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SCO Ordered to Produce Evidence
harmless_mammal and others wrote in with news from the SCO-IBM hearing in Utah today - apparently the judge has ordered SCO to respond to IBM's discovery requests within 30 days. IBM is asking SCO to tell IBM precisely what code it is alleging is infringing, and to date SCO has failed to show any evidence whatsoever. Some reports from the hearing are at Groklaw, which is already slow under the load. If SCO continues to fail to produce the evidence they've claimed they have, the judge will likely be very displeased, perhaps dismissing the lawsuit entirely.
IBM was extremely precise on what specificity means. By granting the motion, the judge also agreed to their definition of specificity. By bulshittin they will contempt the court and this is not a wise thing to do. Not that MSFT did not do that for several years for example.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Against a legitimate plaintiff, that'd be the end of it.
This is SCO we're talking about. They make demonstrably false statements. Their press releases are full of self-contradictions. They haven't shown one whit of givashitness for the facts up to this point, what on earth makes you think they'll actually comply with a judge's order?
True enough, but they may determine that the cost of litigating SCO into the ground is worth making it crystal clear that they don't put up with this kind of thing. A quick settlement, while not as expensive right now, wouldn't entirely close the book on 'is Linux a safe choice for my business?' Seeing as Linux is big business for IBM, they may decide to go for the easy kill now and avoid problems from someone else later...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
> If IBM doesn't think it's a good investment, IBM probably won't push it.
I completely agree, but it might be in IBM's best interest to discourage future lawsuits of this sort. I don't think they'd keep the countersuit out of revenge, I think they'd keep it so this sort of thing is less likely to happen in the future. I suppose it could be a double-edged sword if the GPL is ruled against, however. Even if the future lawsuit wasn't again them, they do have enough of a stake to want to prevent future FUD.
We don't need another SCO.
I started out thinking about all the ways that I could demolish his argument (not terribly hard), when the thought suddenly occurred to me that, in a sense, that was exactly what SCO wanted.
Let's use a little common sense on the whole SCO thing.
First off, toss out a couple of emotionally popular but rather unlikely theories:
1) Darl McBride is insane, in the medical, legally-incompetent sense of the word. If he was, the rest of SCO and the Canopy Group would have shut him down a long time ago. Similar reasoning applies for "unbelievably stupid", "totally ignorant" and similar epithets.
2) #1 is true, but for everybody in SCO and Canopy, not just Darl, which is why he's still there. Ok, c'mon. If you're that out of touch with reality, talk to your doctor about upping the dosage on the little green pills.
A common allegation is that Darl McBride is a greedy money-grubber with the morals of an advertising exec. This is probably true, but in America, at least, being greedy on behalf of your company is not only not frowned on, it is (somewhat) required by law. (There is a SEC regulation that requires all publicly-owned corporations to try and maximize the value of their stock. Since it says nothing about HOW that's to be done, the range of tactics is pretty wide. You won't find any American corporations saying "We gave away all our profits, 'cause we felt like being nice guys", though.)
SCO's basic strategy is obvious: Fire the shotgun everywhere possible, as often as possible, and see what sticks. I saw an article the other day that said the software business in 2004 was predicted to be about $230 billion. If SCO can get 1/10 of 1% of that, they'd be ecstatic.
Another characteristic that McBride has, he shares with lawyers, politicians, and most high-powered types in business: a thick skin. I very much doubt he has been bothered in the least by the various vilifications called down on him by his detractors.
I think he was a bit surprised at it when it first started, but since then, it's been more of a weapon in his arsenal than anything else. If he is not bothered by name-calling and accusations, but the other side (the open source community, in general terms) is, then the more furious the argument, the better his odds of being able to find a weak point and exploit it somehow. At the very least, he (and SCO) can point at all the ranters and ravers and claim "With enemies that act like THAT, doesn't it make sense that we're the ones in the right?" (Something along these lines may be what got the money out of Baystar.)
If you're caught up in a strong emotion, you're not entirely sane. If you're angry, all kinds of little things you would ordinarily blow off make you even angrier. If you're ecstatically happy, you can find a silver lining in a mushroom cloud.
The reason I brought up politicians, lawyers, and CEOs earlier is that they all have one thing in common. I called it a "thick skin" earlier. Another way to describe it is that they have the ability to climb out of their emotions and think rationally again about whatever the subject is. That ability is what gets them paid the big bucks.
So what I think SCO is doing with a lot of the more unbelievable claims they've made (like the attack on the GPL last night) is not to seriously convince anyone of that position, it's to stir up trouble. The more emotional the opposition gets, the better the odds that something, anything, will happen that he (they) can exploit. It goes with the shotgun approach: the more you get things stirred up, the more targets of opportunity there are.
Fortunately for IBM, they have good lawyers, who haven't been influenced in any way they shouldn't be by the public furor. They simply stuck to the facts and the law. My favorite element of what they've been saying is that it's mostly in plain English. When one side speaks English and the other sid
If you take a look at SCOX intra-day price movement over the last months you can see someone is "painting" the stock or propping the price up with carefully timed buy and sells at the open and close. SCOX tends to go down slightly overnight, bounce back right after open,maybe edge up a bit, then flat to down, if the stock is down enough someone dumps in a buy order in the last 30 minutes and since there are less sell orders at the end of the day the price bounces back due to "demand" for the stock. If I recall my MBA Finance class this is clearly illegal if done by the brokerage firms who own/sell SCOX, an individual could do it but they would have to own massive amounts of shares and have excellent market timing. It took 60K share today in the last hour to bring the price back to just below where it started, and the broader market was 1.5% on the NASDAQ. This stock must be on the radar screen of the SEC and they are just waiting to grab someone when the whole thing collapses.