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An Offer of Arbitration Docs from Ryan Tibbitts and A Proposed Amended Schedule for Tomorrow

By Pamela Jones et al.

SCO General Counsel Ryan Tibbitts has filed a Declaration [PDF] with the bankruptcy court in support of Edward Cahn's objection to SUSE's motion for relief from the automatic stay. SUSE would like to finish the Swiss arbitration, as you know, and SCO would like to keep it from going forward. Tibbitts offers to submit to the judge sealed materials from the arbitration that he claims give evidence that SUSE is not likely to prevail in what he claims is the "highly contested" arbitration.

Then again, he would say that. But if that were really the case, why would SUSE be so eager to get that show back on the road? I think the arbitration suddenly got "highly contested" in SCO's dreams only after the appeals court ruled that there must be a trial before a jury on copyright ownership. Prior to that, SCO was using the "moot" word, IIRC. Remember at the trial in SCO v. Novell in Utah in 2008, Novell's lead attorney Michael A. Jacobs of Morrison & Foerster, told the court a bit about what was happening in the arbitration:

And, in particular, in the SUSE arbitration, which is still stayed pending the bankruptcy, when SCO was arguing to ... the arbitral panel: Don't go forward with this arbitration. There is no need. The Court -- the District Court in Utah, Judge Kimball, has already ruled on all the important issues here.

SCO said it was pointless for the arbitration to continue because the ownership decisions that the Court made here addressed all of SCO's claims relating to Linux.

It wanted to drop the arbitration. That's how hotly contested it wasn't. And it's still stayed. So exactly when did it become "hotly contested"? And if SCO was about to prevail, why did it argue to drop the whole arbitration? Is SCO telling stories? Is new SCO management starting to behave like old SCO management, or is it simply that they don't know all the water under SCO's bridge and are being misled?

Full post as published by Groklaw on December 29, 2009 (boomark / email).