Motions in limine are flying in Utah like snowflakes in a winter storm, filed by both parties in
SCO v. Novell. But there are a lot more from Novell than from SCO.
Novell has filed 19 more motions in limine, all filed on February 8, for a total of 20, as well as motions for a Daubert hearing to disqualify Dr. Christine A. Botosan, Dr. Gary Pisano, and G. Gervaise Davis III, three of SCO's experts. The Novell motions in limine are mainly to exclude testimony from certain witnesses of SCO's "for lack of personal knowledge," among other reasons. Like
Ed Chatlos. Remember when Judge Dale Kimball was on the case, and Novell filed motions to disqualify that same testimony? Well, now they are raising it again.
SCO has filed 5 motions in limine, but they are not described in the docket, and I haven't read them yet. We can read them together. But I see one of them is titled a motion asking that certain statements of
Michael Anderer "as an independent contractor" be excluded. You remember Darl McBride's once longtime friend and business associate,
Mr. Anderer, the man who
said that proprietary software companies would keep suing Linux until they killed it? And they don't want the jury to hear about what Judge Kimball earlier ruled about who owned the copyrights, I gather. Well, would you, if you were SCO? And they want witnesses to be told they can't mention Groklaw. Say, what? Why would anyone ever mention Groklaw in the trial? I can't imagine any circumstance where that would happen. Anyway, jurors are told not to do outside research, so even if it happened, jurors couldn't visit Groklaw, not that they wouldn't find it enlightening, until the trial was all over.
In other words, as is normal in filing motions in limine, both parties are asking the judge to decide what the trial is going to be about, in essence, by determining before anything goes before a jury what evidence will be allowed to be presented. Of course, Novell has already
filed a motion in limine pointing out that one of Judge Ted Stewart's earlier orders seems to provide the meets and bounds of the trial. If he grants that first Novell motion in limine, I think this list will get pruned. Should he not grant that motion, however, he faces all of them.
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