Novell has filed its response to SCO Group
slander of title case against it, making the same claim against the Unix vendor and adding
that it believes it is entitled to 95% of SCO’s intellectual property licensing revenue.
This legal filing is the latest twist in the long-running argument between SCO and Novell over which company holds the copyrights to the UnixWare
operating system and Unix
System V code base, and could have a financial impact on SCO’s other legal claims.
Grrrrrrr, go get’um.
Novell is doing a great job at further exposing what a sham SCO and it’s ridiculous lawsuits are. This latest punch shows thoroughly that SCO doesn’t even have the right to sue/collect over Unix IP.
This will be the final nail in SCO’s coffin, and will bring to court the MS and SUN Unix licenses paid to SCO, and expose what they were up to (hint: trash/FUD Linux)
I thought MS sold Xenix to SCO then stopped licensing UNIX code? or do they still license it for UNIX Services for NT?
I agree it is getting to a state of mass stupidity with all these SCO cases, it’s been proven many a time via leaked memo’s and lack of evidence that SCO hasn’t got a leg to stand on thus far.
But… could this eventually lead to the collapse of some UNIX Oses like Solaris, because they paid for a license but the license entitles them to pretty much the ink its writen with and nothing more?
I personally hope no one other other than SCO suffers in this twist as i do enjoy using OpenSolaris, would be a shame if it vanished because of legal problems.
On the other hand Sun bought its UNIX license outright several years ago so would any claim Novell had against SUN now be irrelivant because of the time that has lapsed?
Microsoft still technically licenses UNIX Services for NT, which was their pretext for dumping $12 million into SCO’s legal fund earlier this year.
Novell is also concerned that SCO is “quickly dissipating its assets” and has asked for an order attaching SCO’s assets pending a decision on its contract claims.
Translation : if Novell wins this it could break SCO’s back and laugh all the way to the bank afterwards. If Novell, which already aquired some of the best Linux technology companies around, gets their hands on SCO’s assets (eg Caldera and Unixware) it’s set to really make a real powerplay in x86 unix. (read: bad news for Redhat)
Translation : if Novell wins this it could break SCO’s back and laugh all the way to the bank afterwards.
^ I agree with this. ^
If Novell, which already aquired some of the best Linux technology companies around,
^ And this. ^
gets their hands on SCO’s assets (eg Caldera and Unixware) it’s set to really make a real powerplay in x86 unix.
^ But not with this. ^
Caldera had a good product at the time it was going strong. That was years ago.
Unixware had a blip back when it was owned by Novell where it was interesting to PC users who wanted to play around with Unix. In the larger Unix world it was never a really big deal, thus the reason why Novell eventually sold it.
(read: bad news for Redhat)
While Novell is in a good position irt Unix/unix/Linux, Red Hat isn’t going away anytime soon.
I’m sure that RH folks are more concerned about what Novell is now and could do without SCO than what a combined Novell + SCO may become. It might even work in RH’s favor if Novell gets SCO’s assets. Novell would have to dedicate some resources to looking over SCO’s assets to see if there is anything there — distracting them from the task of getting more business or starting/completing projects.
If I were in charge of Novell and my company won against SCO, I’d put as little money as possible into picking over the corpse; maybe look over a few select pieces to see if they have value, find some parts to further embarass SCO’s sponsors, and make some grand statemets to scare off any other pretenders who might think that suing Novell or any OSS project Novell deals with is a good idea. I’d bury the rest of the carcas, keeping a shovel around if someone decides to be silly, and dig up a bone or two. There even might be a benifit in trashing the whole thing outright.
By not disclosing — or even looking — at what SCO currently has they will automatically spread fear that ‘there might really be something there’. That — beyond having a few choice war trophies — is the only value I can see in owning SCO’s assets. I can’t say I’d even want to keep SCO’s employees on.
Caldera had a good product at the time it was going strong. That was years ago.
Well there must be _something_ left of the old Caldera, some ip, some code, maybe even an engineer or two. If nothing else it has marketing value – Caldera was one of the first real Linux innovators and a lot of people remember it fondly.
Unixware had a blip back when it was owned by Novell where it was interesting to PC users who wanted to play around with Unix. In the larger Unix world it was never a really big deal, thus the reason why Novell eventually sold it.
I disagree, Unixware – despite SCO’s bad behavior – is a solid product. If not better than at least equal to Linux with a few strengths of its own. And with Novell being friendly with IBM we might even see some of the Project Monterey code used in Linux/Unixware.
I’m sure that RH folks are more concerned about what Novell is now and could do without SCO than what a combined Novell + SCO may become. It might even work in RH’s favor if Novell gets SCO’s assets. Novell would have to dedicate some resources to looking over SCO’s assets to see if there is anything there — distracting them from the task of getting more business or starting/completing projects.
I disagree, assimilating SCO would get mindshare and great publicity. SCO’s sales/distributer network used to be quite good, maybe that could be leveraged.
Novell (and SuSE before) have made great progress in the enterprise Linux arena, to the point where Redhat-SuSE is spoken in one breath. Now is .not the time to play it safe but make bold moves.
I can’t say I’d even want to keep SCO’s employees on.
So many companies with good employees get ruined by incompetent management. There’s probably a lot of good people in the basement hacking on the stuff because they love it.
So many companies with good employees get ruined by incompetent management. There’s probably a lot of good people in the basement hacking on the stuff because they love it.
If they stayed at SCO — for years — knowing what SCO’s management was up to, they aided and abetted SCO’s management in a scam or an incredible delusion; the employees that stayed are either not trust worthy or too dumb to hire.
Before you say “but maybe the employees really thought that they had a case” consider this; SCO hired an analyst and the analyst did not see any evidence. They hired more analysts who eventually did see evidence. They said “we got evidence!” and refused to provide it to the court multiple times over years.
The level of belief that is required to think that SCO had a case requires self delusion at such a level that it should not be rewarded.
The ones who left within the first year should be treated with the honor they as individuals deserve, though the ones toward the end should not.
If I were in charge of Novell and my company won against SCO, I’d put as little money as possible into picking over the corpse; maybe look over a few select pieces to see if they have value, find some parts to further embarass SCO’s sponsors, and make some grand statemets to scare off any other pretenders who might think that suing Novell or any OSS project Novell deals with is a good idea. I’d bury the rest of the carcas, keeping a shovel around if someone decides to be silly, and dig up a bone or two. There even might be a benifit in trashing the whole thing outright.
Why trash their work? Why not GPL it? End this legal BS with the biggest and most righteous FU the industry has seen since MS scorched IBM back in the 80’s….
Why trash their work? Why not GPL it? End this legal BS with the biggest and most righteous FU the industry has seen since MS scorched IBM back in the 80’s….
As a tactic for Novell alone, having the source for most of what SCO produced may lead to more problems than it is worth.
By all means, make some of it OSS, sell off what has value but doesn’t make sense as OSS (if anything), and give SCO’s current customers a migration plan for surely SCO’s customers should have been considering migration already. The bulk that remains may not be worth the value of releaseing it as existing analogs already exist for much of it. Once Novell owns the source they risk the chance that they will be liable for SCO’s own failures.
Think of it like getting a free cattle ranch and finding out that it is heavily contaiminated with radiation emmiting ore. While you did not cause the problem, you become responsible once you know about it…and more so as time goes on.
Go get them!
All this mess is a sore on the entire IT industry and it needs to stop. SysV is old, its technology has been surpassed by anyone and everyone in the nix world, and it is of no use in today’s business climate. The remaining use of “UNIX” is the ideas expressed in its portability and coherent interface for application programming. The details of implementation, deployment, and environment are what sells UNIX and provides value for customers.
Virtualization, manageability, reliability, failover, scalability, security. These are what sell UNIX today, and none of these things have anything to do with the codebase that everyone is arguing over.
> disagree, Unixware – despite SCO’s bad behavior –
> is a solid product. If not better than at least
> equal to Linux with a few strengths of its own.
Solid in the sense of “nearly unchanged,” and “works on very particular hardware,” and “rarely crashes,” perhaps. But in terms of features, scalability, speed, ease of use, flexibility, etc., a resounding NO. It’s perfectly horrid, terribly proprietary in *nix terms and exceedingly hard to work with unless you are a UNIXWare guru. Count the number of bizarre symbolic links on a UNIXWare/SCO-UNIX system… I dare you.
that part will probably be dismissed
Don’t they call this a decapitation in legal terms? Too bad the lips are still moving.
Can you imagine. Twelve million down the tubes. All due to some management scheme to profit by litigation.
I agree, it would be great to GPL the code. Right now I’m just interested in watching the legal mele.
They didn’t stick with their Open Sourced OS… They beat SUN to the punch, with the Server backend and Client front end Unix/Linux combo.
If only they had not gone evil. They had a fairly popular Linux distro. Too bad it’s belly up now.