I’ll bet you’d like it if someone explained to you what is going on in Germany in the Tarent/SCO dustup. So here goes.
It’s taken me a while to write about what is going on in Germany, for two reasons —
the laws in Germany are unknown to me and because of the language barrier, almost
unknowable. So I wanted to wait until a lawyer there could explain it to me. What I did know about the law there made me cautious. For one thing, while you can talk about a case in public, you’d best be accurate. Privacy laws in Germany are very much stricter than in the US, for another thing. And there are rather strict ideas about copyright on even a letter. In the US we are blessed with fair use, which gives one a little more wiggle room. There is, in addition, no PACER in Germany where the whole world can just go and read rulings. Some are available, some are not, as it varies from court to court,
and some are OK to make available but only with the names blocked out. In this case, that seems out of the question, since you’d know the names of the parties even if I did that.
But now I have had the opportunity to speak with a lawyer in Germany about it, Till Jaeger, the lawyer for Tarent, and I also
have obtained the letter [PDF] that was sent to SCO by Tarent. It’s in German, so I also arranged for an English translation for us. I have also the letter SCO sent back, and I’ll tell you what it says. I’ll explain what it all means, too, as best I can, thanks to having had it explained to me. Just reading it, even in translation, was not enough for me to understand it all, and perhaps you too.…more