[antiRepublicrat]

Dude, you're not an attorney nor do you play one on TV. I'll let the judge try this case.

That's not in this case. If if a Novell case were tried, and Novell won, then SCO wouldn't even have legal standing to bring the IBM case.

Dude, you don't possess all available evidence. Much of it (emails, depositions, transcripts, etc) is still under seal with the court.

You're right, SCO has some sealed depositions countering IBM's MSJ. These depositions would likely have the testimony to support SCO's interpretation. There's the John Harrop declaration, but he's just an SCO lawyer arguing legal points. There appear to be a couple others.

You'd better hope they have something much better than Otis Wilson's declaration. He was head of AT&T's UNIX software licensing department. He states:

At least as I understood these sections and discussed them with our licensees, they do not, and were not intended to, restrict our licensees' right to use, export, disclose or transfer their own products and source code, as long as they did not use, export, disclose or transfer AT&T's UNIX System V source code along with it. I never understood AT&T's software agreements to place any restrictions on our customers' use of their own original work.

And AT&T's Stephen Vuksanovich says

"Our standard software agreements also gave licensees the right to modify UNIX System V source code and to prepare derivative works based upon the code. As I believe we intended the agreements, and as I told our licensees, our licensees owned their modifications and derivative works they prepared based on UNIX System V, and were therefore permitted to do as they wished with those modifications and derivative works..."

These guys negotiated and executed this contract from the side that SCO is now trying to enforce from. How can SCO possibly disagree with them? How do you tell the head of licensing that he didn't know the intentions of one of his major licenses? These guys also state multiple times that they only wanted to protect original AT&T code, and would never think of placing such restrictions as SCO claims exist.

[Bush2000]

That's not in this case. If if a Novell case were tried, and Novell won, then SCO wouldn't even have legal standing to bring the IBM case.

BWAHAHAHA! But that's not what happened, is it? Bzzzzztttt! Thank you for playing. Here's your consolation prize.

You'd better hope they have something much better than Otis Wilson's declaration. He was head of AT&T's UNIX software licensing department ... blah, blah, blah ...

Look, this is probably going to be a shock to you -- but you should know that the testimony of most of these AT&T folks directly contradicts sworn testimony that they gave during the AT&T versus BSD lawsuit. SCO is in possession of the original contradictory testimony. SCO is also in possession of a letter from Otis Wilson that says ...

"AT&T intended for its license agreements to protect from disclosure even products that were based on derivatives of the licensed software.... We want to stress at the outset that licensees may not distribute, or permit access to, any licensed source code software products (either in modified or unmodified form) to any third party at any time, or distribute sublicensed products based on such software products or its derivatives, unless specifically permitted by the license agreement."

That's bad. Really bad for IBM. It directly calls into question the credibility of its prime witness. And when you throw in the sworn testimony of Martin Pfeffer, the AT&T chief Unix licensing attorney, which reportedly agrees with SCO's interpretation of the contract ... IBM may want to think seriously about settling this lawsuit out of court before it ever gets to a jury.