SCO's case doesn't fit, but the lawyers won't quit

Last week The SCO Group held its quarterly earnings conference call and announced it will cut expenses to ensure it will have enough cash to pursue its lawsuit against IBM. Apparently the company burned through $18.6 million with a third-quarter loss of $7.4 million on revenue of $11.2 million. Of that total, $7.2 million was in legal expenses.

SCO now has $42 million in cash left and has cut a deal with the law firm Boise Schiller and Flexner to cap its legal fees at a maximum of $31 million in return for the legal lads getting a bigger cut of the spoils should they win.

Last week on Network World Fusion, SCO's CEO Darl McBride was quoted saying he blamed the "company's ongoing litigation with Linux vendor Novell, Inc. for the SCOsource division's poor performance during 2004." McBride also said, "We continue to believe that Novell's claims have greatly impacted our ability to achieve traction in this business."

To continue reading, register here and become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

Last week The SCO Group held its quarterly earnings conference call and announced it will cut expenses to ensure it will have enough cash to pursue its lawsuit against IBM. Apparently the company burned through $18.6 million with a third-quarter loss of $7.4 million on revenue of $11.2 million. Of that total, $7.2 million was in legal expenses.

SCO now has $42 million in cash left and has cut a deal with the law firm Boise Schiller and Flexner to cap its legal fees at a maximum of $31 million in return for the legal lads getting a bigger cut of the spoils should they win.

Last week on Network World Fusion, SCO's CEO Darl McBride was quoted saying he blamed the "company's ongoing litigation with Linux vendor Novell, Inc. for the SCOsource division's poor performance during 2004." McBride also said, "We continue to believe that Novell's claims have greatly impacted our ability to achieve traction in this business."

Indeed. Traction. McBride is prone to the creative abuse of words - for example, "The litigation business is now in control from a cost standpoint."

The company is just being its usual manipulative self. Could it be that SCO's reality is so distorted by its own corporate greed that it can no longer distinguish between the spin and the real world?

According to The Wall Street Journal, the spin doctoring is in full swing, with the lawyers now saying that the General Public License (GPL) is invalid - and I'm not making this up - because it is pre-empted by U.S. federal copyright law!

The argument (if the term can be applied to such convoluted and obviously calculating flim-flam) is that the amended copyright law only lets a user make one back-up copy of software. This, the lawyers argue makes the GPL void under U.S. law.

Now (and this probably won't surprise you), I am not a lawyer but wasn't that amendment designed to extend user's rights rather than limit them? In other words, it didn't say you couldn't copy, it said you could make limited duplicates for back-up purposes.

How, then, can that amendment be considered to limit the GPL when the amendment was intentionally permissive rather than restrictive?

What I find interesting is that an otherwise prestigious law firm would be so willingly involved in a case that is so transparently artificial, but I guess this is the kind of behavior that makes all those lawyer jokes so funny.

This defense is as ridiculous as when, in the farcical O.J. Simpson federal case, he made it appear it was really, really difficult to put on those gloves, thus "proving" the gloves weren't his. Defense lawyer Johnnie Cochran then intoned, "If the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit."

Interestingly, it turns out that those little rhymes have a reason: In a study conducted in 1998 psychologist Matthew McGlone at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania gave students a list of rhyming aphorisms along with non-rhyming analogs such as "Woes unite foes" and "Misfortunes unite foes." McGlone found that the students rated the rhyming aphorisms as the more accurate descriptions of human behavior.