The SCO vs IBM Zombie Shambles On | Hacker News Reader

The SCO vs IBM Zombie Shambles On

yro.slashdot.org

79 pointsMilnerRoute27 comments

Sometimes there are lawsuits between deep-pocketed entities that get dragged on and on by lawyers and law firms so they can have steady income. The suits get passed from one generation of lawyers to the next as a sort of perverse inheritance. Such was the case in FCC vs RKO Broadcasting. Eventually it bled RKO dry and it no longer exists, since the FCC has virtually unlimited funds.

You have to wonder if that's what's happening here.

Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, over the course of time, become so complicated, that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least; but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarndyce_and_Jarndyce

Bleak House (BBC 8 episodes) is on Amazon Prime, easily one of my favorite period dramas ever.

No. SCO is bankrupt, no income, very little or no funds.

Unfortunately, a law firm (BSF, Boies and two other names that I don't remember and won't bother to look up) signed up to handle the case and all appeals for a fixed up-front fee. That law firm is not broke, and is faithfully carrying out its promised duties, no matter how insane the overall effect is.

Well that explains why it won't die. I suppose the contract is such that, if the firm were to throw their hands up, and walk away, SCO could sue the firm itself for the funds they "expected" to get from IBM?

I wonder who's paying for SCOs lawyers after all this time

So, certainly not a lawyer but does this really mean anything? Isn't summary judgement only for when there are no facts under dispute?

IANAL, but I have been following this case for nearly all of it, and I've learned a lot in the process.

Summary judgment can happen when there are facts in dispute. It means that, even if you give the other side their claimed facts, they still don't have a valid case, and therefore the whole thing should be thrown out now, before we even bother trying to figure out what the real facts are.

Ah, that makes sense - thanks.

Jardine v. Jardine for the modern economy.

Not sure if I'm more surprised to see an article about SCO vs IBM, or a link to Slashdot. Either way, I feel like were back in 2003 again..

Score: 5, Funny

I think you mean Score: -1, Illegal Humor.

Well, that’s the effective exchange rate for converting Slashdot Funny scores into HN votes.

Cowboy Neal is not amused

Frist P0st.

I remember the great UID reset of 1999. Waited a few weeks because I thought cred based on low UID was stupid. RIP Slashdot.org

The article quality on Slashdot seems to be better recently, presumably due to the most recent owners. Don't bother with the comments though.

Honestly, most of the content seems to be from HN these days.

They do overlap, true, but there's content that gets up on one and not the other.

Imagine a Beowolf cluster of SCO lawyers.

Except that nobody believes SCO's male cow droppings any more.

And, in fact, if I understand the current state of play of this suit, Linux is no longer under threat. Linux is completely in the clear. The one remaining issue is a contract one between SCO and IBM over Project Monterrey.

(Also, I bet the comments here will be, on average, better than those on Slashdot...)

It makes sense though, right? Slashdot has always been the go-to source about SCO vs. IBM.

Not always. Groklaw was the definitive source, until PJ shut it down.

And when there was a breakthrough, Groklaw would hit the top of Slashdot, so I never had to go to Groklaw specifically :)

OK, but which comments did you read, Slashdot's or Groklaw's? (Groklaw's comments were miles above Slashdot's.)

It seems to me that some view the blockchain as free and permanent digital storage. That’s a problem.

Whoops, this comment got attached to the wrong post. Sorry :(

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