Teleidoscope

Sun, Dec 03, 2006

SCO versus Everybody

Posted at 10:09 pm MST to Current Events

For the past several years a company calling itself SCO has been involved in court cases with IBM, Red Hat, Novell and several other companies claiming that it has proprietary rights for material included in the Linux/GNU free operating systems. (One of the lawsuits for misuse was against a company that hadn't even been a SCO software customer for several years before the suit. That one was tossed out by the judge .)

The free software community has wanted to know what material was supposedly involved, so that the actual provenance of the material could be determined: Linux is developed in public, in front of God and the whole internet, and there are records of where every line of it comes from, but with millions of lines of code provided by thousands of developers, it seemed possible that something might have been contributed that shouldn't have been.

SCO delayed and refused to provide even a specific explanation of their claims (which IBM needed in order to know what they were being accused of) despite court orders and the rules of civil court procedures. Finally, almost 3 years into the case, the judges set a deadline of Dec 22, 2005 for SCO to specify what it was actually claiming.

SCO provided a list of about 300 items at the deadline, and IBM complained that most of them were too vague to serve as evidence of a legal claim, and the judge agreed and threw out 2/3 of the "evidence" for not meeting the specificity requirements of the court orders and court procedures. SCO appealed this decision.

SCO also provided documents after the deadline in which they tried to claim all sorts of things not included in the original definition of the lawsuit nor in the papers they filed by the deadline. IBM complained about that too.

On Wednesday this week, SCO's appeal about the 300 was denied: 2/3 of their "evidence" is hot air that has blown away.

On Thursday this week, there was a hearing about SCO's attempt to change what the case is about after the deadline. They lost.

The combined effect of these two court decisions is that SCO is effectively suing over 324 lines (out of millions) in Linux, which is not enough to count as a copyright violation even if SCO really owns them (which is being debated in both the IBM and Novell cases).

On Friday Novell brought a motion for the court to acknowledge that a contract between them and a company that SCO bought some assets from is binding on SCO and means what the words written in the contract say. If none of the (vague) evidence that SCO has presented in the Novell case contradicts this, the judge will agree with Novell. The particular contract item in question would gut SCO's cases against both IBM and Novell if it accepted by the judge.

This has not been a good week for SCO, but for those of us who have been following the court filings, and watched as SCO's lawyers told conflicting stories in different courtrooms and used every slimy trick they could think of, it has been very satisfying. The chickens are finally coming home to roost.

There are a lot of people who have been following the cases on the Groklaw weblog and discussing and analysing the legal and technical issues involved. It's sort of like reality TV for geeks.

Groklaw also covers other points of interest along the intersection of technology and law. I'm seriously addicted.

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Some people don't need a software engineer ...

Posted at 7:52 am MST to Technology

They need an exorcist. And a lot more attention to the KISS principle.

There was no post yesterday because I left the house a lttle after 5am and got home a little before 10pm, and I reached the point where I couldn't click reliably, much less type. The weekend's project blew up in several different directions not covered by the excruciatingly detailed plans that were thrashed around all week. And the recovery didn't follow the detailed recovery plan either.

There's a site called Holidailies where people promise to update their sites everyday for the month of December. I didn't sign up because I knew I would be on the road for more than 28 hours next weekend, and I need to reconfigure my DSL connection when I get home. Turns out to be a good decision.

I am planning to do a second post this evening to catch up.

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