Robert Pogson

The long sad story that is SCO v World should have ended long ago with the pitiful poor showing of SCO in court. They had no case, no evidence, and no workable business plan. A judge ruled that, as a matter of law and the plain reading of the contract, that SCO did not receive certain copyrights to a UNIX OS. Since their whole agenda depended on the copyright, they were dead in the water until an appeals tribunal ruled that the matter was too complex to be decided by summary judgement. The case of SCO v Novell for slander of title is now going back for a trial by jury. A further complication is that a trustee has now been appointed to manage SCO’s affairs. While it is hard to see how an impartial trustee could wish the legal bloodshed to be prolonged, it may take some weeks for the trustee to get up to speed.

This whole process has been a failure of the courts to require SCO to provide the least bit of evidence that they had a case. In criminal proceedings this thing would have been dismissed for lack of evidence at a preliminary hearing. Instead SCO was given millions of dollars worth of discovery under the civil rules and allowed to dodge a bullet by hiding behind Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection while they were not bankrupt. The cost of litigation and the bankruptcy proceedings themselves have now made SCO bankrupt so Chapter 7 is appropriate but the saga continues. I hope the trustee finds cause to claw back some of the ill-gotten gains from the lawyers and management of SCO to give the legitimate employees of SCO, their customers and creditors a break.

I do not know what IBM and Novell could have done differently to have this stuff killed promptly. Clearly, paying the thugs off was impractical as they demanded billions. Perhaps they were too polite. I think no judge could imagine this size of case  could be a lie from day one.