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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!
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.
According to the Register article, Mike Anderer is from S2 Strategic Consulting.
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.
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
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.
Yeah, that'd be real smart. Then they have a hostile witness that's willing to testify that he/she got fired for distributing a document that SCO failed to provide to IBM or Red Hat or Novell for discovery.
Or, I suppose, they can fire the person, provide a copy to the various lawyers, possibly get an nice friendly SEC visit, and generally piss off everyone that might have been involved in pushing money at them.
The only thing they can safely do is deny the whole thing... Eric's lost enough credibility lately that it might actually fly. Heck, I wouldn't be too surprised if it's just someone trolling him... It's really about time.
c.
Log in or piss off.
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.
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
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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