SCO is done

A judge has refused to overturn a jury's verdict that SCO doesn't even own the Unix-related intellectual property it claimed ended up in Linux. This spells a final doom for its litigation against companies that use it. [Groklaw]

• [bbbaldie]

  Please let me know where SCO’s body is buried, I want to sprinkle some fine Irish whiskey on it, in its honor as a great company. Well, it’ll be filtered through me kidneys, of course…

• [Anonymous]

  But Microsoft has long taken up the mantle of threatening companies using Linux. Or didn’t you know that?

  http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100033867/

• [redesigned]

  i thought this died years ago, well i’m glad it is finally over…guess you can beat a dead horse.

  IP trolls make a good case for reforming IP laws.

• [technogeek]

  Goodbye, SCO. Don’t let the knob hit you on the way out; the courts won’t award you damages for self-inflicted wounds either.

• [fsck]

  I hope the judgement read:

  Dear SCO,
  FAIL troll is FAIL.

  Love,
  All The Lawyers.

• [jungletek]

  Fsck you, Darl.

• [Anonymous]

  Finally! Justice is served! There is no UNIX in Linux!

• [stevew]

  Before SCO and the lawyers there was a tiny Novell spinoff named Caldera which mutated into the Zombie SCO and lined lawyers pockets. The engineers at Caldera were smart, kind and generous with their time. They formed the heart of the Salt Lake Linux Users Group. They’d drive 100 miles round trip to lecture evenings at the University of Utah and share their considerable ‘nix skills.

  For me Unix will always be Thomson and Ritchie, Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJ. Jointly awarded the Turing Award in 1983 and the National Medal of Technology in 1998. We all owe those two more than words can express.

• [Rickmccl]

  It really gives me great pleasure to finally say,

  I TOLD YOU, SCO!

• [Stefan Jones]

  Good riddance.

• [Xenu]

  Another win for lawyers, and a loss for everyone else. Typical.

  • [Thad E Ginataom]

    To whom, exactly, is the present day SCO a loss?

• [Omir the Storyteller]

  This case was done the moment it started. It just took seven years for it to finally die.

  And congratulations to PJ and the band of merry misfits at Groklaw for documenting the entire thing.

• [sloverlord]

  This case was dead years ago. I have a feeling that SCO’s lawyers just kept telling Darl “Yeah, we can turn this around!” to keep the salaries coming.

  Good riddance indeed.

  • [3eff_jeff]

    Oh, sloverlord, that’s one of the best parts. SCO’s law firm is getting roundly screwed on this. The contract was for a (relatively) small upfront fee, with some installments ending in 2005 and the rest being a rather large contingency based on what SCO expected to win.

    The lawyers have been complaining about being deep in the red on this case for a couple of years now. Whatever SCO wants to do as far as drawing out the case, well the lawyers already signed up and have to go along with it (in fact, they’re kind of in a bit of a dollar auction with respect to SCO). So there is a very silver lining to watching SCO drag this out for one more round. I mean, really, the creditors aren’t going to get anything out of them anyway.

    See: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20041104173931772

• [grikdog]

  I understand the greed and the outrage, and the shrieking screed, “SCO, how DARE you try to take away our beloved whatnix,” etc. etc. ad nauseam.

  I’m not sorry SCO lost.

  But I have this nagging memory. The Apple Lisa computer ran Xenix, and that had SCO’s name on it.

  Future historians may remember this the same way IBM used to hype the Jacquard loom as the “origin of punched data cards.” Huh huh. Right. The same way Lady Lovelace was a programmer without ever writing a line of code? It was a good way to throw the dust of prior art in the eyes of copyright challengers, judges and lawyers who could be counted on to be impressed by narrow ties and the air of god-like authority.

  It ain’t over till it’s over.

  • [VagabondAstronomer]

    The Apple Lisa could run Xenix as one of several OS’s available to it, but its main OS was the Lisa OS…

  • [Halloween Jack]

    The Apple Lisa computer ran Xenix

    Not quite. Xenix was ported to several systems, the Lisa (and other 68000-based computers) among them, but saying that it “ran Xenix”, while not wrong, isn’t particularly accurate.

  • [Anonymous]

    You disparage Ada, Countess of Lovelace, as a programmer because she never wrote a line of code. My wife’s first program consisted of a patch panel of connectors. Later she wrote machine code, assembler, FORTRAN, COBOL, Pascal, various SQL dialects (and her experience was never sullied by a single line of code in VB). But it began with patch panels and Ferranti.

• [bhtooefr]

  Wait, is it really done? Could SCO appeal that judge’s decision, if someone will pay for it?

  Just saying, SCO has had quite the habit of appearing to be dead after a headshot, and then getting back up and stumbling on.

  • [Dreamshadow]

    In this case, the judge has shot down their core argument, that Novell sold the Santa Clara Whatsis (the company before SCO) the rights to the Unix as well as the business.

    Novell maintained, and proved that their intent was to simply sell the Unixware business to the pre-SCO company, and the judge and jury agreed with this.

    • [jgs]

      s/Clara/Cruz/
      s/Whatsis/Operation/

  • [3eff_jeff]

    IANAL, but the possibility of an appeal was mentioned in the linked article. I suspect this is one of the final death throws of this legal action, but there could be a round or two more in everyone’s favorite Evil Zombie Corporationâ„¢.