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SCO Consultant S2 Strategic Consulting In Depth
cdlu writes "Wondering about SCO's contractor S2? They're the people that wrote Halloween II and indemnified SCO... well, here's all you want to know about them from NewsForge." (NewsForge is part of OSDN.) Maybe not all you want to know, but enough for one day. Several readers also point out Bruce Perens' column on CNET today which reiterates the difficulty SCO faces in attempting to get past the clarification of license terms AT&T offered Unix licensees in 1985.
how it was able to raise so much money for a company that has had serious trouble selling its bread-and-butter products for months
to be backing completely away from the little Utah company as the heat in the kitchen gets hotter
What you smell cooking in the kitchen is usually what is served
Thank God. Finally a non-SCO story. Phew.
*wipes brow*
Free XBox, PS2
This is probably why S2's phone has been out of order "for several days".
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
We all know that is done done. SCO is done and if M$ doesn't cover their tracks they are done. I f you read Groklaw and I am sure many of you do SCO doesn't have a case.
Worst case scenario IBM actually put AIX code into Linux. SCO doesn't own the code. SCO doesn't have copyright on the code. It's even in dispute with novell if SCO can even sue IBM over this AIX code anyways. Worst case is they will get a few bucks from IBM. Linux will remained unchanged. Obviously this case hasn't killed the adoption of Linux by many corporations. So I am not worried. Hell, SCOX is starting to plummet regardless of what Crazy Press Releases SCO makes. Do you think Autozone and Chrysler are worried about SCO? Even a large company would have trouble with the plethora of lawsuits SCO is dealing with and there will be more when all is said and done.
Sleep easy slashdot No one is taking Linux from us.
It's all Politics
The more you dig into SCO, the more bovine feces you find. Some of these feces have a the distinct "redmond feces" smell, while other feces seem to have a vague odor of "corruption" and "bad legal advice". It's hard to tell the last 2 apart.
The fact is that Microsoft had dominated the software market because the identified who/what was the industry standard and they under cut their price, and/or provided the product free OR bought out the competitor and silently buried the product. With Linux - it becomes very hard to utilize this successful strategy. This article seems to point to the developing theory that MS has taken the low road. When you can't compete, sue (in thise case finance the suer, keeping pretty hands "clean").
In the end - this deserves more investigation. I'm still not convinced that this isn't just the most ellaborate pump and dump scheme yet devised.
AngryPeopleRule
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
What news are they reporting? It's not news when you whine about why phone numbers didn't work and why you could get in touch with attributions (Anderer, Sontag, etc.). It's not news when you start a paragraph with "That leaves us, for now, with a couple of major unanswered questions." News reporters answer questions; they don't ask them. And it's not news when your story is speckled with "imagine all the partnering," "Anderer appears to be" and "what you smell cooking in the kitchen is usually what is served."
Give me a break. I'm all for Linux advocacy, but let me know when you have some real news.
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
I guess you haven't read mainstream news lately. There are planty news articles that end with "The call to YYY from ZZZ company did not return the call.". Acording you your logic, most of the news stories out there would be "Conjecture and Hypothesis".
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
"And why does domain registration information for S2.com give the obviously false phone number 123-456-7890"
:)
:)
Indeed, why? I would think even SCO would be smart enough not to make an under-the-counter relationship with MS so blisteringly obvious.
IMHO, this means either of two things:
a) There is no under-the-counter conspiracy
b) SCO is smoking even more crack than we previously thought
I hate SCO as much as the next guy, but I would think that multi-billion dollar corporations would do a little better job covering their tracks.
Or perhaps not.
~psi42
Defenestrate Windows...
For once, this really is "real news". It removes the case from "David protecting his precious IP from Goliath" to MS trying, in their normal trustworthy way, to subvert Linux.
SCO has confirmed the memo is for real. If you look at the contract between S2 and SCO you can see that S2 was hired to:
advise SCO as to any potential financings, either debt or equity, and assist SCO in arranging a customary revolving credit agreement or other financing in connection with any Transaction;
And that is just a small part of the contract which is very wide ranging.
To suggest that this guy didn't know what was going on with the financing deals is just ludicrous...Give me a break.
So, this is important, it confirms what people suspected and frankly, it changes the entire nature of the case and SCOs accusations.
-- Free software on every PC on every desk
Since the release of Halloween X... the SCO and Microsoft "development" has been increasingly sounding like a massive conspiracy that has been in the works for at least several years.
Did Mr. Anderers, Darl McBride and the other conspirators originally meet with Microsoft Agents while working at IKON when they hatched their plan?
Was Silicon Stemcell created merely as a front to allow the conspirators to plan and work in secret? If not, then why is all that can be found out about Silicon Stemcell is that "may have moved again or gone out of business"? Was Silicon Stemcell actually just cast aside when their secret plot was ready to launch?
Did Darl McBride position himself to become CEO of SCO merely to carry out the plot, planned years ahead of time? If not, then how is the connection between McBridge and Anderers at IKON explained?
Was S2 also created as a front, to allow Mr. Anderers and the other conspirators into the front door that McBride had opened? If S2 is a real company, why does their website consist of 1 page with no links and no information and have their domain registered under a falsified phone number? How, exactly, did SCO even contact S2 to form their "business relationship" unless you take into account McBride's previous "friendship" with Anderers.
YOU BE THE JUDGE!
... and in the DRM, bind them.
Just tell us when Darl is going to jail -- that's what we all really want to know.
Ohh yeah, we also want to know when M$ gets a slap on the wrist. (If that even...)
Nope, sorry. Calling something "good" or "bad" is an opinion, not a fact. If you don't agree with their opinion, fine, but calling people liars just because you disagree with their opinion discredits nobody but yourself.
For your reference, lying would be if they said that the unemployment rate was 2.2% when the official figure was really 5.6%.
(And if you think it's impossible for a 5.6% unemployment rate to be "good" one year and "bad" during another, consider how that figure is computed -- it's currently artificially low because so many people have stopped looking for work, and thus are no longer considered "unemployed", even though they remain jobless)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
And the really wonderful thing about SCOX plumetting is... their lawyers "$9 million in fees" apparently consisted of $1 million in cash and 400,000 shares of SCOX stock! Uh, that would make it about $5 million as of today, Mr. Boies! Here's hoping the stock will be worth less than $40,000 before they have a chance to sell it!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Okay, I can understand a bit of restraint. Only the judge gets to decide which side will prevail* and even the most highly paid lawyer can't predict how cases will play out in the end.
... (and yes, I am aware of their vested interests, but even so...)
However, all of the information PJ of Groklaw bases her conclusions on is available to the public. It is all there for you to read, at your leisure, in the Groklaw archives. She's not asking you to believe her with respect to evidence no one else has ever seen (unlike, say, Darl...)
That said, I will still say that SCO clearly doesn't have much of a case, even though IANAL. I mean, I seem to remember both Novell and IBM's lawyers, as well as several outside lawyers calling SCO's action against them "meritless"
* This star is here because I think that SCO has always requested jury trials for some reason. In a jury trial, the judge decides the law, and the jury decides all the facts. Thus, the judge instructs the jury about how they should vote depending on what they believe the facts of the case to be. The judge cannot decide any of the facts, not even incontrovertable ones, and to do so is a reversible error. In other words, I personally think that SCO believes themselves more able to snow a jury concerning this than a judge, but that's just me...
For a person to have an unlisted number is one thing. That's pretty normal.
But for a company to have no good way to contact them? That's one of the first things most people look for (or should look for...) in spotting a fly-by-night online business...
Why? Because if you buy a good or service from them and they don't deliver what they've promised, who are you going to contact to complain? And how are you going to get your money back?
It's pretty simple, really...