From 2003 to 2009: the summary for the SCO lunacy
Pepe
renamed it The SCO Group, procceeding then their FUD campaing against
Linux and to sue it's own customer right and left.
Here is a nice summary highlighting all the important point of all that
has happened, and which succintly tells where are we now.
(It is extracted from an Slashdot.org post:
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1279241&cid=28448831 )
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Pepe
Yes, better if I really post it... :-)
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They sued IBM over the copyrights to Linux, which they claim they own
because they claimed they owned the Unix copyrights. Novell said that
they never sold the copyrights to SCO, so SCO sued Novell for saying that.
Since SCO was suing IBM for copyright infringement, that whole thing was
put on hold while SCO and Novell fought out who really owned the copyrights.
At trial, all of SCO's claims were tossed out in summary judgement and
the like. The court agreed with Novell that SCO had no copyrights to
Unix (it never even got to the question of whether or not Linux violates
Unix copyrights and their mounds of secret evidence has never been
presented anywhere). All that was left were the counterclaims that
Novell had against SCO. Among those was the claim that all the money SCO
had collected from Sun and Microsoft should rightfully belong to Novell.
The judge agreed that SCO was guilty of conversion, which means that it
was never SCO's money to begin with.
That part is important: it's not a debt owed to Novell, it was always
Novell's money. SCO sold something to Microsoft and Sun that it didn't
own. SCO had a right to collect royalties, but it was contractually
obligated to give that money to Novell and be paid a percentage back.
The court agreed and the only question was "Wow much of what SCO sold
was Unix and how much was anything else?"
The only thing left for trial was to figure out just how much money SCO
stole from Novell. On the eve of that trial, SCO filed for bankruptcy.
Under the law, SCO has a certain period of time where they get to be the
first to propose a way out of bankruptcy. They missed every deadline.
When the courts had all agreed that their unique opportunity to file a
plan had expired, other parties began filing motions.
Among those filing plans were the U.S. Trustee appointed to oversee the
bankruptcy. He felt that SCO had no chance to move forward as an ongoing
concern and moved to convert from Chapter 11 (reorganization) to Chapter
7 (liquidation). Novell and IBM agreed.
SCO's last move wasn't even the eve before this time. They were late to
court, and appeared at the last minute (an hour beyond the last minute,
actually) with a so-called "plan" to sell the company. The plan
basically amounts to selling all the assets to another company and
leaving a shell behind to fight Novell, IBM (and Chrylser and other
former SCO-unix customers on the basis that Linux violates the
copyrights of Unix). Selling the "business" means, essentially, moving
all of "SCO's" money to another company and leaving nothing behind for
Novell to collect from at final judgment.
SCO, as I said, showed up late and with only one copy of the agreement
for the Trustee, Novell and IBM to see. They objected and asked the
judge to move forward with the Chapter 7 conversion motions. They
pointed out that SCO was past all legal deadlines. The judge said, and
I'm not kidding or exaggerating, "What happens if I don't meet that
deadline? Will they take me out back and shoot me?" Thus defying the
statues, he gave SCO one more chance and agreed that they will meet in
the required 15 days to hear about SCO's plans. The judge ruled that
July 16th is 15 days from June 15th...
SCO is really holding out for an appeal. But they'll never turn
everything back. And without the copyrights (and probably even with
them), they don't have much of a case against IBM (and IBM, like Novell,
has counterclaims against SCO). Red Hat is also suing SCO, also on hold
for Novell/bankruptcy.
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Nico Kadel-Garcia
> Pepe wrote:
> > Time has passed since 2003, when Darl McBride hijacked Caldera, and
> > renamed it The SCO Group, procceeding then their FUD campaing against
> > Linux and to sue it's own customer right and left.
>
> > Here is a nice summary highlighting all the important point of all that
> > has happened, and which succintly tells where are we now.
>
> > (It is extracted from an Slashdot.org post:
> >http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1279241&cid=28448831)
>
> > --------------------Quote begins here---------------------
>
> Yes, better if I really post it... :-)
Yes, it usually is. But please, please, for your own legal sake, point
people to the original material where possible. I highly reocmmend the
fine, fine material gathered over at http://www.groklaw.net for the
last few years to cover the cases in amazing detail for an amateur
website.