Final Protective Fire

Thursday, June 23, 2005

 

While I'm currently very interested in issues regarding Open Source software and its licensing, I've not been commenting on that here. However, I've been spending a lot of time reading on Pamela Jones' Groklaw site about the SCO suits against IBM and others.

Recently there was a bizarre lawsuit by a strange individual named Wallace against the Free Software Foundation alleging that the Gnu Public License is an unlawful restraint of trade. Absolutely hilarious pro se style of complaint.

Well, the nuts seem to be coming out of the woodwork. This is a PDF of a complaint by someone named Jeff Merkey.

The context of this suit seem to be that PJ reported on Groklaw about some weird suit between Jeff Merkey and Novell over a sexual harrassment charge and termination of Merkey. I won't try to explain the peyote. Any attorney who has worked litigation will tell you that there is nothing worse that pro se litigants. They can't do anything competently, so you can't actually get a handle on the case and the courts bend over backwards to tolerate their incompetence. Merkey's complaint is hilarious. Evidently from reading it, he copied from some older complaint in some other case that he doesn't actually understand because he is citing completely inappropriate statutes and can't even get the jurisdictional amount for a diversity suit right.

Robin 9:16 PM