I've been following the SCO saga almost from day 1.
This ruling is being played up right now, but really it only means
a) SCO *MUST* pay Novell approx $3 Million - which is more than they
have at the moment.
b) Only the summary judgement decision was overturned. This now goes to
trial.
There is NO decision here regarding who owns the Unix copyrights. That
won't be clear until after trial.
However, SCO is in chapter 11 bankruptcy and management has been deemed
untrustworty and a trustee is to be appointed by court order. Already
ordered, just not selected.
This trustee is *supposed* to do what is best for the company and the
creditors. That means it should do whatever is necessary to stop
bleeding cash and remove unreasonable business practices (like maybe
dubious legal proceedings). Failing that, the trustee can put the
company into chapter 7 bankruptcy - where everything is sold off and the
company dissolved.
As it is, SCO may not even exist long enough to see this trial. But if
we speculate that they do survive that long AND they somehow win the
copyrights, they STILL face IBM (who thy sued for billions). The claims
of Unix code in Linux are moot in that case now - years of discovery and
none was ever found. So now they have a contract violation clause left,
and even there they look like they are not in a good position.
And *if* they somehow win those cases, they could still face appeals by
Novell and IBM. And don't forget the Red Hat case, or AutoZone case,
which are pending the Novell decision...
SCO's future looks bleak. I think the trustee will enter settlement
negotiations and try to return the company to doing something other than
litigation to make money.
So in short, absolutely NO bearing on Linux in 2009, 2010, 2011, or
possibly even 2012. If ever.
My thoughts.
Shawn
(I thought of digging up the supporting links for each of the points I
made, but all the detail can be found at http://www.groklaw.net, or even
in the related SlashDot postings -
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/08/25/0021246/Appeals-Court-Overturns-2007-Unix-Copyright-Decision?from=rss)
Juan Alberto Cirez wrote:
Anybody in the list who is steeped in 'legalise' can you please clarify
if this:
"...A federal appeals court on Monday ruled that the SCO Group has a
right to a jury trial on its claim that it owns the Unix operating
system. The ruling could lead to renewed legal entanglements for Unix’s
open source cousin, Linux..."
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/08/sco/
Has any teeth or bearing on LINUX in 2009...?
Thanks
_______________________________________________
clug-talk mailing list
[email protected]
http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca
Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php)
**Please remove these lines when replying
