Another day, another knockout punch aims at SCO, Dec 06, 2006

Last week saw the end of most of The SCO Group's claims of IBM contributing Unix code to Linux. Now, Novell has filed a motion that undercuts all of SCO's contract claims against IBM, based on a "silver bullet" clause in the original sale of Unix to SCO.

The SCO Group's struggle to keep its Linux-related lawsuits against IBM and Novell viable on Monday faced increasingly dismal prospects.

Investors fled SCO Group’s stock on Friday, voting with their feet after a federal judge gutted its lawsuit against IBM.

SCO took big hits this week -- both in the courts, and in the stock market. Regardless of what SCO's management decides to do, the company's stockholders seem to have finally had enough of the troubled company.

A federal judge on Thursday gutted SCO Group's $5 billion, Linux-related lawsuit against IBM - renewing debate about the Utah company's future.

You may have noticed that I don't cover news about the never-ending SCO vs. IBM, Linux, Novell, et al much anymore. There's a reason for that: SCO doesn't matter anymore.

[Ransom Love] thrusts a dagger right into the heart of SCO's claims. I see no way to recover from his declaration, because there is no one who can convincingly contradict. He was the CEO, the co-founder of the company to boot. Who can possibly know more than he does about the history of the company, what it did with Linux

So, just where do things stand legally in the Linux world, post-SCO? What has changed as a result of the SCO saga? If a Son of SCO shows up in the future, is the community prepared? What is now in place that wasn't there when SCO first showed up in 2003? Here is a brief summary to bring you up to date.

Seems like this case will never, ever grind to a conclusion. And not a month goes by without something weird or pathetic or inadvertently hilarious happening.

Three and a half years ago, a company called the SCO Group took another company called International Business Machines Corporation to court. Among many other sins, said SCO, IBM had misappropriated intellectual property by stealing parts of Unix and putting them in Linux. If true, enormous implications would follow for open source in general and Linux in particular.

So was Microsoft really the power behind SCO's Linux jihad? Or did it simply wink approvingly from the sidelines?

The cat is out of the bag. According to BayStar Capital's managing partner Larry Goldfarb, Microsoft allegedly assured BayStar that it would somehow "guarantee" BayStar's $50 million investment in SCO.

A former investor in the SCO Group has identified a Microsoft executive who, he said, worked to "backstop" a funding deal that ultimately helped SCO pursue its legal case against the Linux operating system.

On Sept. 25, IBM took its crack at ending its case with SCO by summary judgment. Now, it's Novell's turn, and the company appears to be attempting to cut off SCO's lifeline to its cash reserves.

... if IBM were to prevail on all its motions (of course that is a rare event indeed) then the only thing left to bring to a jury would be IBM's counterclaims. That has to be SCO's worst nightmare.

The SCO Group, Inc. reported its financial results for its third quarter ended July 31, 2006 on September 6th. It wasn't pretty.

The slander of title battle between SCO Group Inc and Novell Inc is to be split in two after the judge hearing their case agreed to a delay on proceedings related to Linux copyrights while they are referred to arbitration.

Today SCO expanded the initiative with a Microsoft Visual Studio partnership that includes a MAD Toolkit plug-in of Visual Studio 2005.

Remember The SCO Group, the company that is in a battle against IBM? The company has certainly taken on a formidable foe.

After a sustained slide fed by sustained poor earnings results and courthouse reversals, SCO shares closed Tuesday at $2.28 per share.

First, SCO has not filed a motion for sanctions for spoliation. That's the way to get an issue regarding missing evidence properly before a judge. It has not happened.

Utah's SCO Group is appealing a federal magistrate's gutting of its $5 billion lawsuit against IBM, hoping to salvage the tens of millions of dollars it has spent litigating the case over the past three years.

Unix vendor SCO Group's intellectual property lawsuit against IBM has been widely seen as a go-for-broke strategy. Now it looks more like just a plan to go broke.

"They should focus on the litigation and cut out other distractions," says analyst Rob Enderle of tech market researcher Enderle Group. "Their business is litigation. If they lose, they're done." Enderle at one time believed that SCO had a good chance of winning its case, but now is skeptical.

There's "Not much left for SCO but to appeal this almost-fatal ruling in its already weak case. Yes, it is the beginning of the end. I expect summary judgment will be the stake that kills this vampire long before it gets to trial."

Enderle says the ruling means that Linux users in commercial environments can breathe easier, knowing that it's now less likely that SCO will gain control over significant pieces of the freely distributed Linux operating system. "There's still that possibility, but it's getting more remote," says Enderle.

Wednesday night, in a blistering 39-page ruling, Magistrate Judge Brooke C. Wells of the United States District Court in Utah tossed out two-thirds of SCO's claims against IBM.

"Certainly if an individual was stopped and accused of shoplifting after walking out of Neiman Marcus, they would expect to be eventually told what they allegedly stole. It would be absurd for an officer to tell the accused that 'you know what you stole I'm not telling.' Or, to simply hand the accused individual a catalog of Neiman Marcus' entire inventory and say 'its in there somewhere, you figure it out.'"

I followed the merger of SCO and Caldera like a hawk, and Caldera had always intended since day one to merge the best features of Linux and Unix together.

The SCO Group Inc. is trying to become something other than the company that sued prominent users of Linux.

Would you believe that The SCO Group Inc., enemy of all things Linux, will be releasing a Linux distribution?

On June 8, The SCO Group Inc. reported results for its fiscal second quarter, which ended April 30, 2006. The news wasn't good.

The Linux market in China continues to grow, according to a new research report from IDC. And it is apparently growing partially at the expense of Linux nemesis SCO.

Just because The SCO Group Inc. opposes Linux doesn't mean that it objects to all open source.

Linux is apparently hurting the bottom line for unix software maker SCO Group, in more ways than one. Salavation, however, may well just be sitting at the "Edge" for SCO.

The SCO Group, the Unix and wireless software company best known for its seemingly endless Linux and IBM litigation, reported greater then ever losses for its fiscal first quarter, which ended January 31.

IBM continues its court-scheduled defense discovery. It has subpoenaed documents from JP Morgan Securites, Inc. and McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Here's Defendant/Counterclaim Plaintiff IBM's Notice of Service of Subpoenas Duces Tecum. That is the kind that asks for documents only. There is no deposition scheduled.

Utah's SCO Group - eager to show it has more going on than its big-ticket, Linux-related lawsuits - on Monday unveiled a family of applications and services targeting the burgeoning mobile communications markets.

Hold on to your hats! IBM has subpoenaed Microsoft! And Sun! At last, we're getting to the core of the matter. We're going to get to find out the whole story.

SCO was taken out behind the woodshed by Intel a few days ago in one of the more unfriendly court filings in a long and extremely unfriendly case. The 64K question is not what happened, that is more than adequately documented on Groklaw, the real question is why SCO, or its attorneys got so stupid.

IBM Corp has asked the court hearing its breach of contract defense against SCO Group Inc to throw out the majority of SCO's claimed evidence against it, maintaining that 201 of SCO's 294 examples fail to identify any misuse.

... now Intel has filed in Utah a Nonparty Intel's Response to SCO's Motion For Leave to Take Certain Prospective Depositions [PDF], and they are hopping mad. Mad enough to tell Judges Kimball and Wells that what SCO said about Intel is "unfair and untrue":

In this interview, [Thomas] Carey explains why SCO has no case, predicts the open source legal fields of battle for 2006 and discusses SCO's claims against Novell.

The SCO Group's long-running legal fight against Linux took a new turn at the very end of 2005. In a Dec. 30 filing, the company sought to expand its lawsuit against Novell, a prior owner of Unix intellectual property and a current seller of the Linux operating system, which SCO argues is tainted with its own Unix intellectual property.

 View older news this year: Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan
 View news from other years: 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999
 View older news in category SCO this year: Aug Jul Jun
 View SCO news from other years: 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2000