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Novell and SCO (Finally) Agree to Postpone Until May |
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Friday, March 04 2005 @ 09:29 PM EST
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The Novell-SCO hearing on Novell's Motion to Dismiss has been postponed for two months. Here are four documents about it, and they are a character study in themselves: What happened is, Novell's lead attorney is involved in another trial, and it's going longer than was expected, and he can't make it to the March 8 hearing, so he asked for a delay of about two weeks. Now, as it happens, the last delay was because one of SCO's attorneys, Ted Normand, wanted a continuance because his wife was expecting a baby. Novell was nice enough to say yes to the request. But when Novell asked for a continuance, SCO said no. Their reason was because the judge has no openings until April, despite Novell asking for only 10 to 14 days. As it happens, Normand has a date in another court on the April date offered. So no go. Discussions galore. The upshot is, Novell put in a motion that pointed out how unreasonable SCO was being about the thing. Lead attorneys have no control over a trial running long in California, and both sides have granted time to the other from day one in this litigation. Besides, Novell's attorney was ready to argue the matter on the date SCO postponed for the baby, so the current problem only came up because SCO postponed the earlier hearing date. I guess SCO decided, after reading the Novell motion, not to fight, and they stipulated eventually. But first they forced Novell to go to the expense and effort of drawing up a motion that both sides must have known Novell couldn't lose from day one. Just totally unnecessary. So it's May 25th at 3 PM, on stipulation by the parties, and so ordered by Judge Kimball.
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Authored by: penfold on Friday, March 04 2005 @ 09:49 PM EST |
Post Links as HTML using:
<a href="www.blah.com>Link Text</a>
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The worth of man is determined by the battle between good and evil in the mans
subconcious.The Evil within is so strong that the way to win is to deny it
battle[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, March 04 2005 @ 09:50 PM EST |
.
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--Bill P, not a lawyer. Question the answers, especially if I give some.[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, March 04 2005 @ 10:01 PM EST |
Ted Normand, SCO counsel, from BSF LLP, in email to Heather
Sneddon:
The basis for SCO's unwillingness to stipulate to a
continuance of the hearing date on Novell's Second Motion to Dismiss not only is
that the Court did not propose any available dates to reschedule the hearing
until April 25-28, but also because on those dates counsel for SCO is scheduled
to be in trial in Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of New
York...
Someone please comment... Bankruptcy Court? [ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, March 04 2005 @ 10:01 PM EST |
It appears that the Sneddon and Normand declarations are also included in the
PDF of the Motion. Or are they diiferent and I missed some differences?
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--Bill P, not a lawyer. Question the answers, especially if I give some.[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: BC on Friday, March 04 2005 @ 10:03 PM EST |
What!? SCOG not taking an opportunity to delay and draw something out?
Just like a sibling; It's all mine! and I want the opposite of whatever you
want.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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- Delay - Authored by: stend on Friday, March 04 2005 @ 10:24 PM EST
- Delay - Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, March 05 2005 @ 02:50 AM EST
- Throws the Troll Schedule Off - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, March 04 2005 @ 11:28 PM EST
- Of Course - Authored by: GLJason on Saturday, March 05 2005 @ 01:49 PM EST
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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, March 04 2005 @ 10:42 PM EST |
OK so the attorney's trial is going longer than expected. Why not get someone
else from the same firm to take over????????
I would say Novell's law firm is incompetent. What happen's if Novell's
attornery got hit by a bus (god forbid)? "Oh sorry your honour due to the
unfortunate death of our lawyer we will have to cancel this lawsuit". Its
ridiculous - another attorney should be able to take his place without problems.
Any half decent business (or legal firm) would NOT have any jobs that can only
be done by one person.
Handing delays on a platter to SCO.... very sad.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, March 05 2005 @ 11:21 AM EST |
Then why did't SCO just agree? Well here's one scenario, as May 25th comes
around and SCO wants to stall(for some possibly dubious reason) they can point
to this.[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: tredman on Saturday, March 05 2005 @ 11:57 AM EST |
Just some observations:
"4. Mr. Normand asked me whether
Novell would be willing to stipulate to a two or three-week extension of the
February 1 hearing date. He informed me that he was not involved in earlier
discussions between counsel to set the February 1 date, and that his wife was
due to give birth only a few days following February 1. Mr. Normand also
indicated that his firm was busy trying to complete discovery involving
SCO."
Declaration of Heather M. Sneddon in Support of Novell, Inc.'s
Motion for Continuance, paragraph 4
So, apparently, Mr.
Normand isn't as central or pivitol a figure to the prosecution as Mr. Jacobs is
to the defense. This goes beyond the pot and the kettle. But the part that got
my attention was the last sentence. If they're referring to the discovery
provided by IBM, well, they hadn't received any yet. If they're referring to
the discovery provided by SCOX, well....uh....wait a minute. SCOX's providing
discovery? Somebody stop the presses...
By the way, in terms of the
documents linked to, it appears that Novell-64 and Novell-65 are attached to
Novell-63 as well.
Finally, just by reading the documents, and by PJ's
observation, it doesn't say why or how SCOX eventually caved and gave in to the
stipulation. Part of me almost believes that they didn't think Novell would
actually file anything, and didn't become responsive until they saw it in black
& white. Another part of me wants to think that SCOX is doing this as a
face-saving measure, so that they can come back and say, "Well, we wanted the
trial to go forward in a bad way, but Novell forced us into a
delay.".
The problem here lies with selective short-term memory, which
the media has in abundance, it seems. SCOX thrives on that fact. They seem to
depend on the press having no more of a 30-day recall of the events, and
considering that many journalists cover so many different events in their beats,
it's not really that suprising. No mainstream journalist or analyst is as
devoted to SCOX as PJ. They're writing for people who want to know as much as
they can about so many different things. If a journalist were to focus on one
particular subject, their readership would get bored and wander off to get their
fix from some other news or commentary outlet. (Contrast this to PJ and Groklaw;
PJ can afford to focus on one or two things because that's what her readership
comes here for: specifics). Becuase these journalists are not focused on any
one thing, they have to spread their resources. Although they may get the
general facts right more often than not, they tend to gloss over, or completely
screw up, the details. Many times, those details are inferences, conclusions or
evidence drawn from the past, which tends to be fuzzy for people who don't focus
on particular subject matter.
Many here are probably shouting "FOUL"
because of the delay, how Novell is handing SCOX exactly what they want. It
doesn't matter. The Novell case is irrelevent. The only step left is for the
case to be thrown out. It won't have any impact on the other litigation, since
SCOX was narrow enough to only litigate on slander of title. In retrospect, it
was actually a smart move for them, much smarter than for them to actually file
the case to begin with. Novell puts itself out on the thin branch by contesting
ownership, and they know that it's possible for it to come up anyway in SCOvIBM.
I'm sure Novell would much rather deal with the whole thing as a witness
instead of a defendant. Besides, with the murky history of UNIX, Novell
probably realizes exactly how much of a pain in the posterier it would be to
trace ownership and copyrights across the entire UNIX property. They know that,
if and when the time comes in SCOvIBM, the focus will be much narrower, only
dealing with specific areas like NUMA and JFS and all kinds of other things that
they know ownership can be clearly traced for.
Of course, I may be
completely off my rocker and full of it, too.
Tim
"I drank what?"
- Socrates, 399 BCE [ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: Christian on Saturday, March 05 2005 @ 03:26 PM EST |
Jacobs is lead defense counsel in Lexar v. Toshiba.
A little googling has
shown two interesting points of correspondence with SCO v. IBM.
Toshiba
invested with Lexar on a project to develop a flash memory controller. Lexar
alleges that Toshiba was simultaneously involved secretly with a similar project
with ScanDisk, and that Toshiba's main interest in Lexar was to acquire trade
secrets to transfer to ScanDisk. This love triangle sounds a lot like the
Monterey - Linux claims that SCO is alleging. I guess this is a common problem
in tech.
More interestingly, Toshiba won a motion to push its electronic
discovery costs onto Lexar. While the decision is based on CA law, a legal
commentary notes that this "is instructive of the trend by courts to shift the
cost of expensive electronic discovery to the requesting party." Let's hope
this trend continues in SCO v. IBM. [ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, March 07 2005 @ 05:26 PM EST |
There are still many warm ties between Noorda and Novell..
and you don't kick a man when he's down.. unless that man, is of course, Darl or
Ralph or Darcy or Elder Christiansen.
The problem isn't SCO.. and the State of Utah has gotten sooo much bad press as
a result of this that someone is calling in the mormon militia, I wouldn't be
surprised if the Danites don't give the boys a visit.[ Reply to This | # ]
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