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IBM Subpoenas SCO Investors, Analysts
Bigfishbowl writes "Forbes has an interesting article about IBM sending subpoenas to large SCO investors in an effort to compel discovery. An IBM spokesman says IBM is frustrated by SCO's reluctance to produce proof of its allegations. '"It is time for SCO to produce something meaningful. They have been dragging their feet and it is not clear there is any incentive for SCO to try this in court," he says.'"
This is just like poker... And IBM finally called... now SCO is gonna have to lay down the cards or fold... Either way... we all win! :)
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
This is a little OT, but SCO told the names "offending" files in a court doc at groklaw. They don't say what parts of the files are "theirs", but they've narrowed it down to about a 1/5 of the kernel. :-)
about IBM sending subpoenas to large SCO investors in an effort to compel discovery.
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"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Warning: put drinks and domestic animals safely out of danger first.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
SCO claims to have shown "the code" to investors and such. IBM says, "okay, SCO won't show us the code, so we'll make your investors do so." Both intimidates the investors and calls SCO's bluff. Brilliant!
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Geez, how lazy are you people? Just check the box next to "Caldera."
Let's start referring to www.forbes.com as a "stock-market enthusiast Web site".
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The mind boggles! Sontag is asking IBM to deluge him in paper? He only has 100,000 pages, and he wants IBM to see his million and raise it!
Groan, somewhere, a forest cries in pain as the log chippers are fired up.
Do not start a land war in Asia, do not enter a paper war with IBM. Sheesh!
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
Big companies like IBM, Microsoft, et al don't act in a single-minded way like we individuals tend to. You can't run a big company with a "you're my enemy so I won't do business with you" mentality.
There are many, many examples where IBM competes or cooperates with Microsoft and others. An even more extreme example is Sony, where, one half of the business is frantically taking on file swappers and copiers, and the other half is making bucks from selling devices used to copy and swap files.
[x] auto-moderate all posts by this user as insightful
Sontag says SCO has provided 1 million pages of documents
I don't think he realizes that press releases don't count.
What's worse is that a large part of the 'million' pages that SCO produced were scanned printouts of UNIX source code. Rather than burning a source code CD or DVD and mailing it to IBM, they went to enormous efforts to furnish the data in the least useful format possible. They did this even though they acknowledged that IBM would need to perform computer analysis of the code itself.
Oh, and though they had time to send the million pages to IBM, they didn't have the chance to include the code that they have been showing for months to financial analysts, columnists, and anyone who will sign an NDA. It must have slipped their minds.
Well, you do a typical fifteen page paper in formal legalese and you'll likely end up with 1k pages or so...
..."
"The claimant of the first party, hereafter identified as Mrs. Lee, has a prior, wilful relationship with the claimant of the second party, hereafter identified as The Book, in that the claimant of the first party establishes the status of authorship on the claimant of the second party, a status that the claimant of the second party has yet to file a motion to dismiss. Within The Book, the claimant of the third party, referenced alternativel but equally as Scout and Miss Finch is described by the claimant of the first party as
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
We may hear of an SCO offer to settle in the very near future.
If they do, it will show the same lack of understanding the German high command exhibited at the end of WWII:
With the Russians surrounding Hitler's bunker, the Germans actually sent an officer out to negotiate peace terms. After five minutes, the Russian general basically said "we have troops and you don't. No settlement other than unconditional surrender is possible."
SCO has spent six months pissing on IBM. Short of "Darl consents to be publically sodomized by the IBM executive of your choice," SCO may not have any negotiating points left.
From SCO's supplemental responses:
I've been wondering when someone was going to try this for quite a while. "Dumping", selling a product below cost in order to force your competitors out of business, is illegal for good reasons. It seems like a motivated attorney could pretty easily make a case that any company who is putting substantial investment into software that is distributed for free is dumping, and trying to kill a competitor.
This doesn't just apply to IBM and Linux, it also applies to Sun and OpenOffice, and perhaps others as well. Now it looks like SCO is trying this argument out for real.
I had hoped the argument wouldn't get brought up for a while, until a history of such corporate open source efforts was well established. And it seemed reasonable that it might not be brought up, since the "damaged" party in both the Linux and OpenOffice cases is Microsoft, and as a convicted anti-competitive monopolist with a massive market share they're not in a very good position to complain.
It seems like Microsoft has found a way to get the idea in front of a judge after all...
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I think the precedent is the fact that SCO claims GPL is not enforceable. If the court agreed that GPL is a legal license, that will make any challenge in the future against GPL hard or impossible. Which gives open source softwares some legal backings.
In US, you can easily buy enough major firearms to wipe out your neighbourhood but a few little fireworks are banned.
I would like to purchase one (1) subpoena against oneclicksubpoena.com with regard to violation of US Patent# 5,960,411.
Sincerely,
amazon.com
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
Well, SCOX was at .70 before this all started and was off everyone's radar. It's not totally crazy that the stock doubled after they announced a $3 billion dollar lawsuit against a large competitior.
However, the people recommending Buy when the stock is at $20 are probably the same folks pumping money into SCO so they can keep the bubble from deflating. Even if it's an honest recommendation, it's based purely on high-risk speculation and not on any fundementals or facts.
Contrary to the slashbots, I think it's highly unlikely that this market manipulation is SCO, Canopy, Microsoft, Sun or anyone else. It's probably just independant brokers who know a goldrush when they see one. Just like VA Linux, etc.
When SCO was going around threatening end users, I sent a letter to my congressman, Barney Frank of Massachusetts. Here is his response:
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September 26, 2003
Dear Mr. Minsky,
I share your view that the suits being brought by the SCO Group
against the users of the Linux system are an entirely inappropriate
use of the legal systems for broader corporate purposes. While I have
note been able, obviously, to examine these in detail, the suits do
not appear to me, from what I have read, to have any merit, and in
fact seem to be motivated, as I said, by an effort simply to prevent
the use of Linux for competitive reasons.
There is, unfortunately, a very limited role for Congress here. I
agree with those who would like to see us "stop SCO from punishing
innocent consumers to inflate its other legal claims." But under our
separation of powers doctrine, Congress has no role whatsoever to play
in the pursuit of particular cases. We can pass laws which prevent
certain types of suits from being brought, but it is very, very
difficult to pass those in a way that would be retroactive - that is,
that would apply to existing suits. And the problem with this suit is
not that it is of a sort of legal claim that is inappropriate to
bring, but that it is totally unjustified on the merits. In other
words, the remedy here is for these suits to be dismissed on their
merits and Congress has no role, as I have said, in doing that.
I am prepared to join in expressions of extreme disapproval of what
SCO is doing, and I will be consulting with my colleagues to see if
there is a movement to do that. I hope that will have some impact on
them. All of these lawsuits brought against individuals will of course
be dismissed but I realize that is of little consolation to people
who have had to go through the trouble and expense of defending against
them. It may be that at some point a judge will act decisively enough
in this regard to prevent this proliferation of suits, and while, as I
said, our Congressional role is very limited here, I will be
encouraging anything we can do along these lines.
Barney Frank