Stewart Rules: Novell Wins! CASE CLOSED!(Groklaw)

The witch is dead. However you want to describe it. SCO and SCO lawyers have proven to be the idiots they are.

PJ is right. If she can see the true value of the SCO litigation why couldn't SCO lawyers see it? They did see it. They wanted to pursue the nuisance law suits anyway. And that is all they ever were. It is true that the public took some time for the facts to be exposed over time. And yes, Groklaw played a major role in all of that. But, any lawyer worth two bits would have ascertain the facts before ever accepting the case. And the SCO lawyers did that. They just wanted to take the huge legal fee and pursue the litigation anyway. Nuisance law suits do work. At least sometimes they do. Not today.

The only downside for this whole mess is that Linux and possible copyright violations was never litigated. The SCO v Novell case will not about possible copyright violations. Rather it was all about the fact that SCO had no legal right to make the allegations. Of course they wanted to extort money just the same. And they did do that. At least until the facts started to be exposed and the industry decided not to pay SCO the extortion money it wanted to insist upon.

But, what about IBM's counterclaims? And Red Hat has a few claims too.

You do not get blood out of a turnip. And IBM and Red Hat have known that all along as well. SCO has been diced, smashed and specifically discredited for the idiots and fools they are. And that includes their lawyers.

Many lawyers will press any case if you pay them enough money. But, as I have often suggested we do not know what the SCO lawyers told SCO. Maybe the lawyers lied to SCO. Maybe the SCO lawyers committed fraud. Maybe the lawyers should be sued for malpractice. Certainly there is a case for that. And if they really think that even a nuisance law suit should be pursued, well, there is one more law suit being considered. Sue the SCO lawyers for even suggesting that the SCO litigation be pursued and bankrupting the company in the process. Clearly any lawyer should be more careful about advising a company to go bust pursuing a lousy case. Did the public know that the case was lousy from the start? It is fair to suggest the public did not. Reading Groklaw helped a lot. And eventually the public became aware. But, the lawyers knew all of the facts from the very beginning. All of them. It was their job to ascertain the facts before advising SCO. And there is no doubt that they did that.

This was not even about copyrights. It was about a nuisance law suit and extortion. Simply a protection racket.

Post Script Update:

Did not the SCO lawyers say these cases were all about contracts? Yes, they did. And they were right about that. But, Novell had the contract rights not SCO. And that was true about IBM too but it looks like we will never see those issues resolved in court. Thanks again to Groklaw the public has been able to at least discuss the contract issues related to IBM as well.