I followed the SCO case for years. My participation in the defence of Linux included writing about 400 complaints to the SEC about violations of U.S. security laws by SCO and its various partners in crime.
As I remember the case SCO first sued IBM for breaking the contract before IBM completed the software agreed to in the contract. Then SCO raised some money from Microsoft and Sun to sue IBM for copyright infringement by copying SCO owned UNIX code into Linux. The case got more and more convoluted until it ended, as Mark Radcliffe describes, with a court ruling that Novell owned the UNIX copyright.
Then, as Mark Radcliffe describes, SCO tried to recommence the suit against IBM which had been stayed until the Novell v SCO lawsuit was decided. The latest ruling says that SCO cannot reopen the issues decided in the Novell v SCO suit. But no court has ever ruled on SCO's claims that IBM breached the contract with SCO by terminating the contract before the project was completed. So I would think that SCO could continue the case on this one point and only this one point.
As I remember it IBM's defence on the contract breach claim was that the contract had a clause forbidding SCO to transfer the contract to another company. SCO reassigned the contract to a different corporation when SCO did a reorganization of its various subsidiaries and sister corporations. But as far as I know no court has ever ruled on this claim.
I probably spent 20 years altogether buying products from computer salesmen as a part of my job. One of the problems that an IT buyer faces is that marketing people have a strong tendency to gloss over or deny the existence of the costs and effort that the buyer will have to put forth to install the proffered product. I found that marketing people who had a background in system engineering or even programming gave much more realistic sales presentations.
So I agree with the theme of this article that marketing people are much more effective if they actually have an in depth knowledge of the technology that they are selling.
I followed the SCO case for years. My participation in the defence of Linux included writing about 400 complaints to the SEC about violations of U.S. security laws by SCO and its various partners in crime.
As I remember the case SCO first sued IBM for breaking the contract before IBM completed the software agreed to in the contract. Then SCO raised some money from Microsoft and Sun to sue IBM for copyright infringement by copying SCO owned UNIX code into Linux. The case got more and more convoluted until it ended, as Mark Radcliffe describes, with a court ruling that Novell owned the UNIX copyright.
Then, as Mark Radcliffe describes, SCO tried to recommence the suit against IBM which had been stayed until the Novell v SCO lawsuit was decided. The latest ruling says that SCO cannot reopen the issues decided in the Novell v SCO suit. But no court has ever ruled on SCO's claims that IBM breached the contract with SCO by terminating the contract before the project was completed. So I would think that SCO could continue the case on this one point and only this one point.
As I remember it IBM's defence on the contract breach claim was that the contract had a clause forbidding SCO to transfer the contract to another company. SCO reassigned the contract to a different corporation when SCO did a reorganization of its various subsidiaries and sister corporations. But as far as I know no court has ever ruled on this claim.
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Steve Stites