documents (Score:4, Interesting)
I hope they kept everything, SCO was going to start destroying stuff in 2013.
http://www.groklaw.net/article... [groklaw.net]
Re:Destruction of documents (Score:4, Informative)
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More fucking gruel! (Score:4, Insightful)
Over for good!
When we heard this unaccountable answer, we looked at one another quite lost in amazement. Could it be possible that the Will had set things right at last, and that Richard and Ada were going to be rich? It seemed too good to be true. Alas, it was!
Our suspense was short; for a break up soon took place in the crowd, and the people came streaming out looking flushed and hot, and bringing a quantity of bad air with them. Still they were all exceedingly amused, and were more like people coming out from a Farce or a Juggler than from a court of Justice. We stood aside, watching for any countenance we knew; and presently great bundles of paper began to be carried outâ"bundles in bags, bundles too large to be got into any bags, immense masses of papers of all shapes and no shapes, which the bearers staggered under, and threw down for the time being, anyhow, on the Hall pavement, while they went back to bring out more. Even these clerks were laughing. We glanced at the papers, and seeing Jarndyce and Jarndyce everywhere, asked an official-looking person who was standing in the midst of them, whether the cause was over. "Yes," he said; "it was all up with it at last!" and burst out laughing too.
"Mr. Kenge," said Allan, appearing enlightened all in a moment. "Excuse me, our time presses. Do I understand that the whole estate is found to have been absorbed in costs?"
"Hem! I believe so," returned Mr. Kenge. "Mr. Vholes, what do you say?"
"I believe so," said Mr. Vholes.
"And that thus the suit lapses and melts away?"
"Probably," returned Mr. Kenge. "Mr. Vholes?"
"Probably," said Mr. Vholes.
For those who don't know, it's Dickens. (Score:2)
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FYI IBM lawyers have been known as Nazgul for 50 years.They are staff, but I'm sure they enjoyed this.
I'm not a violent person... (Score:4, Insightful)
... but my kneejerk reaction is to find the remaining SCO layers, some strong hemp rope and a stout oak tree.
Seriously though, nothing cries out for Tort reform like this nonsense.
What is this, 1740? (Score:2)
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SCO's shysters got paid in SCO stock and are stuck with the case for the duration.
This whole deal is the Nazgul torturing SCO's lawyers. Like a cat with a half dead rat. I hope they kill the law firm and leave the partners heads on pikes outside the office.
Zombies! (Score:2)
Somebody shoot the zombie in the head!
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You don't just shoot them in the head, then you need to fill their mouth with salt and sew their lips together to keep them from spitting it out. Shooting them in the head is just to slow them down enough so that you can do that.
What will it take to kill SCO permanently? (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe a laminated stake through the hear (wood & silver soaked in garlic and holy water). Then stuffed in a coffin placed in a double hulled container, the container gap is filled with holy water and garlic juice. Put into a rocket and launched into an orbit near the sun. Even then I would be willing to bet it would get out and return.
Ad rotator = Perfect Timing... (Score:2)
Scheduling conflict for the suit (Score:2)
PJ's all booked up
I'm no fan of IBM (Score:2)
All right, WHO went out and purchased (Score:2)
A license from SCO?
Come on dude, all that money you paid just went directly to the lawyers who now are using it to file another pathetic round of "legal actions". PLEASE just stop buying their stuff. If you need help porting your legacy application off of their platform let me know, I'm sure we can arrange to get it done for you. Not to mention that the hardware you are using has to be nearly 20 years old now... Time to let this garbage go..
SCOX would not sell you a license if you begged (Score:2)
I know because I called, and asked to buy a license - twice.
I suspect that selling a license to something you don't own is seriously illegal.
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Seriously, I KNOW that "SCO Unix" was a licensed product. I actually used this platform at 3 past employers and we spent a lot of cash paying SCO for the right to install and use it in literally thousands of locations world wide.
All this "We own UNIX and you owe us for running Linux" stuff was bunk, but they did have a licensed product which they DID legally own, it just so happened that the stuff they owned didn't include Linux.
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Arduino (Score:2)
Does anyone else see a similarity SCO and the recent Arduino drama?
Huh? (Score:2)
IBM ordered source code to be destroyed?
Just what would that even accomplish? I get the source code to the Linux kernel with every set of CDs/DVDs that I've downloaded or purchased over the years. Is SCO seriously going to argue that that source code has been magically cleansed of the code that IBM allegedly ordered purged from IBM's developers' computers? That would only make any sense if IBM offered a Linux distribution -- tweaked, I assume SCO is thinking by the code they are alleged to have stolen from
Why don't courts demand evidence right away? (Score:2)
Court: do you have evidence IBM stole your code?
SCOX: nope
Court: case closed.
Instead, the case drags on 13 years while scox plays "hide the ball" with evidence.
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The odd thing is, they WERE ordered to present the evidence. They even got an extention until the end of January (severl years ago) because their lawyers went on vacation over Christmas. They still didn't present any evidence (to speak of). And yet the case went on.
Seriously.... (Score:2)
Seriously? This is a real thing? Fuck the current Tort system...
Scox scam just another successful MS scam (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft was behind it all along.
Who do you think arranged all these just-in-time multi-million dollar "loans."
For Microsoft, $100M is nothing. Less than the cost of one commercial.
A successful Linux smear campaign for $100M is a bargain.
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Mostly IBM vs SCO (Score:2)
Keep in mind that most of the remaining case is IBM suing SCO. most of the other part has gone away( but not all.).
GAH! (Score:2)
They *still* libel Linux (Score:5, Informative)
According to SCO's website [sco.com]:
Wasn't it proven that Novell owned any and all copyrights involved here? How long do you get to publicly libel someone (like everyone who uses Linux) before a judge can order you to cease and desist that idiocy?
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I miss the middle ages (Score:2)
Hundreds of years ago, both parties would choose their best man, and it wold be settled on the field of battle. No appeal. Just think about how much less corporate malfeasance there would be if CEOs and board members had to defend themselves with a broad sword.
TSG Execs have a planned stock sale (Score:2)
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This post triggered me and gave me PTSD.
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Why not, she's already in the same camp of "people we wish to hear less from"
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Yeah, where are my OffTopic moderator points when I need them...
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SCO's lawyers got paid in SCO stock to represent them for the duration. At this point its IBM's lawyers racking them over the coals for LOLs.
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Not over this matter. In this case it's quite important that IBM win.
Pick another case.