Just when you think that slime ball, Darl McBirdbrain, can't sink any lower, he finds another way to poison the wells. So, after crowing so loudly for so many years about how SCO would kick the stuffing out of the GPL, and bring IBM to its knees, and how the courts would vindicate them, and all that other malevolent claptrap; the minute he LOSES a lawsuit, he wants the bankruptcy court to help him to hide under the covers and hope the big bad boogie man will go away. If nothing else, he is absolutely consistent: he has no spine, he has no moral compass, he has no shame, he is entirely driven by greed.
Well done, SCO, well done!
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It's about Copyrights, not Patents
The SCO/Novell lawsuit is about who owns the Unix Copyrights. In many places in the article you refer to a Patent battle, this is completely wrong. There is a lot of mateial you can read to correct your otherwise accurate story. Groklaw is a site that certainly springs to mind.
In August, Judge Kimball ruled that Novell retained the copyrights. That gutted pretty much all of SCO's case against Novell. The trial on monday was to address Novells counterclaims, that SCO owed them money from licenses it sold to Microsoft, Sun, CA and others. This Chaper 11 timing, on the eve of trial, is yet another foul trick that SCO has produced.
The lawsuit against IBM is about Intellectual Property, and whether any of SCO's IP ended up in Linux. Again, that's not patents either.
Patents? Chapter 11.
Basically correct that software is copyright. However, IIRC, UNIX does have a few patants. I presume that the issue would be the same here that Novell granted a license to (now) SCO -- they didn't sell them.
Note that SCO did he proper thing by filing for Chapter 11. When a corporation runs out of money, there is little else they can do considering the best interest of the shareholders. Now it appears that the final outcome will be determined by a Federal Bankruptcy Court. It seems likely that Novell will wind up owning part of the reorganized SCO unless it is sold out of bankruptcy.
Did this really surprise anyone?
This is precisely why all of the "indemnification" money paid by alleged "infringers" should have gone directly into an escrow account while awaiting the outcome of the various trials.
An interesting racket, in any case: allege that some large number of defendants have infringed on your rights despite lack of evidence; take what is essentially "protection" money from some of them, spend that money to sue the others, stall in court for years and then finally declare bankruptcy as the entire scheme collapses. Doesn't this have the feel of a classic Ponzi scheme?