Caldera vs. Microsoft Court Documents To Be Shredded

Geste writes "As now being reported in this brief story and on my local (Seattle) NPR affiliate, 3 million court documents from Caldera's unfair competition suit against Microsoft are to be shredded in Utah. The timing relative to Microsoft's recent licensing of SCO Unix IP is undoubtedly a complete coincidence. "

Comments

The AARD code story is immortal.

[vegetablespork]

And available here.

Re:Who's doing the shredding?

[vivekb]

That suit was settled in January 2000, and Caldera -- now The SCO Group -- was paying up to $1,500 a month to store the documents. In October, the company persuaded U.S. District Judge Dee Benson to order their destruction.

I gather from that bit of the article that Caldera, now the SCO Group, has ordered the shredding to reduce expenses by $1500 per month.

Re:Why...

[ShmuelP]

According to the article, they are being scanned in, and are only being destroyed one digitized.

Why don't you actually read the article?

[spacefrog]

The article doesn't say, who ordered the shredding?

• 
  Geeez, did you or any of the people modding you up to 5 even read the article?
  
  Oh wait, this is Slashdot, never mind. Oh well, I'm sure you will read it the next four times this story gets repeated.
  
  And I quote the article:
  
  
  • Caldera -- now The SCO Group -- was paying up to $1,500 a month to store the documents. In October, the company persuaded U.S. District Judge Dee Benson to order their destruction.

Re:Why...

[Kircle]

Not quite. I think Sun is scanning 40 boxes of documents. The other boxes along with those 40 are to be destroyed.

Literacy

[siskbc]

The article doesn't say, who ordered the shredding?

Yes it did. Shredding was requested of the judge in the Caldera/M$ case by SCO in October. Judge agreed. SCO contracted the schredding by some shredding company. Sun got an injunction to stop the shredding, got 40 boxes of documents, scanned them, returned them, and the rest is now being shredded.

You got anything else you need read, you just let me know.

Re:Ironic.

[pokka]

Why is this modded +5? All you have to do is search for "murberry slocomb" on google and you'll get: "Your search - "Murberry Slocomb" - did not match any documents. " As a matter of fact, just search for any page with the two words "murberry" and "slocomb" and you'll still find 0 hits. According to switchboard.com, there is not a single business in the US with "murberry" in its name, and only one (listed) person in the US has a last name of Murberry. None of your links tie your statements together. You link to a generic page which shows SEC filings for VA, but nothing on that page ties it to "Murberry". You link to the board of directors for VA, but again, you don't link them in any way to "Murberry". And why didn't you provide a link to any page which links OSDN to "Murberry?" You claim that you found these links using lexis-nexis because you know that most people don't have a (very expensive) subscription to that database. Nice try. Anyone with an educational/legal subscription to lexis-nexis: Please do a quick search and refute this guy's claim completely.

Re:when did scanned docs become accepted in courts

[!Squalus]

Scanned documents have been an accepted legal practice since at least the Pennzoil/Texaco lawsuit days. Pennzoil won a few Billion dollars from Texaco and went on a scanning spree and wasted few million when the market was just getting Windows for Workgroups (Yech - 3.11).

The requirement is that the scan documents have to be written to WORM (Write Once Read Many) media. At the time we were using 5GB optical platters (pretty advanced in its day).

I will never forget the MIS director Barbara saying that we should just "delete" the documents from the WORM platters so that we could use that room for other information.

Seems that the concept of WORM was unknown to her. She didn't support macros either, thought everything should be hand-coded, even when it was boring and repititious. I used to write macros back then to massage the DB and would have them running on 5 or 6 PCs at once. Drove the suits crazy. They thought I wasn't doing anything (until they looked at the machines working - then they looked like deer caught in the headlights - didn't quite know what to do).

This was back in 1988 or 89, so the concept isn't new - and has been around for a very longe time. Before that it was a little thing called Microfiche - film on tapes, often stored in little cassette like rolls. Of course, that just shows my age. ;)

Re:Ironic.

[tmalone]

I just did a rather (I'm sorry to say) extensive search of Lexis Nexis, and nothing came up. I looked through the regular news (nothing relevent came up) and business news. I also checked the Lexis-Nexis company listings, which also showed no results for "mulberry slocomb". You can tell it is a hoax just by reading the post though. It looks very similar to many other expose posts that have appeared on slashdot. I'm just pissed that I can't get myself to do some quick research on my final papers, but of course, I'll do some research on a fictional company that some guy on slashdot made references to. Oh well.

Re:Andrew is a shill.

[mdielmann]

I disagree. Sure, he says: Whether in spite or because of the books Undocumented DOS and Undocumented Windows, I've often had to publicly defend Microsoft against what I felt were acts of scapegoating from whining competitors (including Novell, Borland, Lotus, and Wordperfect), complaints which remind me of the way some Americans like to blame Japan for what are ultimately our own domestic problems.

But, he also makes that statement in a section of the article named "Maybe It's a Bug?" (good grief! It's the first paragraph in the section!) and then he goes on to say this: In fact, much of Microsoft's practice, far from targeting competitor's applications, points in the opposite direction: Microsoft sometimes goes to extremes to maintain compatibility, even with competitor's mistakes (see, for example, the crazy GetAppCompatFlags() function discussed in Chapter 5 of Undocumented Windows).

*sarcasm*Personally, I find this shocking. Company A has a bug that makes their code incompatible, but they blame Company B.*/sarcasm* That's almost as old as the "It's the hardware." "No, it's the software." game. Besides, are you going on the record as saying that Novell has never had bugs in their products? Good luck.

The way I see it, he has nothing good to say about what MS was doing in that article, but he doesn't condone attacking MS every time something goes wrong. It also has no relevance with your comments, or the article you linked to - it's quite clear that they are in the wrong there...