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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.
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If $1500 per month is killing SCO, they're in worse shape than I thought.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Until now, that is. While helping my 16-year-old son (also an avid Slashdot reader) do research for a term paper on technology and journalism, I stumbled across some information that made me change my views about Slashdot completely. In a nutshell: Slashdot, and more accurately, its parent company VA Software, has deep and mutually influential ties to the Microsoft Corporation. In fact, Slashdot's own editors are paid (albeit indirectly) out of the coffers of Microsoft.
Yes. It's hard to believe. At first I couldn't believe it. But a few simple Google searches and 45 minutes' research on Lexis-Nexis (as well as a couple of phone calls to a friend of mine at the SEC) revealed the following:
At first I was more amused than shocked; I mean, the technology industry is notoriously incestuous and its leaders, even those who are in competition, often sit on the same boards and are members of the same organizations. So what if a few board members of Slashdot's parent company are also directors of a company funded by Microsoft? Well, it gets more interesting.
As it turns out, in May of 1999, VA Software submitted to the SEC Form 5506-D, Application for Direct Non-Ownership Subsidization. This is the form that a corporation will submit to the SEC when it wants to directly fund a subsidiary from its own parent corporation. (It's basically a tax shelter for companies with a lot of subsidiaries) The application was approved in July 1999. The applicant name? OSDN. In other words, Form 5506-D basically eliminated the middleman between OSDN and Murberry-Slocomb. Following the money, I now saw that OSDN was being funded directly from an infusion of captal that Murberry-Slocomb has received from Microsoft!
Weird. I know. But what does this all mean? Honestly I have no idea. I'm not the custodian of any privileged information. A look at VA Software's web site and a Google search is all anyone needs to find the same information that I found. Are Slashdot's staff being paid through Microsoft? I sincerely hope not. But the facts are there and it sure looks like it. More importantly, what does this mean for the future of Slashdot? Can any grain of objectivity or journalistic ethics be preserved? What happens when the company you are bashing, nay, the very company that you preach the loudest against, Microsoft, is the same company that signs your paycheck? Could there be a deeper link still? Who knows. As far as I'm concerned, I'll never look at Slashdot the same way, ever again.
Paper documents can be altered too. They call them "forgeries", like the one about Iraq buying uranium from Africa. Arguably, the legal system hasn't caught up to centuruies-old technology . . .
If someone have a copy of the SCO source code maybe make a Torrent file, so we can start analysing if they indeed stole something. A few nuggets will go a long way to quash the FUD from SCO. Anyone know where old SCO bug reports can be gooten?
Quote:
6. Possible License Violations Within The Kernel Source
Elsewhere, Christoph Hellwig replied to the original post as well, saying:
As somone who walked for SCO (or rather Caldera how it was called at that time) I can tell you this is utter crap. There were very people actually doing Linux kernel work then (and when the German office was closed down all those left the company) and we really had better things to do then trying to retrofit UnixWare code into the linux kenrel. Especially given that the kernel internals are so different that you'd need a big glue layer to actually make it work and you can guess how that would be ripped apart in a usual lkml review :)
It might be more interesting to look for stolen Linux code in Unixware, I'd suggest with the support for a very well known Linux fileystem in the Linux compat addon product for UnixWare..
Jim Nance said, "Wouldnt it be halirous if whatever code SCO is talking about when they say there is Unix code in Linux turns out to be code some SCO employee ripped out of some GPL program and stuck it into Unixware. That is actually far more likely than what they alledge."
Help fight continental drift.
Tis here, my friend I bet if you search hard enough, you WILL find a duplicate of every taco post.... Its the new urban ledgend everyone keeps talking about..
...says that there may be some useful information in the sealed documents in the court battle between Caledera/SCO and Microsoft.
It's interesting that this airs today.
Like wiping your ass with silk...
The documents have been imaged for permanent storage, so the destruction of the paper records is not a big thing.
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.
Funny how the US Government later decided that M$ did indeed engage is such practices. Andy and DDJ should be ashamed of that article.
Let's see how the US government saw things. The jucky bits about DRDOS have been dug up by others. Have a look at M$ email for yourself. It was orchestrated from the start to crush an admitedly superior technology, included abouse of Microsoft's own custormers and malicious PR. Anyone who says differently has been proven a fool.
The destruction of court records is evil because it burries evidence of wrongdoing by a convicted monopolist that has yet to be punished and is proceeding as if nothing at all had happened. These letters may be published elsewhere, but they need to be preserved in context if an objective history is to be written. There's no telling what goodies the Caldera folks dug up before they became M$'s next shill. Evidence of Microsoft's concerted effort to eliminate free software is going to be lost.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
- SCO attacks Linux.
- Microsoft supports SCO by paying them a lot of money for their patents, at the same time validating SCO's lawsuit.
- SCO destroys evidence that Microsoft is a monopolist.