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Leaked Memo Says Microsoft Raised $86 million for SCO
badzilla and numerous others wrote in with this: "Eric S. Raymond's Open Source site has a new Halloween memo. The Halloween X memo, which ESR says he received by email from an anonymous whistleblower inside SCO, appears to confirm Microsoft's alleged funding of SCO's anti-Linux initiative. And the actual dollar amounts are much larger than previously rumored!" The consultant is discussing his fee for bringing in this business, in the first few lines of the email.
...is probably Richard Emerson.
> IBM still has a policy of never smearing a competitor as far as I am aware... ;)
lol, you make them sound so fluffy
IBM's founder spent time in prison for his string arm dealings in the cash register business (smashing up stuff, dumping, threatening).
He was awarded Nazi Germany's highest honour for a foriegner for leasing Holleriths and programmers to the Third Riech (they didn't run 10million+ slave workers with pencil & paper).
The story is an interesting read. Especially with regard to personal data & the unseen hand.
I wonder what a happened in this lawsuit.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Please!
The site is not slashdotted. The text you copied is annotated with ESRs remarks in green. But the green tags were lost when you copied the text into this reply. So your text is complete gibberish! The original mail and ESRs comments are mixed up.
Please mod down!
)9TSS
According to the SCO 10-K to which ESR linked, Anderer signed an agreement between SCO and S2 Strategic Consulting (his company) on August 4, 2003. Assuming the parent poster believes what he wrote, Anderer probably left SCO in June to continue performing the same functions as an independent contractor.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
Details of SCO claim against AutoZone Authored by: inode_buddha on Wednesday, March 03 2004 @ 10:32 PM EST Right... I would *love* to see them try "All your algorithm are belong to us". Regarding the merit of the actual cases vs public opinion, I would like to remind SCO that your words both in and out of court are and will be compared to your actions. Questions of good faith vs bad faith, and corporate ethics are fair game when one acts and speaks publicly. As an individual I take pains to ensure that my actions and words correspond in such a way that my integrity is difficult to question; people are often shocked to discover that I was telling the truth. As a fictitious person in the form of a corporation, companies including SCO should do likewise. IMHO this is a poor reflection on our society, that truthfulness is not automatically given nor assumed. I take at face value and I give at face value. I expect all my relationships, both business and personal to be likewise, else those relationships are terminated with extreme prejudice. To apply that concept to computing and legal disputes, I've never met a computer that you can BS. It will have bugs and give errors if you try it. Groklaw exists in order to debug the legal system If anyone wants to accuse groklaw of shady dealings or duplicity at any time, please refer them to this post and quote me on it. --- "Truly, if Te is strong in one, all one needs to do is sit on one's ass, and the corpse of one's enemy shall be carried past shortly." (seen on USENET)
Newsome broke this last night about midnight EST on #groklaw, about the new Halloween doc and I had serious doubts whether it should be posted at all until it was verified.
C|N>K
Thirty NCR executives were found guilty in that decision, which was subsequently overturned. See this Fortune article for an overview. As far as I can tell, T.J. Watson never served a day.
Oh, and while T.J. arguably founded the modern IBM, the company had existed for years before T.J. got there as the "Computer Tabulating Recording Company". CTR was itself a derivative of Herman Hollerith's Tabulating Machine Company, founded in 1896.
Microsoft themselves confirmed the authenticity of at least the first halloween memo.
"The Milliard Gargantubrain? A mere abacus - mention it not."
>big well funded companies like that tend to cover all their bases.
This is generally true, Microsoft does appear to contribute more to Replublicans, but that has shifted over time:
Of the nearly $1.2 million in PAC and soft money contributions Microsoft contributed between 1995 and 1998, 72 percent went to Republicans. But during the first 18 months of the 2000 election cycle, Microsoft, aware of the closeness of congressional races this fall, has upped its giving to Democrats. Of the $2.3 million Microsoft has given in PAC and soft money this election cycle, 55 percent has gone to Republicans
Microsoft spokesman Rick Miller told Roll Call that the company largely follows a "very basic business strategy to giving and that's a 60/40 approach - 60 percent to the party in the majority and 40 percent to the minority." Miller added, however, that while two years ago, Republicans were Microsoft's defenders, now the company is also seeing a number of Democrats take up its cause.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
Not that I'm saying the memo is real; I have no idea. I'm just considering your point.
I'm no fan of the Bush Administration, but they are right here. Outsourcing hurts the folks that get outsourced, but the rest of us win. The people that can do the job the cheapest get the job, the basic goods and services we use get cheaper, our standard of living goes up, etc. etc. Again, the person who loses a job is hurt, but it's often temporary. Because we all benefit from the individuals loss, we should support temporary benefits while that person changes careers.
From the Economist, Feb 19th 2004 (the India issue):
EARLIER this month, President George Bush's chief economic adviser, Gregory Mankiw, once Harvard's youngest tenured professor, attracted a storm of abuse. He told Congress that if a thing or a service could be produced more cheaply abroad, then Americans were better off importing it than producing it at home. As an example, Mr Mankiw uses the case of radiologists in India analysing the X-rays, sent via the internet, of American patients.
Mr Mankiw's proposition, in essence, is the law of comparative advantage, first postulated by David Ricardo two centuries ago and demonstrated to astonishing effect since. Yet the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, Dennis Hastert, joined Democrats in their rebuke of Mr Mankiw for approving of jobs going overseas; another Republican called for his resignation. The White House gave Mr Mankiw only lukewarm support -- unsurprisingly, since Mr Bush recently signed a bill forbidding the outsourcing of federal contracts overseas. And the Democratic presidential contenders? Mr Mankiw had just written their attack ads.
She uses the example of cheaper IT hardware, one of the main aspects of globalisation in the 1990s. Most of the drop in prices for PCs, mainframes and so on was caused by the relentless advance of technology; but she still thinks that trade and globalised production -- all those Dell Computer factories in China, for instance -- was responsible for 10-30% of the fall in hardware prices. These lower prices led to higher American productivity growth and added $230 billion of extra GDP between 1995 and 2002, equivalent to an extra 0.3 percentage points of growth a year.
These days, software spending is increasing at twice the rate of hardware spending, as businesses struggle to make their new computers work better. The manufacturing sector is where such integration has gone furthest. In many other parts of the American economy, the process has barely begun -- particularly among smaller- and medium-sized businesses. Mr Mankiw's example of the Indian radiologist shows how the internet could help lower costs and raise productivity in health care. Who would object to that?
I'd add more, but the Economist doesn't have a free online site. If you don't mind paying $2.95, you can read the whole article. Or, you can find someone who doesn't mind putting the whole article on the web.
A great book for learning basic economics is Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science by Charles Wheelan. And, of course, a subscription to the Economist can't hurt.
It's painful to see outsourcing move from the manufacturing sector to the service sector, but we're better off because of it. Keep your skills up-to-date folks, and think about those management jobs.
Sorry, but have you been following this story since it first broke - years ago, when ESR was given the original Halloween Documents? Do you realise what MS feel is at stake here, and how far they are willing to go?
This is a no compromise situation. If $86 million is a lot of money to you in this situation, then how do you feel about $5 BILLION? For that is what MS expended on Internet Explorer, not to make it best of breed, but just to make it good enough, so that with all their other shady dealings, they could drive Netscape out of the market. And they never even once considered selling IE. Those $5 billion were a drop in the ocean to them.
Get a grip!
include $sig;
1;
This is how it worked:
Just like in the SCO case, MS was using their Financing arm to do anti-competitive business transactions. Manipulating enemies through innocent-looking cash movements and investments while supplying cash, information and most importantly *connections* to henchmen willing to do the dirty deeds (Vector, Baystar...). IIRC there was indeed a MS connection to BayStar as well. Paul Allen as an investor?
Microsoft won't stop this sort of anti-competitive clandestine operations until authorities have thoroughly investigated what is going on within their shadowy Corporate Development and Strategy (incl. Rich Emerson and Robert Uhlaner) unit and how favors and sensitive business information gets passed around within the infamous Microsoft Old Boys' Alumni network.
Starting in 1922, General Motors bought up many of the nation's
electric urban and interurban light rail systems, including
the excellent streetcars that served Los Angeles, converted them
to internal combustion engines, and deliberately managed them into failure.
Before this time, good electric streetcars made an automobile
unneccessary in many urban areas.
See http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/4518
Wait a minute. Didn't I say that on the other side of the record? I'd better check
From the web page: "Post-Postscript: According to Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of CNET, SCO confirmed today (04 March) that this memo is legitimate."
"Post-Postscript: According to Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of CNET, SCO confirmed today (04 March) that this memo is legitimate." reads the end of the article linked. Perhaps...
I haven't posted in so long, my sig is out of date.