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Story: Red Hat must wait for SCO ruling

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Judge Robinson ruled that Redhat had a case against SCOG that should proceed toward trial. However, she noted that the central issue to be decided in the Redhat case, whether Linux contains any code that was misappropriated from SysV code owned by SCOG, was also an issue in the IBM case, and stayed the Redhat case until this issue was decided in the IBM case.

She did not emphasize that SCOG is under court order to send IBM the information needed to decide this issue, and that the deadline is April 19, eight days from now.

Further, Novell's motion to dismiss SCOG's suit against Novell will probably be granted within a month, and possibly on grounds that SCOG did not provide evidence that Novell transferred any copyrights to old SCO.

Finally, IBM's latest amendments to its counterclaims cover essentially all the issues that Redhat raised in its suit.

Redhat can now let IBM and Novell carry the ball, and Redhat can have its case won for it with no legal expenses.

Meanwhile, SCOG gets no benefit from the delay, since the IBM and Novell suits are now proceeding rapidly, and all the news is bad for SCOG, so further pumping the stock price will be next to impossible.

By moving to delay the IBM trial, SCOG has given IBM a marvelous opportunity to catalog the ways that SCOG tried to delay the trial and withhold the information that IBM and the judge properly requested, while complaining that IBM had not given information requested by
SCOG's improper fishing expedition.

On December 5, the judge ordered SCOG to supply this information and stayed SCOG's discovery from IBM. On January 12, SCOG defied the court order with respect to its claimed rights in Linux, asked for more time to get some minor items, and complained that the fish that IBM had given were not enough to allow SCOG to state its claims precisely.

On February 6, we found that SCOG had still not provided the basic information needed before SCOG would have a right to initiate discovery. The judge invited IBM to request dismissal at that point, but IBM suggested giving SCOG more rope (oops, time). SCOG ask for 30 days, so the judge pondered for a month, gave them an additional 45 days, and told IBM to complete its own response to a subset of SCOG's interrogatories defined by IBM with the same deadline.

I am sure that IBM will describe all this and more in its response to SCOG's motion to delay the trial.

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