SCO News Roundup

Good news, everyone. Another Friday, another tasty batch of decisions in the Novell case. Zen's got 'em here. It's actually just one document, Novell-453, which covers a bunch of recent pretrial motions.

The important bits:

1. No jury trial, the thing I was just wringing my hands about the other day. Seems that the few remaining parts of the Novell case render it a case in equity ("common law") [see user comment below], not in statutory law, which means SCO isn't entitled to a jury trial, if I understand correctly.
   
2. No immediate appeal. By declining to enter his prior PSJ rulings as Final Judgements (you gotta love that name) for now, Kimball prevented SCO from appealing while the current case is still ongoing. SCO's current goal, I gather, is to keep its claims in the IBM and AutoZone cases in a permanent state of quantum indeterminacy, neither won nor lost, neither waived nor affirmed. Kimball's having none of that, though. He hasn't collapsed their wave packet just yet, but at least he reserves the right to do so in the (hopefully near) future.
   
3. Contrary to SCO's wishes, Novell will be allowed to mention the IBM case, or GL, or this humble blog for that matter, if they think it'll help.
   
4. The one bright spot for SCO is that they're allowed to introduce (i.e. invent) new theories about what all that M$/Sun money was supposed to be for. So they have another chance to make some lame, non-credible excuses, which Kimball can then dismiss. I'm starting to think he's just toying with them now.
   

There were also a few motions yesterday, with each party objecting to the other's proposed jury instructions, and SCO objecting to Novell's proposed witness list. Nothing really earth-shattering there. It'll be interesting to see if SCO tries to revisit their witness list, now that there won't be a jury trial. Bringing in random people to say "Look, a Wookie!" isn't going to work as well when your only audience is a federal judge.

Now to the media coverage. Surprisingly, the Deseret News already has a piece about Friday's rulings.

ComputerWorld has an interview with Darl, titled "Q&A: McBride says SCO isn't dead yet, despite legal loss", in a case of exquisitely poor timing. It's classic Darl, loaded with corny sports metaphors (boxing, surfing, football, etc.) and a few "did he really say that?" moments. He says they have a shot at 20% of an $80B market, which would give SCO annual revenue about 3 orders of magnitude greater than the present-day value of the entire company. He also claims SCO's poised for an Apple-like comeback. If we're playing historical analogies, and comparing present-day SCO to the Apple of 1997, that would make Darl the new Gil Amelio -- who as you might've noticed is no longer CEO at Apple. SCO's tangled corporate history makes it hard to figure out who gets to be Steve, though. Ransom Love? Doug Michels, maybe?

Over at IT Jungle, Timothy Morgan also argues the Novell case is still very much alive. Again, not the best timing. If you're going to write an article saying SCO has even the remotest shred of hope going forward, it's best not to write the article on a Friday, because that's when Kimball usually rules.

Oh, and Affinity Technology (remember them?), Kevin McBride's other IP-troll client, is losing money by the boatload. Net loss of $476k, on revenues of just $8k, and total liabilities running around 10x of total assets. Their forward-looking statements go on and on about all sorts of pending appeals they feel really super-optimistic about. Sound familiar?