Submitted by SCO has published a statement after the court ruling in their case against Novell: “The company is obviously disappointed with the ruling issued last Friday. However, the court clearly determined that SCO owns the copyrights to the technology developed or derived by SCO after Novell transferred the assets to SCO in 1995.” And at the end: “Although the district judge ruled in Novell’s favor on important issues, the case has not yet been fully vetted by the legal system and we will continue to explore our options with respect to how we move forward from here.”
Statement From SCO Regarding Recent Court Ruling
51 Comments
2007-08-14 7:01 pm
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2007-08-14 7:11 pm
… what Rob (Master of the IT Universe) Enderle and Laura Didio will (won’t?) say about this.
This SCO case is really getting old and as time goes on SCO are being more unambiguously exposed as having shaky legal platforms for launching their case.
I think the worst thing that has come out of this for SCO is that their image amongst the very people who would be most likely to recommend solutions has been severely tarnished.
Not so much that Wal-Mart won’t take any of them on as a Greeter Associate. ^_^
SCO has more or less been beat. My feeling is that they probably aren’t going to win many more of their claims. I figure at some point they will be forced into bankruptcy, sold off for outstanding debts, and Unix will completely go back to Novell (probably even the changes SCO might own).
Personally, I think they ought to sh*t can the CEO and start working on a new open source friendly campaign.
Yep they try to avoid bankruptcy. Nice win for the patent (or copyright as it is called here) haters!
This is a copyright case, NOT a patent case. They aren’t alternative names for the same thing, they are different.
For example Europe does not recognise software patents.
It does however recognise copyright.
However, they are obligated by international law to respect patents from other countries.
Only if the country is a party to that law. I don’t know about countries in Eroupe but as we know China and Russia are not a party to most of those laws. We can try to hold them to those laws as a condition of being in the WTO or something.
>However, they are obligated by international law to
>respect patents from other countries.
Not if those are software patents.
Only to the extend that these patents are valid. Software cannot be patented in most european countries and as such software patents from USA are invalid.
Well, it’s copyrights. SCO didn’t loose any copyrights they owned. No code was forced into public domain. So I’m not seeing how this is a win for copyright haters (or patent haters for that matter).
Too little, too late I suspect (though canning Darl would just be plain funny). SCO owe novell for the MS and Sun deals and any other scosource deals presumably (forget the name of the ISP who went in on that ATM). They don’t bring enough to the table for the OSS community to bother to do anything more than grind out the remaining ill-will it (quite rightfully IMHO) feels toward SCO and a change of name, management and attitude would probably not be enough to change that.
Get rich or die trying I say
I just took a look at SCO’s shares on nasdaq… oh, man!
http://quotes.nasdaq.com/asp/SummaryQuote.asp?symbol=SCOX
Poor fellas! So much for all this 4.5 years of bad-mouthing.
Yep, SCO shares are down almost 72% from Friday’s closing. SCO is road-kill.
“HAa Ha!” Normally I would be sad to see a provider of Unix go away, they do make good products. But the way that SCO killed themselves has lost all pity from people who may have been a strong support for them.
Make a false claim, do not give evidence to support it or the ability for the open source community to fix it out of court.
Sue companies who are big support for Linux and some that are the size where the CEO can buy your company from spare change in his wallet. Piss them off to a point they much rather spend extra money to watch you suffer.
If SCO just sticked to selling their products. Their stock price will probably be steady around $3.00 – $6.00 a share but in a Get rich quick scheme they killed themselves. And unless you were stupid enough to be invested in the company you don’t feel sorry for them.
but keep an eye on your pockets ’cause NASDAQ says your down in the dumps:
Change Net / % 1.071 down 68.65%
Best Bid / Ask $ 0.4801 / $ 0.489
A SCOX paper costs less than 50 cents .. =P
I don’t know if I’m interpreting this right, but if I am the chart is very entertaining;
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=SCOX&t=5d&l=off&z=m&q=l&c=
Edited 2007-08-13 17:47
yes you are =)
Whee! It just keeps dropping! The last time I checked it was down 71%, but now it seems to be down 73%
Oh my, I wonder how low it will go! 
They got burned, they got burned BAD ^^ <3
EDIT: just went to 75% :O
Edited 2007-08-13 18:13
Oooh. I wonder how hard it would be to buy them out now…?
It would be very expensive.
There are a lot of counterclaims against SCO still “on the table”. There are counterclaims of slander of title from Novel, counterclaims of copyright infringement from IBM, and any number of claims under the Lanham act from everyone and his dog, including RedHat.
Given that SCO do not have the UNIX copyrights, (let alone that Linux is not a copy of UNIX code), all of these claims against SCO are pretty much slam dunk.
Any buyer of SCO would have to answer to all these claims.
No-one is going to buy SCO.
Jack Elliot: C’mon, it ain’t over till the fat lady sings!
Toshi Yamashita, Jack’s Interpreter: [subtitle as he translates to the team] When the game is over, a fat lady will sing to us!
Source: Mr. Baseball (1992)
(And yes, you have to see this just to understand the humor behind it…)
Edited 2007-08-13 17:52
As they say, it ain’t over till it’s over… but enough already ! Man, I have to go back and apologize to all people I ever thought being stupid, cause given these fellas, everybody else is a bloody genius.
Hey, is it me, or should we all pool our money together and buy SCO 🙂
…Come to think of it , what would we get for that? A few developers? Are there any redeeming features we could open source under GPL and use to enhance Linux, or are they just too irrelevant now? Is it trash or treasure? Linus once said that at least Solaris has an interesting file system worth looking at…
What do SCO have to offer, I guess is my question…
Edited 2007-08-13 17:58
The funny thing is that their UNIX on Intel is better then Solaris on Intel.
And I will admit I was a HUGE Caldera fan till all this happened. Caldera was one of the first versions of Linux I ever used. Sco was my first brush with real Unix. (Even before I used BSD)
But they let MS talk them into blowing the company. I hope some of the people made good money cause SCO is done. And MS now sees that they may want to watch their back if they choose to sue. They have plenty of money etc but after this I am not sure they would win. Google and Novell are lawyering up to battle MS.
And I assume Oracle and IBM will not let MS push over Linux ether being that they are both making money from Linux. And both are using developing resources from other companies like Red Hat.
Actually, their ‘cash cow’ has shifted from UNIX systems to point-of-sale systems these past few years… and they do have some really talented people working there, just stupid management.
Hmm, I made $900 working this summer. If their stock keeps dropping, could I buy SCO out for that much? (Hmm… total market value of SCO’s stock is about $9 million. That’s good enough for a 0.01% interest…)
Edited 2007-08-13 18:34 UTC
You might be able to buy SCO for a pittance … but it would cost you a fortune to answer all the outstanding counterclaims against SCO.
You would have to pay out Novell for monies you collected from Scosource. You would have to pay out Novell for slander of Novell’s title. You would have to pay out IBM for distributing IBM software (in Linux) without a license from IBM (since you violated the GPL by starting up scosource). You would have to pay out IBM and RedHat for Lanham act violations (for badmouthing their business {Linux} without cause). You would have to pay out Autozone and Daimler Chrysler for all that nonsense you put them through.
Have you got that much money? Has even Microsoft?
Edited 2007-08-14 04:24
Since when did stockholders become liable for a companys debt? If you take it private, you might be liable though. But who on earth would do that?
Another thing is, that SCO might not be worth much (or anything), if the counterclaims goes against SCO. But yes – of course Microsoft would have the money to pay SCOs liabilities. Whats a few billions among friends….
SCO has a dead in the water mobile middleware thing and UnixWare. SCO has spent millions litigating while UnixWare is unchanged for the last six or seven years. Let’s look at what you get for $699 per CPU:
X11R5 (Not R6, no X.org). Yes you can run X11R6 with KDE but only via the Linux Kernel Personality.
GCC stuck at 2.95
Userland tools that haven’t been updated since 2000. No drivers for anything later than 2000, if that.
For all SCO’s crying about Linux having their IP and hurting their sales, they have done NOTHING to improve their product. Zero. Their business became litigation.
Once UnixWare was a respected Unix. Now it is a museum exhibit.
Well, that makes it all worthwhile, then.
Back in time, they had some good products. Too bad a gang of professional gamblers put their hands on the company and decided that they should try their “luck” and convinced share holders besides all signs. Probably some of them made more money on this “big dogs proxy game” than they could earn on the same period had not them started all this sellout. Yes, don’t be ingenuous, things like that don’t just “happen”, they are pretty much calculated, specially if the risk can be redirect to someone else pocket. I hope the laws will be fixed so that its effects become devastating on bad managers all over the country with similar management patterns.
Wish luck for all good employers still working there.
“Although the district judge ruled in Novell’s favor on important issues, the case has not yet been fully vetted by the legal system and we will continue to explore our options with respect to how we move forward from here.”
Continue to explore their options to dig their own grave I suppose?
*Sigh*
These guys just don’t know when to stop. Why not do something useful with the little resources they have left? Like arranging a big party or something? At least that would be better than continuing their potinless litigations.
Edited 2007-08-13 18:42
They could make a movie…Night of the living dead (company).
Couldn’t the stock holders simply force the company to bankrupt or liquidate its asset and close the door?
I’m not sure what is worse, that the stock of SCO is down to 0.44USD or that eventually the developers who are working at SCO will lose their jobs because management tried to do a Get Rich Money Scheme.
The current thugs in the SCO Management ought to be brought to justice but unfortunately, that would be easier said than done. Let us hope Microsoft gets the hint, Linux isn’t going anywhere!
I’m not sure what is worse, that the stock of SCO is down to 0.44USD or that eventually the developers who are working at SCO will lose their jobs because management tried to do a Get Rich Money Scheme.
I don’t think there are many developers left, and if you were, wouldn’t you have a well-fleshed out “Plan B” in place?
“that eventually the developers who are working at SCO will lose their jobs”
Presumably the developers with half a brain and at least some ethics has already left the slinking ship.
“””
the developers who are working at SCO will lose their jobs because management tried to do a Get Rich Money Scheme.
“””
Excuse me, but this has been going on, out in the open, for over 4 and a half years. Just how many tears do you expect us to weep for people who are aiding and abetting this scam?
Back in 2003, I would have agreed with you. In fact, I made some posts to that effect. But anyone at SCO today simply deserves what they get. And has either had ample warning, or is too stupid to see the obvious.
It’s childish of me, I know. But after following this whole thing for all these years, I am gratified to see SCOX’s market cap plummet to less than $7m. And I smile as I say to myself, out loud, “Die SCO! Die!”. Sometimes it’s OK to allow yourself a childish moment, I suppose. 😉
Sometimes? Look at what that got Darl. A worthless company being whored out.
I’m quite curious of what Microsoft has to say about the fallen for two reasons:
a) Microsoft bankrolled them through Baystar to keep up the IP fight.
b) Any money they put into SCO by licensing illegitimate IP goes to Novell, which brings to mind this scenario:
Novell is well within its rights to void any agreement made between SCO and MS relative to the IP in question, which puts Novell in a very good position at the bargaining table should MS decide to follow that route, and it would be in their best interest to do so because we all know there is some semblance of Unix in Windows just waiting to come out one way or the other.
What I am looking forward to is somebody (IBM? REDHAT? LINUX FOUNDATION?) suing Microsoft for conspiracy to commit fraud and cheating Linux companies of rightful revenues by FUD and defamation.
For the past 5 years Microsoft has been fully aware that SCO had no case but it still paid it a kickback in the name of “intellectual property” to help fund it’s fight against Linux. I would like Microsoft to show the world, the Justice department, and the EU what it used this “IP” for and in what Windows applications this SCO “IP” is implemented.
This SCO implosion is just the tip of a Microsoft iceberg of trying to win every battle by hook or crook. The hand in this case is Esau’s but the voice is Jacob’s.
When you type FUD, what definition are you thinking about? FUD is legal especially if it is true. Defamation is a different story.
I’ll bite your legs off!
SCO’s stock trading for today tells what investors are fearing. It appears that they’ve read the ruling, decided to run & their dumping the stock.
SCO started at today’s open at $1.56 per share. It ended at $.44 per share at the close of the day. After-hours trading has the stock up to $.45.
That translates to a 71% loss in a single day. An incredibly poor showing when just over 6 million shares were traded considering that the stock was at a high of $102.00 in March of 2000.
Check out SCO’s Stock Ticker (SCOX) to see the stats.
I’m thinking SCO will declare bankruptcy quite soon.
Hello, My name is Daryl. Welcome to Wal-mart!
The thing that gets me, is that most of SCOX’s executive staff will get recycled and thrown right back into circulation. Bad executives are like bad, but established, NBA players. You know you’re getting nothing out of them, but someone is dumb enough to sign them. I need to find someone to pay me big bucks to bring almost nothing of value to the table.
the Hobbs Act”
United States v. Enmons 410 U.S. 396: “wrongful has meaning in the Act only if it limits the statute’s coverage to those instances where the obtaining of the property would itself be wrongful because the alleged extortionist has no lawful claim to that property.”
http://law.gsu.edu/library/index/bibliographies/vi ew?id=28 [gsu.edu]
Remember scox sending out 1500 letters, which essentially said: “pay us for our UNIX code that’s in Linux, or we’ll sue you.”
“Judge Kimball’s decision not only undermines SCO’s claims against IBM but also suggests that the company was aware that it did not own the Unix copyrights on which it based its litigation even before it launched its SCOsource intellectual property licensing business”
http://www.cbronline.com/article_news.asp?guid=981 E3D15-5DC6-4D48-8BA4-8DA6D8AA9BC7 [cbronline.com]
There have been so many, but here a few of my favorites:
Enderle: “SCO Should Win”
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0%2C1895%2C1545173%2C00.a…
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1563242,00.asp
Lyons: “What SCO Wants, SCO Gets”
http://www.forbes.com/2003/06/18/cz_dl_0618linux.html
BTW: Dan Lyons is also the guy who screamed and cried about anonymous boggers, and message board posters, then he turned out to be the fake Steve Jobs.
Didio: “SCO Group Gains Psychological Edge, Registers UNIX System V Copyrights”
“The fact that SCO registered its UNIX System V copyright lays to rest an earlier, erroneous contention by Novell president, Jack Messman, claiming that SCO did not own the copyrights.”
http://www.techupdate.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2914388,0…
Groklaw: “Maureen O’Gara reportage on a court hearing she didn’t attend, yet magically was able to report on both the contents of a sealed SCO filing *and* what was shown by SCO’s lawyers on a projection screen only Magistrate Judge Brooke Wells and the lawyers were supposed to see.”
Here is the O’Gara article:
http://www.linuxworld.com/story/46800.html“ rel=”nofollow”>http://web.archive.org/web/20041025040145/