Okay, I read this article and what of the comments I could stomach with the awful commenting system on there and I guess it's just that I've tried to flush this entire thing from my mind after spending years of concern about it. I understand that the judge decided to allow a reopening of certain aspects of the case v. IBM because he decided it was improperly closed.<p>But from what I understood, the decision v. Novell essentially stripped SCO of any claims of copyright to Unix. Now I know the IBM lawsuit revolved around some slightly different issues from the Novell one, but if SCO has no copyright claims, how is it even paying counsel to sue someone?<p>Is this just a leftover pile of money that's literally doing nothing but funding a series of doomed lawsuits?<p>I understand from a strictly legal standpoint they are allowed to go on with certain claims but from a practical standpoint, I just don't get it. If there is a leftover pile of money, wouldn't it be smarter to actually, you know, invest this in creating an actual business rather than have it be a lawyer welfare fund?
Okay, time for a serious question.<p>IBM has money, and SCO's lawyers gave them a fee cap. So this endless litigation is not wrecking anyone's life. Mostly it's just an annoyance to IBM and to SCO's lawyers.<p>But suppose it weren't IBM. Suppose SCO were suing me. Or you. Being hounded for over a decade by the ghost of a company, which remains in existence <i>solely for the purpose of suing you</i> sounds horrible. And since I/you may very well have done nothing wrong, this is an unacceptable situation.<p>Now, I would hope that a good judge would realize this. Just about all the articles I've read concerning this case are about the court asking SCO to clarify something. And, indeed, here we read:<p>> So it's going to go like this:<p>> 1. SCO must file a brief statement identifying the claims ....<p>So I would imagine that our hypothetical good judge would stick up for me/you by simply saying to SCO, "You need to make a clear statement about what you are claiming, and we're not going to waste any more time with you until you do."<p>But then I wonder why the judge couldn't simply have done that in this case, too -- a decade ago.