Catching up with SCO
Posted Oct 23, 2003 15:13 UTC (Thu) by
jre (subscriber, #2807)
Parent article:
Catching up with SCO
As one might have expected, the core of SCO's objection to IBM's motion to compel discovery is mere pettifoggery -- they claim that they need more time to respond because the whole matter is very complicated, and they want to make sure the judge understands it all. You see, it goes way beyond "misuse of trade secrets" and involves a bunch of "breach of agreements" which are somehow larger than, and different from, the trade secret issue, so you can see, Your Honor, why it's not as simple as highlighting some lines of code and boxing some documents.
Crank up the smoke machine.
Of greater interest is the fact that SCO's fancy lawyers are still making some surprisingly dumb rookie mistakes. In their earlier objection, they pulled out a Utah court rule governing the content of motions, and kvetched that IBM had not supplied all the required info. As it turns out, that was not the case, and they are now in the position of apologizing to the Court:
The drafters ... worked largely from faxed documents that were incomplete ... Since the filing of the original motion, the contents of the Addendum were discovered. ... SCO apologizes to this Court for filing a motion deficient in that manner.
Talk about the dog eating your homework!
This calls to mind SCO's amateurish original complaint, with its cheesy metaphors about bicycles and luxury cars, avoidable errors of fact such as referring to rms as a professor, and misspelling "Linux"(!)
Boies, Schiller and Flexner seem to be doing somewhat better these days, but they still don't impress me as living up to their reputation. Nor, based on their performance thus far, would I feel an irresistible urge to throw $8M at them.
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