On The SCO Lawsuit Front
It’s
time for our nearly weekly SCO versus the IT industry update.
This week’s news is varied.
The
important piece is that SCO did deliver the court-ordered (and
long-awaited) answers to IBM’s interrogatories on January 12. However, they were a lot shorter and less interesting than
many were expecting. Or
perhaps they were just what some had expected after all.
The
big news is that SCO did not offer any proof of infringing code in
System V UNIX. There
are claims of infringing code in AIX and DYNIX but no real proof;
SCO claims that they need newer versions of the IBM operating
systems for that. So I wonder how they knew the infringements existed then?
Speculation
is rife as to what will happen on January 23 when SCO and IBM meet
in court. (Since we
wrote this, the court date has been postponed to February 6.)
Theoretically, IBM could ask the judge to dismiss the case
(they still have a counter-case pending against SCO).
Or they could just wait and see what the judge has to say
about what SCO has offered as “proof.”
As
you might imagine, the web is alive with derisive comment.
Read it all at Groklaw.
Reading Groklaw is a full-time job, so the specific article
I’m citing is at http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20040114194241382.
You’ll love the comments.
On
January 20, SCO announced that it had filed a Slander lawsuit
against Novell, claiming that Novell has improperly filed copyright
registrations in the United States Copyright Office for UNIX
technology covered by SCO's copyrights.
They also complain that Novell has made false and misleading
public claims that it, and not SCO, owns the UNIX and UnixWare
copyrights, and that Novell has made false statements with the
intent to cause customers and potential customers to not do business
with SCO.
You
may find that pretty amusing, in light of what SCO has been up to
for most of the last year.
We’d
guess that this is all about:
(1)
Putting a negotiating piece on the table to have something to trade with
Novell; or
(2)
Looking to confuse things right before they have to appear in court and
perhaps be embarrassed by their inability to show the evidence they
claimed they had;
or
(3)
Just another way to heat up this too often re-boiled soup.
We’d
guess Novell filed those copyrights for a reason (maybe because they
wanted a negotiating piece of their own?) and that we’ll see all
this play out soon enough.
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