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MS Word File Reveals Changes to SCO's Plans
jfruhlinger writes "Ah, the joys of 'track changes' in MS Word: metadata in a document obtained by Cnet reveals some earlier plans by SCO's legal team. Among them: to sue in February (their original target date), to sue Bank of America, to 'impound ... all Linux software products in the custody or control of Defendant through the pendency of these proceedings', and to accuse in court 'Linus Torvalds and/or others' of 'inclusion into one or more distributions of Linux with the copyright management information intentionally removed.' Good stuff." Also, SCO has announced a few new licensees including Computer Associates.
FYI... here's a free app that removes MS Word metadata (useful for sensitive docs for distribution)
http://www.docscrubber.com/download.html
-fren
"Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?"
it's called caldera. if you werent a poor AC you could use it to hide all these stories.
They do. And they have a spellchecker too. Look at slash.
This particular story was not offered up for pre-release viewing.
__________________
Supposedly there's a horde of paying Slashdot readers who get to see the article early in order to "proofread" it, in order to prevent these sorts of mishaps...
Clearly, those people are either stupid, or were denied their coffee fix this morning...
/. finds me to be 20% Troll, 80% Funny
At the confernce call they said
that "over half" had given no
reply.
So somewhere between 50% and 100%
of the demand letters they sent
out went unanswered.
This big license deal spree came out this week, but the recently released earnings only reflects the 3 months that ended with the end of January. Therefore, that $20k statistic likely doesn't include any of the recently announced deals, that'll be in next quarter's release.
I did report it the editor on duty and it was not fixed.
I don't drink coffee.
Office XP/2003 Remove Hidden Data Tool
CTRL-A
CTRL-C
CTRL-N
CTRL-V
CTRL-S
supply new file name and hit
Phew, that was tough.
"This particular story was not offered up for pre-release viewing."
Yes, there was. And I DID e-mail the editors.
KARMA TAG! You're it.
On March 4th SCO, within 24 hours of publication, I received word from Steven J. Vaughan at eWEEK.com that SCO had confirmed that the memo is legitimate.
I'm willing to bet that BOA has a few more servers lurking around... I could be wrong but I'll put a buck on it.
"Windows Me offers tremendous reliability and stability improvements..." -- Paul Thurott
No relationship there.
Name: web.kkklan.com
Address: 198.77.57.132
ABCS ONLINE ABCS-52-13 (NET-198-77-52-0-1) 198.77.52.0 - 198.77.61.255
OrgName: ABCS ONLINE
OrgID: ABCS
Address: 2700 South 25th Street
City: Terre Haute
StateProv: IN
PostalCode: 47802
Country: US
NetRange: 198.77.52.0 - 198.77.61.255
CIDR: 198.77.52.0/22, 198.77.56.0/22, 198.77.60.0/23
NetName: ABCS-52-13
NetHandle: NET-198-77-52-0-1
Parent: NET-198-76-0-0-1
NetType: Reassigned
Comment:
RegDate: 2002-08-14
Updated: 2002-08-14
TechHandle: MC1728-ARIN
TechName: Cialdella, Matthew
TechPhone: +1-812-232-1208
TechEmail: matthewc@abcs.com
The seven cents SCOX gained today are nothing compared with the nearly $2 it lost yesterday.
Where did you read this??? So far, no one outside of the U.S. has been paying their license fees.
Ironically, UC Berkeley is also going to be a licensee!!
Why? I thought edu's were exempt. I called SCO numerous times telling them I owed them about $1mil for them to send me a bill, and they never did. I too am from an educational institution and will not pay them 1 cent until they can 1) give me something to license 2) support said product. Plus, RH will back me for legal issues if they sent me a bill.
I have paid for linux in the past and will do it again. I would even pay SCO if they had something to sell.
(Sorry for the anonymous post... none of this is confidential but I'd still like to keep my name separate from it...)
1. We use AIX. Heavily. Like most banks do.
2. We're rolling out Linux right now. I'm personally involved in this deployment, and we have made a big deal out of it, going as far as making a presentation at the last LWE about our Linux plans.
In an interview on Wednesday, SCO's CFO confirmed that the three companies were licensees, and claimed that his company had now signed up somewhere between 10 and 50 IP License for Linux customers. ...
I listened (sp?) in on the teleconference and that exchange was the most interesting. The CFO was asked "How many companies have licensed SCO's intellectual property?" And he stuttered and said a few and growing, or something to that affect. He was then asked "Well, how many is a few?" And he came back with "A handful". Then he was asked "How many is a handful?" and finally answered "Less than 50".
This is from memory, but it went something like that. Pretty evasive speach for a CFO IMHO.
Acrobat is a product, not a format. Portable Document Format (PDF) is what you mean.
Definately not. http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=kkk.com
Almost all of their machines are *nix, and in violation of SCOs 'intellectual property'.
Informatus Technologicus
FWIW, the BOFA branch I walk by every day is running W2K on their desktops. Not that it matters, because they are basically using them as dumbterms.
The use of Tracking Changes magically becomes "another example of security breaches?"
Turn off the damn tracking changes. Or strip them using Microsoft's free tool.
Why in the hell was this modded up as insightful? What insight does it gleam?
> They are not some litte ISP.
You almost had me agreeing with you until this line. They are one of the biggest providers of discounted rack servers on the planet. NetCraft apparently knows about them too, and had an interview with Marsh before this whole thing happened. They host a lot of boxes and just got done building a second data center.
The people in question need to be fired immediately. They will bring ruin on your company.
Plus, RH will back me for legal issues if they sent me a bill.
Uh, don't be so sure about that. RH dug their heels in the ground and told us in no uncertain terms "no way" when we asked for indemnification against SCO suing us (a community college district) for using RH in our RedHat Academy.
"Blake Stowell, SCO's director of communications, acknowledged that the leaked memo is real." -- eweek
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Since you brought up Microsoft and EV1...
There is a Case Study on Microsoft's web site here. This discusses the addition of several Windows-based servers to their Linux environment.
So, are they bed buddies? You bet.
-m.
CA Says It Didn't Pay SCO No Stinking Linux Tax
The Linux faithful have been hammering Computer Associates as a heretic since the British publication Computer Weekly quoting the SCO Group's CFO Bob Bench identified CA Thursday as one of SCO's rare Linux licensees.
CA senior VP of product development Mark Barrenechea says that Bench's claim is nonsense. CA has not paid SCO any Linux taxes, he said.
Drawing up short of calling SCO a liar, Barrenechea claims that SCO has twisted a $40 million breach-of-contract settlement that CA paid last summer to the Canopy Group, SCO's biggest stockholder, and Center 7, another Canopy company, and has turned it into a purported Linux license.
As a "small part" of that settlement, Barrenechea said, CA got a bunch of UnixWare licenses that it needed to support its UnixWare customers. SCO, he said, had just attached a transparent Linux indemnification to all UnixWare licenses and that is how SCO comes off calling CA a Linux licensee.
But when CA agreed to that settlement, Barrenechea said, "It was not CA's intention to become a Linux licensee. It has nothing to do with CA's product direction or strategic direction," he said.
CA has absolutely no sympathy for what SCO is doing, Barrenechea said, and in fact, he said, reading from a formal statement, it stands in "stark disagreement with SCO's tactics and threats."
Barrenechea and CA's Linux chief Sam Greenblatt are worried that CA will be tarred with the SCO brush and that CA's considerable Linux ambitions will be damaged by a disaffected, if not hostile, open source community when in reality CA has "nothing to do with SCO's strategy and tactics," they said.
CA was the mystery company SCO was thinking of when it announced last August that an unidentified Fortune 500 company had supposedly become a Linux license. SCO privately described the deal as "significant."
CA couldn't disassociate itself from the rumors that identified it as that licensee because of an NDA that the Canopy side had insisted on hedging in the $40 million settlement with, Barrenechea and Greenblatt said.
Barrenechea said that SCO now regards that NDA as being off because of the legal discovery that's been going on in SCO's $5 billion suit against IBM.
See, SCO lawyer Mark Heisse in a letter dated February 4 to IBM lawyer David Marriott at Cravath Swain identified CA, Questar and Leggett & Platt as Linux taxpayers.
According to that letter, which is up on the Groklaw site, Heisse owed IBM a copy of the CA agreement on CD.
Barrenechea said that SCO was dropping CA's name to associate itself with the "third-largest software company in the world" and build support for its "lost cause."
But according to Barrenechea, not only are SCO's IP ambitions doomed, but its Unix interests are a "trailing negative" on the road to dropping from 10% of the market to 3%-5% in a few years and then "SCO will be irrelevant,"
he said.
By the way, CA doesn't have enough UnixWare licenses to cover all its Linux servers, Greenblatt said.
In answer to CA's contentions, SCO said its lawyers think that CA has a Linux license.
Meanwhile, Bench also told Computer Weekly, whose story was picked up by sister paper InfoWorld and maybe other properties in the IDG stable, that SCO had signed between 10 and 50 Linux licenses.
CA is where software products go, not to die, but to become UNDEAD software. The majority of their products would be better off with a stake in their heart. So, with all the undead walking around, why is it suprising that they are associating with SCO Vampires, which are, obviously, just as Undead.
It's inadmissible in most circumstances, that's a given. In the IBM suit, it's not germane to the case. In the AutoZone and DaimlerRambler cases, it might be of some significance, but not much.
As for the attorney-client violation, it may not be, actually. SCO has an internal legal department, so it very well could have been drafted there. It would fall under protected work product, just like any other legal notes.
Lawyers should not be providing editable documents like word files. Final format documents like PDF, or signed PDF would seem to be a lot better thing to be passing around legal documents.
PDF, especially Adobe's implementation, has its own problems. IANALBIHWFL (I am not a lawyer, but I have worked for lawers), in the places where I've worked, the rule was -- if someone wants a copy of something, there's a xerox machine in the corner, right next to the industral shredder. Both of those got quite a bit of work.
Disable Fast Saves in all of your MS Office preferences. Problem solved.
But keep a Mac and a copy fo Keynote around to rescue corrupted PowerPoint presentations.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
"We did agree to a one time payment" says marsh in your eweek link.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1542915,00.as p
details at http://blogs.cocoondev.org/dims/
CA Says It Didn't Pay SCO No Stinking Linux Tax...details at http://blogs.cocoondev.org/dims/
RH does not offer indemnifaction. They offer to defend you if you get sued.
The best way to support the US war effort is to continue buying American products.
Actually, the current Bank Of America is some southern outfit that bought the old BofA and took the name.
Funny how the SCO stuff started up about the same time as Gates & company started to target Linux.
.doc files the posted. A simple text editor was all that was need to pick out the information.
It is also humorous that the article points out another Microsoft flaw. Word has always had problems with keeping data in the file that no one wanted. It used to be a lot worse when Word docs included all data out to the end of the sector they were written to. I freaked out a couple of Windows users by posting information found in the
I guess this "feature" is useful for some people who need to track changes but the final document should be "clean" of all other information that was previously in that file. Perhaps Microsoft should add a "clean for distribution" command to Office. If not people may start to think twice about using Word and its features to release information to anyone. Makes using Adobe PDF files for document distribution look very, very good!
The word within CA is that the SCO claim is a lie. The following article is doing the rounds internally - it claims to have been published but I can't find it on the web, if I did I would provide a link instead...
CA Says It Didn't Pay SCO No Stinking Linux Tax
The Linux faithful have been hammering Computer Associates as a heretic since the British publication Computer Weekly quoting the SCO Group's CFO Bob Bench identified CA Thursday as one of SCO's rare Linux licensees.
CA senior VP of product development Mark Barrenechea says that Bench's claim is nonsense. CA has not paid SCO any Linux taxes, he said.
Drawing up short of calling SCO a liar, Barrenechea claims that SCO has twisted a $40 million breach-of-contract settlement that CA paid last summer to the Canopy Group, SCO's biggest stockholder, and Center 7, another Canopy company, and has turned it into a purported Linux license.
As a 'small part' of that settlement, Barrenechea said, CA got a bunch of UnixWare licenses that it needed to support its UnixWare customers. SCO, he said, had just attached a transparent Linux indemnification to all UnixWare licenses and that is how SCO comes off calling CA a Linux licensee.
But when CA agreed to that settlement, Barrenechea said, 'It was not CA's intention to become a Linux licensee. It has nothing to do with CA's product direction or strategic direction,' he said.
CA has absolutely no sympathy for what SCO is doing, Barrenechea said, and in fact, he said, reading from a formal statement, it stands in 'stark disagreement with SCO's tactics and threats.'
Barrenechea and CA's Linux chief Sam Greenblatt are worried that CA will be tarred with the SCO brush and that CA's considerable Linux ambitions will be damaged by a disaffected, if not hostile, open source community when in reality CA has 'nothing to do with SCO's strategy and tactics,' they said.
CA was the mystery company SCO was thinking of when it announced last August that an unidentified Fortune 500 company had supposedly become a Linux license. SCO privately described the deal as 'significant.'
CA couldn't disassociate itself from the rumors that identified it as that licensee because of an NDA that the Canopy side had insisted on hedging in the $40 million settlement with, Barrenechea and Greenblatt said.
Barrenechea said that SCO now regards that NDA as being off because of the legal discovery that's been going on in SCO's $5 billion suit against IBM.
See, SCO lawyer Mark Heisse in a letter dated February 4 to IBM lawyer David Marriott at Cravath Swain identified CA, Questar and Leggett & Platt as Linux taxpayers.
According to that letter, which is up on the Groklaw site, Heisse owed IBM a copy of the CA agreement on CD.
Barrenechea said that SCO was dropping CA's name to associate itself with the 'third-largest software company in the world' and build support for its 'lost cause.'
But according to Barrenechea, not only are SCO's IP ambitions doomed, but its Unix interests are a 'trailing negative' on the road to dropping from 10% of the market to 3%-5% in a few years and then 'SCO will be irrelevant,' he said.
By the way, CA doesn't have enough UnixWare licenses to cover all its Linux servers, Greenblatt said.
In answer to CA's contentions, SCO said its lawyers think that CA has a Linux license.
Meanwhile, Bench also told Computer Weekly, whose story was picked up by sister paper InfoWorld and maybe other properties in the IDG stable, that SCO had signed between 10 and 50 Linux licenses.
I actually bought into their InnoculateIT several years ago, again, since it advertised Windows/Linux/Mac compatibility. The system was advertised as being able to manage all my Linux and Windows systems from a Linux server.
..|..
The Windows version choked the start menu. I actually held the Start menu open on as server once out of disgust and frustration, thinking it would have to work eventually. Had to force/reboot the server. The Linux side was complete crap and the Mac version looked like it was MacOS7.x version. The only virus it could detect in MacOS 9.x was the test one included with it.
License this CA
sig mind freed
The statue of Brigham Young is facing directly south down the middle of Main Street, the north-south road that runs down the center of SLC. The temple and Key Bank are both to the west of Main Street. So the statue doesn't have his back directly to the temple and isn't stretching his arms directly toward the bank, but it's close enough that your comment made me smile.
Use Ctrl-C instead of ESC in Vim!
The statue you are referring to is a statue of Brigham Young, and he faces neither towards the temple nor towards the bank (US Bank I believe leases the Gateway West tower) but straight down Main Street.
Hmm, while there is no official statement from CA (yet), one of their senior architects in the web services group has to say a word or two in his blog regarding this matter:
'CA Says It didn't Pay SCO no stinking Linux tax', to use the blog entry's title.
Seems SCO spins it a bit differently from what really happened...
No. 1 is EV1Servers.net who announced SCO lied about how much they were paid (Microsoft is a fan of EV1)
(little did the CEO know when he made the deal that SCO planned to 'worth' him out of seven figures)
No. 2 is CompterAssociates who announced SCO lied about "linux licenses" which are really from an unrelated settlement
No. 3 is Leggett and Platt who shockingly is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000
No. 4 is Questar Gas who just wanted to get things over with and also runs Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) on Windows 2000
Make sure *you* are Legally Unencumbered(tm) by getting a SCOsores license
and don't forget to head over and sign your Clean Slate contract with the RIAA
SCO lies once more
Leggett & Platt was even clearer. "I have now talked to our people who handle our Linux systems and, at least at a corporate level, we have not bought such a licence from SCO Group," said the company's VP of human resources, John Hale. "To their knowledge they would not have an interest in doing so."