Technology Tuesday

Ah, SCO, I knew thee well...

Looks like we're in the final stretch for this 3 and a half year lawsuit. I really don't know what SCO CEO McBride was smoking when he thought he could extort the Linux community for Intellectual Property licenses. But, in perhaps the dumbest move in corporate legal history, they decided to take on IBM; initially claiming Big Blue's contributions to the Linux kernel had lifted source code from "their" UNIX.

I think SCO (which had been struggling with falling revenues) was hoping that IBM would buy them out or settle rather than litigate. Nice going, Sun Tzu, now IBM's legal meat grinder has you square in the cross-hairs.

There have been some wild speculations regarding pump-and-dump schemes, shadowy financing, and of course the Open Source bogeyman, Microsoft, pulling SCOs strings like some demented puppeteer.

It now looks like things are coming to a close. Both sides are requesting summary judgement. IBM, because it feels it has a pretty airtight case. SCO, because... well, who the hell knows what those people are thinking. Actually, I think the lawyers for SCO are seeing there's no more money to milked and are moving to finish the case. SCO is done.

Well, not quite. They still have to deal with Novell and Red Hat.

Here's a summary of the whole SCO vs IBM