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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.
For $86 million Microsoft has created an enourmous amount of chaos. There is little doubt they will make their $86M back on additional because of the FUD the SCO crap has caused.
That doesn't make it any less sneaky, underhanded and evil though.
Hmmm... I have to agree. I can't recall (or find) an email that I have received from an exec, save for the tech exec I used to work for, that did not have spelling errors.
The tech exec knew where the spell checker was and he used it.
Atomic batteries to power! Turbines to speed!
For 86 Million USD, I'd act like a total jackass, too. Not many people wouldn't. I don't know SCO's legal history before this whole thing started. It might be because they never did anything this assinine. 86 million USD would more than justify why they are doing it, esp. if they were on the verge of dying.
Anyone got another 86 Million USD to make them shut up?
My question then, is what happens now? Is it possible to use this as evidence in a lawsuit? Is it possible to get it confirmed by subpoenia-ing (?) the original, and if so how quick?
What exact crime has been committed here, if any, and what are the possible punishments, again if Microsoft are actually doing anything illegal.
It's got to be consipiracy theory BS. Patenting IPX? give me a break. Also it says that SCOs main earner will be MS... seems unlikely given their track to date... So far MS seem to be getting very poor value for money, no evidence that the SCO campaign is in any way helping MS or even that it will.
I call BS on the whole article.
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." (attrib. Joseph Stalin)
The document below was emailed to me by an anonymous whistleblower inside SCO. He tells me the typos and syntax bobbles were in the original.
Wave bye-bye to the nice whistleblower. I bet the 'typos and syntax bobbles' are part of a document tracking system. SCO will know who released this.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
If the discovery process yields the original email, Microsoft is fucked.
ESR wasn't very smart. He shouldn't have published this YET.
Give IT to IBM lawyers so they know what to look for and when they are fairly certain that they have it among their discovery material, THEN publish it.
SCO's going to be shredding and I hear their email server *just* crashed and its hard drives are going to have to be replaced. All of the archive tapes have suddenly gone bad too.
This *could* have been the bomb but ESR probably blew it by speaking a little too soon.
Mods: Please mod the previous comment down and let this one replace it.
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
There are several things wrong here. First, it was already known that Baystar invested in SCO to the tune of around $55m. The memo says Microsoft brought in $86m INCLUDING baystar, so other monies from Microsoft or Microsoft related referrals would only be $31m. And we know microsoft bought a SCO license, which was a good bit of that.
I can believe that Microsoft gave $100 million to SCO. I think both Microsoft and SCO should burn in hell.
But I don't buy the memo. There are just too many "carefully placed" typos. It looks like someone engineered typos to make it LOOK authentic, but something about it's just a bit too intentional and obvious looking.
Is it really 'unfair'? One company says they have a valid and legal way to take out the competition... why not fork over some cash to help them out?
Honestly, if Red Hat says they have proof that MS was using copyright code from one of its properitary dlls, and IBM gave them a boatload of cash to help out, would it be 'unfair'?
Always reverse the situation before you guys go foaming at the mouth!
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Now, if you are going to condemn it in this case you also need to condemn it when one of "the big guys" comes to the rescue of something that *you* like.
Well said!
This is business for good or bad, it all depends on what side of the line you are on in the situation at at hand
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
But you do have a valid point about the "them and us" aspect. If someone condemns Microsoft for this, then by rights they should also condemn IBM if they were to, say invest $100m in an anti-MS smear campaign. Not that that would ever happen - IBM still has a policy of never smearing a competitor as far as I am aware... ;)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Wait, are you being sarcastic? I can't tell.
And if you're not, exactly how would ESR go about doing that, hmm? If he knows the identity of whoever leaked it, he would have to reveal that in court. As far as I know, the source is anonymous. Is it possible to go to the investors and get the numbers on how much was contributed? Is that knowledge even public yet?
Join Tor today!
According to the Register article, Mike Anderer is from S2 Strategic Consulting.
I see myself as a sceptic, but on the other hand...
>Patenting IPX? give me a break.
Would you categorize this as more or less preposterous compared to the statements "There are millions of literal lines of System V copied into linux" and "We own the UNIX operating system"?
Belief is the currency of delusion.
This may have makings of a whole story of it's own, and it may have been previosly reported.
Scroll to the bottome of this page and you will see sco's logo! Why? Is this some sort of mistake or does the page have some sort of time travel cgi written into it?
Or better yet, does this blow Sco's whole case out of the water?
I distinctly remember being very surprised by some information I got in my Michigan law class.
The examples were "based on real cases."
A thief broke into a home and found a meth lab, and reported it to the police.
Another thief robbed a home, and later found what turned out to be murder evidence among his stollen goods. He reported it to the police.
In both cases, the evidence obtained by the thief was admitted into the trial.
I know this holds true in Michigan, and at the time the book stated that this was true in "Most US states." No clue about Federal court.
It was even mentioned that sometimes cops will make a deal with a known burglar to break in and retrieve evidence for them. So long as it never becomes known that the thief was asked or told to do this by the cops, then all is well. If it comes out that an officer of the law encouraged the activity, then the evidence will not be admissible. (The law course didn't tell us what would happen to a cop who encouraged such activity)
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
First off:
1) There is no real tangible evidence that it is a real memo, and not just shock press with no backing
BUT
2) If it is true, it would be intresting to see if there is a correlation between those sued companies like crysler if they have recently cut big ties to MS in favour of linux.
My 2 cents
Well, if you buy the stock, SCO doesn't get the money, the stockholders do. SCO needs the money to fund its lawsuit.
The real point though, is that MS doesn't want to own them. If MS or an MS owned subsidiary was claiming rights to IP in Linux, everyone would be screaming "Monopoly, Monopoly, Anti-Trust!". Personally, I'll doubt the veracity of this memo until it is turned up in court by a subpoena, but the reason these rumours persist is that funding this under the table would be an ideal position for MS. They get to chill the Linux market without looking like the bad guys.
BTW, Baystar got a 17.5% ownership stake in SCO for its $50M investment so they actually did buy a part of the company, not give the money away.
At my former job (got laid off), I used to print all of my documents on the laser near the accounting/legal group. My explanation was that "it's the only printer that has legal-size paper in it." Good stuff for engineering spreadsheets, schematics, and code listings.
... again ..."
Of course, there were ample opportunities to "accidentally" read someone else's prints that had gotten mixed-in with mine. Hyu-mons are predictably lazy - you can learn a great deal if your timing is right. It also helps if you use the adjacent copier (i.e. large flat surface) to sort out the prints. "Oops, accidentally hit the copy button
ESR has a long history of releasing internal memos from Microsoft (and others) that are verified to be genuine. Heck, this is his tenth "Halloween" memo with no hoaxes yet.
It might be time for you to rethink who the zealot is. Just because you don't like ESR's politics doesn't mean that he isn't an excellent source of information.
I read somewhere about a quote from someone at Microsoft about competition. Something to the effect of just having to wound the competition and apply pressure and wait while they bleed to death.
Micosoft has money to burn. Don't doubt for a minute that they will fund something for years and years without getting a return. Just consider the return from every other business division except windows and word - they all loose money on the order of tens to hundreds of millions of dollars every year.
They can keep pushing into new areas by dint of mass and money. Put up a new product. Prop it up for years and wait for the competition to get tired or make a mistake. They have nothing to loose.
Linux is the number one threat to Microsoft on just about every front - servers, embedded devices, maybe phones with Motorola and others, maybe the desktop in a couple years if Sun can others can get thier sh*t together.
Micosoft has spent more money on stupider things.
Ethics are very important in busyness. Let's talk about Enron etc. In the long run it is a good policy to be honorable. You can be aggresive and honorable. It is not dificult. And, I want to make business I want an honorable partner. Otherwise I won't be able to sleep. Not becouse morals dilemas but becouse he can damage my interest from the simple capitalistic point of view
If that's the case, why go through a third party anonymously.
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
Found this doing a little Googling.
Wonder if this is "the" Mike Anderer?
"It's hard to find a large corporation interested in it. Anybody with any scars in this business doesn't want to be the first to do anything," commented Mike Anderer (emphasis mine), vice president of systems integration at Ikon Office Solutions, a large international integrator. "Right now it's kind of a manufacturing and standards war. In a year or two it might be a viable product."
Was found in this story:
http://news.com.com/2100-1001_3-200420.html
If it is "the" Mike Anderer from the e-mail, funny that Mike would have been part of Ikon, which I believe is the company Darl McBride worked at, sometime before SCO, which he sued and won some settlement for.
-Hope
As ESr points out himself on the site - let the lawyers subpoena the mail, then we will all know if it is true or not.... anyway, truth is subjective at best, and the real question is "what does it matter?" nobody needs *proof* that MS hates Linux/OSS, and what difference does it make that SCO got backed for 10 mil or 100 mil? We all know that they are in the endgame right now, and from where I am standing the whole SCO case has not done much to damage my considerable Linux business. If anything, it did Linux some good - it got a lot of people asking that otherwise would not have cared, and people asking is always a great opportunity to evangalise.
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
Why do most slashdotters assume that just b/c you have an MBA you must be some evil hell bent individual? Because we've actually met and worked with MBAs long enough to get to really know them, and have found few that don't fit this stereotype? Like the guy that sat on his ass for a year drawing a six figure salary because "you don't have a product for me to sell yet." Or the ex-IBM manager that thought forcing all the Unix programmers out and replacing them with kids fresh out of school at lower wages was the best way to get a product out the door, because after all people are just replacable pieces like machine tools, right? Or the guy who spent all his time hitting on the cute programmer 20 years his junior in the cubicle next to mine (yes, he was married). Or the guy whose idea of making a requirements document was to look at every competitors product, then insist that we implement the union of all our competitor's features... this same guy took code where somebody had busted his ass to meet his spec in the shortest time possible, and when it was given to him said "we've changed our mind, do it this way instead..." Three times in a row. For the same feature. Yep, we've got a low opinion of MBAs 'cause we've actually known some of them... which is not to say that their all bad.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Hey, who called MBA's evil? I just said semi-mockingly that they have a secret, or at least get exposed to a taboo: that enhancing shareholder value is the foundation of any ethics at a publicly-held company. Or haven't you got to that stage of synthesizing your studies yet?
I myself have worked for a variety of ethically-conscious corporations: but they've been either private or not-for-profit corporations, so that gave me some perspective on the range of dilemmas. The publicly held companies I've worked for realized shareholder value at the expense of good global citizenship, virtual individuals [without the full range of responsibility of a meat individual, and pathological liars to boot] run by some really nice people, who act like assholes when making business decisions.
You'll see. It's easier to convince yourself that you're not being an asshole if you don't consider the full impact of your decisions and actions.
Damn those pesky terrorists
Just take note that M$ has a lot of "Partners" it can twist arms on to cause this money to appear to be from somewhere else. This behavior is an Empire that is collapsing!
For the "Free Trade" and "Capitalist" arguments out there. This isn't either. It is pure and simple Investment FRAUD. Investors are not getting paid, and the money is being spent to acquire power. This also brings up another falacy of the "Free Trade" and"Capitalist" arguments. Bluntly the super rich will spend any money they have to keep or acquire POWER. Money is not their object. You cannot entice them by better earnings or a freer richer world to make money in. They want CONTROL!
By the way I am a capitalist! I believe in the principal that investors should get paid for their investment. The problem with the American Economy right now is that Investors are not getting paid and it is hurting everything! Until we break the CONTROL Freaks in the board rooms of America of their control, nothing is going to get better for the Capitalists!
Sorry for the previous post but this is the Standard Operational Procedure(SOP) for MOST American Businesses at this time.
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
No, I believe that it is in the public interest that we hold all companies to legal standards and that those standards, by necessity, should be higher for monopolies. However, I think that it is obvious that some companies, like Enron, are completely out of control with no regard for law or business ethics, while others, like Baxter Healthcare and 3M are responsible actors. You have to admit that just because GM sued Ford buyers in 1903 does not make it plausible that they would do so today, even in secret by proxy. If MS did pay SCO to sue Linux users, it is an extreme case. Although IANAL, I would be shocked if it were legal
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
Well after thinking about it, isn't Services for Unix (which is now free of charge) falling upon SCO's IP licensing program? If that's the case, could the 86M$ be licensing fee SCO charged Microsoft?
There is a very interesting document around on this subject. Basically, if this was UNIX licensing money then SCO has to pass it on to Novell, who subsequently give SCO their 5% collection fee. It appears in SCO's financial filings as a sort of loan, IIRC
I haven't looked at Microsoft's SFU since it's been called by that name, but their product 'Interix' which preceeded it (a purchase from Softway Systems) even came bundled with the GNU C Compiler.
Yes, that's right. Microsoft shipped a product with GCC in it. I purchased a copy at a previous employer. It's superior to Cygwin in many regards, as it's an entire new POSIX subsystem, not a kludge that rides on top of Win32, which is what Cygwin amounts to.
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Funding to SCO by MS could be made in one of two ways: 1) Through contracts for services; or 2) Capital investment. Either way it appears to me that SCO and perhaps MS would have a problem, if in fact this email is verified
If payment is through services agreements, there is a GAAP (Generally accepted accounting principle) requirement for disclosure that you are reliant on a third party where that third party is supplying a substantive proportion of your revenues. Even if several different parties provided revenues to SCO, if the executives at SCO knew it was solely due to MS and where therefor reliant on MS, disclosure would be required.
If the source of funding was through capital invesment in SCO, there would be a required disclosure in the Company's 10K or 10Q MD&A, since it would appear they are dependant upon this source of funding to carry on with their business. The amount of funding is not insignificant and certainly material.
Furthermore, a hidden MS investment of this signficance, without disclosure, would have manipulated the market price. This would hold MS and SCO open to SEC related lawsuits
If this turns out to be true, lawyers and the SEC are going to have a field day at SCO and MS's expense
Please remember that SCO has been battling the Linux community as well, not just IBM. Has it occured to anyone that SCO could have willfully released this fake through a proxy to get your panties in a wad?
/. crowd spinning about something relatively benign and fuels their paranoia. They MIGHT get another DDOS attack out of it, which Darl will use as a mia culpa in his next speech about how evil the linux community is and how SCO needs to stop it.
What purpose would it serve? Well, for one thing, it might sidetrack IBM's lawyers a bit if they try to suponea it. It might give SCO some leverage in court. The corporate world might view it as a M$ endorsement of the suit, thus keeping SCO's stock afloat for just a few more weeks (remember they just announced a disasterous quarter). Finally, it gets the
Keep this in mind when reading this memo, and it starts to smell more like a fake sent out just to tweak us.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
I hereby propose that we Googlebomb the phrase "Microsoft Shill" to point to www.thescogroup.com.
EOL
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
If this turns out to be true its a pretty backlashing move of Microsoft. Microsoft had almost got rid of the bad taste of the antitrust case and now this. If anything it hordes the open source crowd togheter and opens a unified front, Anything But Microsoft. I presume MS is really involved in some stage cause frankly, what kind of license to unix did they need costing 10 mil? They hadnt any chance of buying a second license since that would have been to obvious. A third party like Baystar funding MS makes perfekt sence.
The halloween docs have all proven themselves on the spot from start and the indices all points towards MS. Why else would this suit have been such a big publicity stunt against linux wich have been a third party in all cases so far that SCO has been starting?
It just reekes of MS "business practices".
HTTP/1.1 400
The problem isn't that he met with big industry people. The problem is that he met ONLY with big industry people and shut every other voice out. If you weren't big business, you had no say whatsoever in energy policy. So if you had concerns with pollution controls, etc, you were shut out.
Then they kept all records of this meeting secret, so no one else can even see what they talked about, even though court after court has said that the documents MUST be public under the Freedom of Information act (it's going before the Supreme Court...if you've missed the articles about Cheney taking a supreme court justice out for a nice long weekend trip right before his court case comes before that justice, you should really read something besides the conservative media.)
Evan Reynolds evanthx@hotmail.com
Two peanuts crossed the street. One was assaulted.
The latest issue of the Economist (registration required for some articles, but not this one) has a news item on the SCO lawsuits that calls SCO "a pariah firm in the software industry". I found this interesting, as past coverage by the Economist had been relatively sympathetic to them.