Confessions of a G33k

SCO loses 2.25 million in 1Q revenue, decides to distract shareholders

by suing Autozone and DaimlerChrysler... From InfoWorld

In an announcement made late Wednesday morning, Lindon, Utah-based SCO said it would file suit later in the day against DaimlerChrysler in Oakland County Circuit Court in Michigan.

That lawsuit alleges that DaimlerChrysler violated its software licensing agreement with SCO by refusing to provide a requested "certification of compliance" as part of a software audit. The suit asks the court to permanently bar the automaker from further violations of the software agreement and seeks an injunction requiring it to "remedy the effects of its past violations" of the agreement.

The suit seeks undetermined damages. SCO officials were slated to discuss the legal action during a conference call at which they also planned to talk about the company's latest earnings report.

Earlier, in a separate announcement Wednesday, SCO said its suit against AutoZone alleges the retailer violated SCO's Unix copyrights through its use of Linux. That suit charges that AutoZone is "running versions of the Linux operating system that contain code, structure, sequence and/or organization from SCO's proprietary Unix System V code in violation of SCO's copyrights."

The already filed Autozone suit is from all appearances a contract dispute rather than pure IP infringement. Autozone had apparently been a customer of SCO, and during the course of their relationship, Autozone made the decision to stop using SCO and to migrate their systems to Linux. The SCO suit alleges that Autozone must have used SCO UNIX programming libraries to make the changeover to Linux. As has been widely quoted, Jim Greer, the former Autozone employee who was in charge of the Linux migration, hotly disputed this assertion weeks ago.

Update: Upon reviewing the Groklaw thread about the DaimlerChrysler suit, someone pointed out an interesting fact. There's an article on Netcraft about the irony of SCO filing suit in Federal Court in Nevada against AutoZone (and not to forget the suits going on in Federal Court in Delaware and Utah). Apparently, (I did not know this) the U.S. Federal Court system not only uses Linux for their websites, but they also are migrating to an Linux based case management system. HEE HEE.

And an interesting law geek kind of thought....I wonder why SCO chose to sue Autozone in Federal Court in Nevada (state of Autozone's incorporation) rather than in Memphis (state of principal operations). Also, the DaimlerChrysler suit in Michigan trial court is interesting because it's a suit against a multinational company. AFAIK about diversity of citizenship, I would have thought that it would easily be a Federal suit. However, even more interesting about the DaimlerChrysler case is that SCO has been fined by the German government for Linux IP claims, so I wonder if SCO is going to merely claim that they are only suing the U.S. division, thusly the reason for going to state court.

Oh and Slashdot legal analysis makes me cry. It's really, really, really untrustworthy.