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July 05, 2005
Put up or shut up
That's what the judge has finally said in not allowing SCO to amend their complaint for the third time.
For those not paying attention to geek news, SCO (The Santa Cruz Operation), a UNIX vendor, was purchased by Caldera Linux back during the height of the tech boom. Caldera was always sort of suspect in the Linux community. After acquiring SCO they changed their name to the company they had acquired. Not long after they sued IBM, the one with the deepest pockets, claiming that Linux had illegally incorporated UNIX code owned by SCO.
GROKLAW was started by a journalist/paralegal as a way of keeping track of the case and is a great place to get up to date and find out what's happening. As of now, 466 legal documents have been filed in the case. And SCO hasn't stopped there. They're also suing Novell, Daimler-Chrysler and Autozone. Red Hat, one of the leading Linux vendors, turned around and sued SCO.
Like I said, at issue is the misappropriation of UNIX code which SCO claims it owns. I won't get into a history of UNIX because it is far too convoluted. The crux of the biscuit is this: SCO has had the multiple cases in court for over two years and has yet to produce a shred of evidence that backs up their claims.
Cynics, myself included, think SCO sued IBM hoping that IBM would just take the company over. IBM called the bluff and, with all the money at IBM's disposal, is content to ride out the lawsuit. Groklaw has documents showing that SCO's financials have been in the crapper for a long time now. I wonder if their lawyers are getting paid up front.
Posted by Half-Cocked at July 5, 2005 11:26 PM
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