Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Intellectual Property Law Blogs -> Groklaw

Intellectual Property Law

: Groklaw

The Trial Testimony of Greg Jones, Day 2, SCO v. Novell - updated

By Pamela Jones et al.

Here is the testimony of the final witness Novell called in the SCO v. Novell trial, Greg Jones, Vice President of Technology Law at Novell. He followed Darl McBride to the stand. His testimony came on day 2 of the trial.

It's primarily because of what I learned from this testimony that I took a long time to write an analysis of the trial. I was, frankly, too angry to trust myself to write about it until I had some time to cool off some.

We learn two primary things from Jones' testimony: first, what a cynical role Sun played in the SCO saga, and second, that all the time SCO was calling on the world, the courts, the Congress -- nay heaven itself, if I may say so -- to sympathize with it over the ruination of its Most Holy Intellectual Property by it being improperly open sourced into Linux, not that it turned out to be true, it had already secretly given Sun the right to open source it in OpenSolaris. Remember all that falderol about SCO being contractually unable to show us the code, much as it so desired to do so, because of being bound to confidentiality requirements? What a farce. SCO had already secretly given Sun the right to open source Solaris, with all the UNIX System V you can eat right in there.

The simple fact is, I gather from Jones' testimony, Sun could have prevented the harm SCO sought to cause by simply telling us what rights it had negotiated and received from SCO prior to SCO launching its assault on Linux. Yet it remained silent. When I consider all folks were put through, all the unnecessary litigation, and all the fear and the threats and the harmful smears, including of me at the hands of SCO and all the dark little helper dwarves in SCO's workshop, I feel an intense indignation like a tsunami toward Sun for remaining silent.

Full post as published by Groklaw on June 25, 2008 (boomark / email).