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After 18 years, SCO's IBM litigation may be settled for $14.5M
- marcodiego 5y agoWho will pay? Who will get the money?
- peepohpoopah 5y agoThe lawyers will get the money.
- jepler 5y ago"The Estates" are the corpse of SCO, and "The Trustee" is the court-appointed trustee for The Estates. So, it would seem that IBM is going to pay $14 million to the corpse of SCO.
- phire 5y agoAnd I wouldn't be surprised if the corpse of SCO will pay all of it to their lawyers. Though there is a slim chance there will be some left over, and will go to the shareholders.
- axiolite 5y ago> And I wouldn't be surprised if the corpse of SCO will pay all of it to their lawyers. That's not how it's supposed to work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26693487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26693487
- mixmastamyk 5y agoAnd what are they paying for? Case was always described as meritless.
- ghaff 5y agoIANAL but I assume to close the books and be able to stop paying their own lawyers on anything related to the case, however relatively minor--and perhaps to mitigate any future risk, however minor.
- mixmastamyk 5y agoThanks, wonder why there was no final ruling yet.
- ghaff 5y agoLegal stuff takes a lot of time.
- Twirrim 5y agoXinuos, founded by former SCO leaders filed a lawsuit against IBM & Red Hat, back in April https://lwn.net/Articles/851315/ https://lwn.net/Articles/851315/ (no, it wasn't an april fool's day joke). https://www.xinuos.com/xinuos-sues-ibm-and-red-hat/ https://www.xinuos.com/xinuos-sues-ibm-and-red-hat/, alleging anti-competitive behaviour etc. Xinuous produces newer versions of *nix based OSs that the SCO Group used to produce, the OpenServer and UnixWare brands. So even though SCO group is finally (finally?!) dying, everything is still pretty much business as usual.
- smorgusofborg 5y agoI'm confused, if SCO sold off its rights to a new company the settlement should go to the new company? If the price didn't reflect the potential of this settlement then that could have been an accounting crime against the now bankrupt SCO, but I don't see why SCO would be entitled to any duplicate claims.
- ch_123 5y agoSCO only sold the IP for Unixware and OpenServer to Xinuos, retaining whatever rights were needed to continue the lawsuits with IBM and others. I believe at that point, the leftovers of SCO were called TSG (short for “The SCO Group”). In their early days, Xinuos would make a point of stating that the old SCO lawsuits were nothing to do with them.
- smorgusofborg 5y agoThat would make sense but this is the quote on their own website: “While this case is about Xinuos and the theft of our intellectual property,” said Sean Snyder, President and CEO of Xinuos. “It is also about market manipulation that has harmed consumers, competitors, the open-source community, and innovation itself.” Edit- unless you are saying their claim is that someone would rip off new code at this late a point in their dead branch of UNIX? That would be possible I guess, but they would have to be delusional to a point that strains credulity.
- isatty 5y agoSlashdot is breaking the browsers back button now, seriously? HN should not allow urls that do this to be posted.
- justinsaccount 5y agoOpen links in new tabs to avoid this "problem" entirely. Right click or long press the back button to go back more than one step at a time. If you still have issues complain to your browser vendor, not HN or slashdot.
- isatty 5y agoI can also restart my phone or buy a new one to avoid this problem entirely. I guess I’ll do that.
- anaganisk 5y agoYou know, if your browser is allowing for its back button to be hijacked, its right to blame browser rather than, people who use its API. What next block websites that track locations, send notifications? If your phone needs a restart, to close a website. I think you have bigger problems with that phone.
- binarybanana 5y agoI recommend PinePhone.
- jffry 5y agoI was able to click on the link, and click back to return to these comments, in both FF and Chrome. What behavior are you seeing that's different?
- isatty 5y agoI’m guessing you’ve ublock origin or similar on those browsers thats mitigating it. It’s broken on safari (iOS).
- marcodiego 5y agoIt is a shame that after all the damage they did, they will still get millions from this.
- edmundsauto 5y agoIf it makes you feel better, I’m guessing that every penny went to their attorneys (and then some!)
- natas 5y agoThis is probably the best ending the Linux community could have hoped for; however, I'm dismayed that SCO burnt itself in flames, it was actually a very good operating system; not GNU/Linux-good, but very good back in the days. I understand they lost a lot of business to Linux (so did Microsoft etc.) and that's how the system works; but they were "stuck" because they couldn't open it as it held files with various copyrights (AT&T, Novel, etc.) whom wouldn't have agreed to this. What could/should have they done instead? Well, I can't think of anything as most of the commercial unix vendors are gone now (Irix, Solaris, Tru64, etc.).
- mixmastamyk 5y ago> What could/should have they done instead? Gone quietly into the night with their dignity intact.
- gjsman-1000 5y agoOr, "if you can't beat 'em, join em." Adopt Linux-based systems and support both classic and Linux offerings. Adapt.
- Dracophoenix 5y agoChange Linux to FreeBSD and that's what Xinuos is doing right now with Openserver 10.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoThat SCO isn't the one that launched the suit. It was Caldera/SCO that did it and already had a business selling support for their Linux distro.
- ghaff 5y agoThe whole thing was/is a tangled web. I spent months on this case at one point and even I'd have to go back to my notes to reconstruct the whole messy timeline.
- dehrmann 5y agoFeels appropriate linking to Slashdot for this bit of news.
- mixmastamyk 5y agoIn soviet russia, a beowulf cluster of cowboy neals serves hot grits to you! :D
- dehrmann 5y agoI remember seeing Cowboy Neal on IRC and feeling like it was a celebrity sighting. The world needs a Cowboy Neal option.
- squarefoot 5y agoAs long as it isn't the goatse guy, it's all ok :D This thread brought memories...
- phendrenad2 5y agoHave a frosty mug of natalie portman!
- morpheos137 5y agoDid anybody else notice that Xinuos is So Unix backwards?
- mirekrusin 5y agoXinunotihs Corp
- Taniwha 5y agoNot a new idea - invented by Mt Xinu
- CRConrad 5y agoI suspect the "-os" bit is supposed to be read the right way around, as "OS" (= Operating System). "Xinu OS". Hmmm... In good old recursive-definition-hacker-backronym style, "Xinu Is Not Unix"?
- dzdt 5y agoWho else misses groklaw, BTW? That was my favorite tech law site for many years. [1] http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=20031016162215566 http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2003101616...
- smhenderson 5y agoI miss it but it was never the same without PJ and I hope she's been able to move on and is doing well.
- willvarfar 5y agoWhat happened?
- ghaff 5y agohttps://www.zdnet.com/article/privacy-concerns-cause-pj-to-close-groklaw/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/privacy-concerns-cause-pj-to-c... Basically she had privacy concerns. As I recall, at least one journalist had tried to track her down in real life.
- Sunspark 5y agoReal cloak and dagger stuff.
- ghaff 5y agoWell, without reopening ancient wounds, it actually wasn't unreasonable to ask who the person behind this popular and influential anti-SCO website was. Certainly the question would have come up with a pro-SCO website. I personally know an analyst who was convinced it was a sock puppet site for one of the litigants. I don't think he was ever convinced otherwise even though a journalist friend of mine, who I absolutely trust, assured me it was a real person who was about as you would imagine. So, yeah, I believe PJ was more or less who she appeared to be. I'd also expect people would be very skeptical about such a blogger's identity under different circumstances.
- Svperstar 5y agoI'm old. I remember reading about this crap back in 2003 and thinking "I'm sure it will be thrown out of court in a year or two". The court system is nuts.
- fergie 5y agoI assumed that this case had been resolved like a decade ago. Does anybody else remember when SCO vs Linux (as reported by Groklaw) was an obsession of tech news sites?
- ghaff 5y agoThe case was essentially zombie-fied (no, that's not actually a legal term) over a decade ago but, in spite of a couple events since, the final stake never got driven.
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoYup. It was a daily visit for me. Did a bit of time at the courthouse reporting. Fun times...
- fortran77 5y agoWhen I first moved to Silicon Valley, I worked for Olivetti's R&D lab and we did a lot of work with SCO. In the early days if x386 "Xenix" and Unix, they were one of the coolest companies around. We loved going down from Cupertino to Santa Cruz and working with them.
- bborud 5y agoIt is fitting that this is reported on Slashdot.
- axiolite 5y agoWhy? Because Slashdot is a hideous zombie of its former self, sold off several times to different owners, and now all about politics and inaccurate / flamebait semi-tech stories with the credibility of a tabloid? I guess that's fitting.
- bdowling 5y agoI read and posted on Slashdot daily in the early 2000s. Back then then it was all about politics and inaccurate/flamebait semi-tech stories with the credibility of a tabloid. So, I don't think Slashdot has really changed. Slashdot's audience, however, has largely moved on and the cultural significance of Slashdot has been taken over by other platforms.
- axiolite 5y agoIt was much better in the 90s and very early 2000s. The creation of the politics section, Sept 2004 was the beginning of the downfall, in hindsight. The site really kept changing for the worst from then on, and the latest change in ownership turned it into complete trash.
- steelframe 5y agoI worked at the IBM Linux Technology Center back when this whole clusterfsck was just taking off. Without going into details, it impacted how I was able to get my job done. The damage that the SCO Group inflicted on the world by making it a lot more difficult for companies like IBM to contribute toward Linux is immeasurable, and I can only laugh bitterly when I see a settlement amount measured in a measly 8 figures. The industry-wide FUD that SCO inflicted has been far, far more damaging.
- walshemj 5y agoBut it paid for a lot of lawyers yachts in the mean time.
- garaetjjte 5y agoNot necessarily. TSG back in 2004 negotiated with their law firm to cap legal fees at $31 million. http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20040831183432157 http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20040831183432157
- CRConrad 5y agoThat's still a lot of yachts, if they aren't all in the multimegabuck class.
- cheese_van 5y agoAges ago, the Santa Cruz variant of SCO ran some key components of the State Department's sensitive communication system. The rigs were good, solid and did their job. It was sad when they morphed into the bad SCO.
- squarefoot 5y agoWhat will happen to the $699/CPU (minus discounts) licensing fee SCO demanded to companies using Linux back then? Apparently, a certain number of them paid to avoid litigation. Does it mean they can call back for a refund?
- kanzenryu2 5y agoI don't get it. Does this mean SCO had a valid legal point after all if IBM paid them $14.5M?
- sjansen 5y agoNo, it means the lawyers responsible for handling SCO’s bankruptcy have stopped hoping for a bigger number and settled for being able to repay creditors something instead of nothing, while IBM’s lawyers have decided the number is small enough it’s not worth defending itself any longer.
- rvz 5y agoHuge waste of 18 years for $14.5 Million.
- stakkur 5y agoFinally, it’s the year of Xenix on the desktop.