D-Day Arrives for SCO, Dec 23, 2005

After more than two and a half years, SCO must finally turn over to the U.S. District Court in Utah any proof it has that there's Unix code in Linux.

Utah's SCO Group finished its fiscal year deep in the red, but with high expectations for its revamped Unix products and new applications in the coming year.

The SCO Group has raised about $10 million in a stock sale to institutional investors and a company board member, a move that will help the financially struggling company, which is embroiled in a complicated and expensive legal battle against IBM and other companies

The supremely funny SCO Group has now topped even itself. They have asked IBM to turn over "all documents concerning IBM's contributions to the Linux 2.7 kernel," including "development work."

SCO finally revealed to the U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City some of what it claims IBM stole from its Unix intellectual property and placed into Linux last Friday, but there is still no smoking gun.

It took more than two and a half years, but the SCO Group finally has disclosed a list of areas it believes IBM violated its Unix contract, allegedly by moving proprietary Unix technology into open-source Linux.

After two and a half years and hundreds of legal filings, the open source community should finally get what it has been waiting for this Friday, when SCO Group is scheduled to present its evidence against IBM.

The fact that several online journals of note this morning rushed to report that IBM has dropped three charges against SCO, even though the full story is a bit more complicated, points to one truth: everybody now wants this case to be over and done with.

The SCO Group Inc. failed on Friday to extract more documents on IBM Corp.'s business strategy for the Linux computer operating system.

SCO says it needs 25 more depositions to deal with the counterclaims? Fine, IBM counters. We'll drop the counterclaims. *Now* what do you need, you whiney little phoney?

SCO launches a set of Web services designed to let companies tie "smart" handheld devices that act both as cell phones and mobile desktops to back-end applications and data.

SCO's latest filing in its legal battle against Novell appears to lend credence to Novell's claim that the transfer of Unix to SCO was not comprehensive.

According to Alan Cox, we're just at the beginning of a long journey into getting security right. Eager for directions and a glimpse of the future, O'Reilly Network interviewed him about his upcoming keynote.

SCO has reported a 16.5 per cent decline in revenue in the most recent quarter to $9.4m. The drop in sales was attributed largely to a drop in revenue from its controversial SCOsource Linux insurance scheme, combined with a sales decrease of the company's Unix products.

SCO, the company best known for Linux litigation and its Unix operating systems, reported results for its fiscal third quarter ended July 31, 2005, on Wednesday. The news wasn't good.

The SCO Group, which launched a high-profile attack against Linux, has signed a partnership with open-source database seller MySQL, the companies said Friday.

While thousands of members of the Linux community flocked to San Francisco for LinuxWorld, a smaller group of several hundred resellers convened in Las Vegas last week at SCO Forum, where they heard SCO officials deliver a competitive strategy that was anti-Linux and anti-Microsoft, almost in the same breath.

Darl McBride, president and CEO of SCO, talked with Computerworld during the SCO Forum here last week about the state of SCO and about its future -- whether it wins or loses its legal battles.

Two years after SCO accused IBM of illegally using its intellectual property in Linux, the Utah-based company has dramatically softened its tone. But this change of attitude does not mean that SCO no longer believes that Linux infringes on its copyrights.

Two years after SCO accused IBM of illegally using its intellectual property in Linux, the company from Utah has dramatically softened its tone

Brushing courtroom battles over Linux aside this week, SCO will use its annual users' forum here to unveil new initiatives around its Unix products, including a future architecture code-named Project Fusion, a new SCO Office appliance geared to resellers, and a distribution deal with network appliance maker Cymphonix.

Recently unveiled memos suggest that there is no 'there' in SCO's Linux IP claims and make you wonder if SCO can survive suit by Red Hat.

The SCO Group has slammed as "inaccurate" suggestions an e-mail from one of its own engineers showed Linux did not contain copyright Unix code.

A 2002 e-mail suggests that an investigation commissioned by The SCO Group failed to produce any evidence that Linux contained copyrighted Unix code.

SCO Group Inc's attempt to change its legal case against IBM Corp for the third time has been denied by the judge, who has also set the two companies a deadline to present their respective evidence "with specifity".

SCO had best start looking for that needle in the haystack expeditiously. At last. They have to finally tell us what this saga has been about, if they can, with specificity.

A federal judge refused to throw out The SCO Group's slander-of-title lawsuit against another Utah technology company, Novell Inc.

In an effort to turn around its dwindling Unix revenue, SCO introduced a new version of its OpenServer product Wednesday along with a new open-source-friendly attitude.

Controversial Unix vendor SCO Group has appointed a new independent accounting firm after KPMG resigned

The SCO Group's revenue continued to decline in its most recent quarter, but the company that launched a legal attack on Linux reported a narrower net loss compared with the year earlier.

Two complaints filed with the Australian consumer watchdog against the SCO Group are still active, contrary to SCO claims, the two complainants said today.

A minor tempest in a legal teapot swirled up around litigious Linux vendor SCO on Thursday, via a posting on the open-source community site Slashdot, which speculated that SCO might be under SEC investigation. SCO said that wasn't the case.

Maureen O'Gara's big expose of Groklaw author Pamela Jones was sleazy and mean-spirited.

If anything is going to kill Linux and the open-source movement, it's the presence of certifiable lunatics in the ranks representing the users. It may be that this is actually a deep Astroturf PR campaign orchestrated by Microsoft to discredit open source and Linux. It sure seems like something weird is going on.

What happens when a recalcitrant reporter becomes the story in the seemingly never-ending SCO-vs.-the-world saga?

Interest is swirling around the Linux-advocacy site Groklaw.net, following the weekend posting of an article by Linux Business News, which purports to uncover information about the identity of site editor Pamela Jones.

Utah's SCO Group, claiming it can show IBM copied 200,000 lines of its Unix code into the freely distributed Linux operating system, wants a federal judge to amend its lawsuit a third time.

IBM's plea for less paperwork worked, with Magistrate Judge Brooke Wells this week deferring 97 percent of the documentation required from a previous ruling.

The long-running legal actions between Unix vendor SCO and IBM over rights to Unix code may soon be over, if only because SCO is running out of money to pursue its claims.

The SCO Group has finalized a contract naming supply-chain provider Synnex as a distributor, a deal seen by some as a sign that SCO is de-emphasizing its Linux legal woes by making a renewed commitment to the SCO Unix platform.

SCO came close to being delisted from the Nasdaq SmallCap Market, but it's back to trading as usual as the company has been in told that it's back in full compliance with the Nasdaq filing requirements.

As a result of the SCO litigation, the community has bonded more tightly than ever, and showed that it will support Linux and free and open-source software and any company that stands up for it. That is how Groklaw was born.

SCO Group said this week that it will not raise any legal challenges to plans by Sun Microsystems to open source its Solaris Unix operating system, having reviewed Sun's plans and licensing.

To say PJ's not a SCO fan would be an understatement, a fact that has won her the adoration of a legion of FOSS fans.

Good news continues to be hard to find for SCO as it reported, after the market's close, still more losses and revenue decreases in its first quarter of 2005, which ended on Jan. 31.

On Friday after the bell, SCO finally got its paperwork in to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

... it appears the defenders of their most holy IP grabbed the PDFs from Groklaw and Frank's tuxrocks.com site, without giving us credit for doing the work of obtaining the documents from the court and scanning them to create the PDFs. Oops.

The SCO Group, already awaiting the outcome of its delisting appeal for not filing its fiscal 2004 earnings, now has been told its failure to file a first-quarter report also could deny it a slot on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Lawsuits between two members of the SCO Group board and their former employer, The Canopy Group, have been settled, clearing some uncertainty from SCO's cloudy future.

SCO's litigation over Linux was hugely unpopular but there was a big upside, says the chief executive of Open Source Development Labs

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