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Mar. 22, 2010

Already in its second week, the Salt Lake City Jury Trial between the SCO Group and Novell about the copyright to Unix's original operating system code has uncovered further surprising details of this never ending debate.

Number one, SCO's former CEO Darl McBride, who was called as a prime witness, confirmed that SCO didn't need the original copyrights for the development of its family of operating systems, and that the copyrights were only required for the licensing business of the vendor's SCO Source division.

Number two, the previously unaware jury members were informed that a judge had already delivered a ruling in that matter more than 2 1/2 years ago, but that his decision had been overturned since.

The trial will now go into its third week. Meanwhile, Novell's Brainshare conference will also be held in Salt Lake City.

So is this just a coincidence? That's pretty good timing some think...

At any rate, the current jury trial became necessary after a Court of Appeals last year overturned the first instance ruling passed by district judge Dale Kimball in October 2007.

The Court of Appeals ruled that the question whether the copyright to Unix was transferred when Novell sold its Unix distribution rights to SCO should be retried. In the court's opinion, this question was so involved that it should be tried by an unbiased jury instead of a district judge.

Consequently, a jury without any prior knowledge of the long case history was sworn in to decide on the copyright question in the first week of the appeal trial. There's no question now that Novell wants to put that puppy to bed once and for all, and McBride as well. And the sooner the better.

During the testimony of a financial expert on day nine of the trial, the questioning of a witness on day eight of the trial had revealed that the copyright question is closely tied to the issuing of the antidote licences SCO intended sell to corporate Linux customers.

SCO's former CEO Darl McBride had to admit to the court that the copyright ownership was regarded as a prerequisite for selling the so-called "antidote" licences.

According to McBride, this business collapsed after Novell announced that it would protect its customers against legal claims by SCO. Any surprises here? (!) (...)

Well one surprise during the second week of the trial was the testimony given by Gary Pisano, a so-called 'expert' commissioned by SCO, who had to admit having based a calculation of damages on a market study by the Yankee Group without having investigated the methodology used for the study.

Not only that, but the court was even presented with an internal memorandum by HP about the question of whether it was in customers' best interest to purchase an antidote licence.

The authors of the HP memorandum were of the opinion that buying such a licence is similar to providing financial support to terrorists...

It will sure be interesting to see how this never ending story closes. Most in the Linux community now believe that SCO is dead in its tracks this time and that the company will either fold or go into bankruptcy.

Whatever the outcome is, one thing is for sure: SCO as a company and Darl McBride are no friends of the Linux and open source community, and the two have managed to attract a lot of enemies in the last 4 years.

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Source: Novell.

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