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Reporting from the fsckin trenches – Novell v. SCO trial

Ladies and germs, it’s been too long since I’ve got anything up here, so I figured it would be good to post a short update on what I’ve been up to this week. The Novell v. SCO trial is ending tomorrow, and I’ve been attending it the last couple days. It’s pretty damn interesting, to […]

Ladies and germs, it’s been too long since I’ve got anything up here, so I figured it would be good to post a short update on what I’ve been up to this week. The Novell v. SCO trial is ending tomorrow, and I’ve been attending it the last couple days.

It’s pretty damn interesting, to say the least. If you’ve never heard one of the old guys talking about UNIX, you’re missing out. There’s so much public information available, but to actually hear things explained by the perpetrators and see and hear evidence that has never been made public before is really eye opening.

SCOs Darl McBride took the stand yesterday, and it was a sight to behold, have a read about it over at Ars.

It has plenty of juicy quotes like this:

“Linux is a copy of UNIX, there is no difference [between them].” — Darl McBride

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!

Moving on to about what happened today, Jay Peterson took the stand for SCO, he worked for Bell Labs — you know, the place that saw the invention of the transistor, then USL, then Novell, and finally SCO. Interesting guy, and I’ll be writing more about him for sure.

Bill Brodrick also testified that he worked for USL and moved through companies just like Jay did. I’ll be damned, but he admitted to making a 420 page “spreadsheet” in Word using the table function. Perhaps SCO doesn’t hire the brightest of the bunch — OpenOffice.org would have saved this guy a ton of time and trouble.. 🙂

Also taking the stand was Jean Acheson, who started working with USL in 91 and also continued through the company food chain like Jay and Bill. She did invoices for software royalties and had all sorts of numbers in her head.

Probably the least interesting person to take the stand (at least for me) was Jeff Hunsaker, the proverbial asshole hotshot salesman who claims to have “no technical knowledge at all.” I’m pretty sure he knows more than he let on. Just like every other salesman I’ve ever met, he played dumb the entire time he was on the stand.

If you’re in Salt Lake City, the trial will resume at 9:00am (be early!!) at room 220 and run for about 1.5 hours or so and we should have a judgment in Novell’s favor tomorrow. If Novell actually wins 20 million in damages, I’ll take anyone who shows up out for lunch on me. 🙂

5 replies on “Reporting from the fsckin trenches – Novell v. SCO trial”

I think judge Kimball said he wants to start at 8:00 am due to a scheduling conflict later on in the day.

Negative. Before the court recessed for the day, Judge Kimball asked both sides how much time they would need, SCO said they had one more “quick” witness, and 20 minutes for closing, Novell would need 25-30 minutes for closing.

At that point he said we could all sleep in because if they’re only going to be there for about an hour and a half, he could start at 9:00 and still make his 2:00pm appointment with the florida bar association or whatever it was.

“If Novell actually wins 20 million in damages, I’ll take anyone who shows up out for lunch on me.”

Even if they did, do you actually think that Darl the Dorque would pay up?

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