Disputed SCO Code Won't Be Made Public
from the how-to-mitigate-damages? dept
I'm sure all of the many many sites focusing on the SCO lawsuit will have more thoughts on this, but the latest news is that, despite an original ruling saying that SCO needed to make the disputed code public, SCO has now convinced the judge that they should only present the "evidence" of infringement to the judge, jury and IBM. This means that the open source crew, who have been doing an excellent job picking apart each sample of "infringing" code that SCO has shown so far won't have the ability to go through the rest. The reasoning, of course, from SCO's point of view is that opening up their source code to the public means that it will never get to put it back in the genie bottle. However, that makes no sense. If the entire claim is that this code was taken out of SCO's source code and put into Linux, then the code is already public. Displaying it again does nothing to lessen SCO's control over the code if it really is already out there. The only thing it really does (and the real reason SCO wants to do it this way) is make it more difficult for IBM to go through the code and figure out if (as has been the case so far) SCO is wrong in their claims. This is not a surprise, of course, as SCO has done everything possible to make the process as difficult on everyone else - including the news last week that they delivered the "infringing source code" to IBM on a million sheets of paper. You get the feeling, sometimes, that SCO believes this is all a big game. They're acting like the bratty first-grader who insists on some sort of strict interpretation of what he's been told just for the sake of annoying everyone around him.
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Trial by Jury
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Re: Trial by Jury
Eight? Try twelve, with two alternates.
Petit juries have 12 members, grand juries have 23.
However, I suspect there are two really big questions that need to be answered before I will believe this article...so don't get too upset yet.
1.) This is SCO who is claiming that the Judge ordered the disclosure closed. There has been no corroboration from either the court or from another party, and Blake Stowell, the same head of PR who has lied to the press before about various plans of attacks or actions that SCO was going to undertake, as well as writing some of the "Open Letters" that were "penned" by Darl McBride and contained numerous inaccuracies. This article, and every other article I've seen on the issue has said "According to Blake Stowell..."
2.) Just because they have asked the court to seal the disclosure, and just because the court may have agreed, doesn't mean that the code won't be released, there is always the process to allow a 3rd party to challenge the order, such has been done numerous times by the media in cases such as the O.J. Simpson and David Westerfield cases, where both defendents asked for a closed hearing, and both judges ordered the hearings closed, only to have the media challenge the order and open up the hearings.
Visit groklaw for more info...
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Re: Trial by Jury
Actually, let me amend that, (I forgot that civil juries weren't always 12,) according to most state and federal laws, the number of members on a trial jury can be 6 to 12. Apparently you are right though, according to Utah law, eight jurors are used for civil cases over $20,000 in damages.
Hmmm... Ooops, but everything else should be correct.
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delay
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