* Latest legal dealings down in Utah
Today, we’ll take a brief break from alerting you of new and old utilities for the NetWare/Open Enterprise Server platform to bring you up to date on Novell’s legal maneuverings. Maybe we could call it “Law and Order: Special Weirdos Unit.”
Novell was recently in federal court in Utah asking U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball to dismiss The SCO Group’s “slander of title” suit. In its suit, SCO is suing Novell because the Waltham, Mass., company claimed that it – not SCO – owned the copyright to Unix System V, Release 4 (SVR4) so therefore SCO had no standing to sue IBM. According to SCO, this comment so inflamed the potential clients for SCO’s Unix offerings that the clients stopped buying them.
While a quick glance at SCO’s financials (https://ir.sco.com/ReleaseDetail.cfm?ReleaseID=164950) confirms that business is way off, most attribute this to an intense dislike of the company and its CEO, Darl (a.k.a., “Darth”) McBride in the wake of its frontal assault on Linux and the open source community. Still, SCO could hardly sue McBride for causing its problems, could it? Well, maybe it could. That’s hardly as bizarre as its claim that the open source GPL license violated the U.S. Constitution. (Don’t believe me? See https://www.thescogroup.com/copyright/)
Novell’s other recent trip to federal district court also involved folks who some think may have taken leave of their senses.
The company settled with stockholders who had brought a class-action over what the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals had termed “various accounting shenanigans” that took place in the same time frame as the ouster of Ray Noorda, the selling off of WordPerfect and a generally disastrous time for the company. Rather than face a trial on the charges that Bob Frankenburg, the then Novell CEO and chairman of the Board and his CFO had conspired to book as “revenue” sales that never actually occurred, the company paid out almost $14 million to make the suit go away. These are the same people, by the way, who announced that they were going to sell off WordPerfect, come hell or high water, and were surprised when they were only offered about 10% of the price they had paid for the applications. Paying the money to settle the suit was a very wise move, in my opinion. It’s nice to know that Novell’s current management isn’t letting sentiment get in the way of hard-headed legal moves.
We still don’t have a ruling by Judge Kimball in the SCO slander suit, but it’s expected any day now. I’d bet on Novell prevailing in this one, also.
Now if only it took the same hard-headed attitude towards marketing.
