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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.
Phew, for a second there I thought it read "$2 Strategic Consulting".
how it was able to raise so much money for a company that has had serious trouble selling its bread-and-butter products for months
to be backing completely away from the little Utah company as the heat in the kitchen gets hotter
What you smell cooking in the kitchen is usually what is served
Thank God. Finally a non-SCO story. Phew.
*wipes brow*
Free XBox, PS2
Microsoft is trying to kill linux via litigation, the truth is out, people are dodging questions.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
...albeit a mansion. The mapquest map shows this address about as high as you can go in the salt lake valley.
This is probably why S2's phone has been out of order "for several days".
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
We all know that is done done. SCO is done and if M$ 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.
Not sure how current the other listings for S2 are, but wayback machine shows their old website, which contains some interesting demographic data (particularly, an office in Redmond, WA).
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
If you take the trouble on filing a formal complain to the SEC you could actualy make a difference.
Second the MS antitrust judge Kollar Kotelly needs to be informed as well. What MS is doing is directly against her ruling.
Help fight continental drift.
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)
The MS conspiracy theory is the only thing that makes sense when gaging SCO's actions. Who on earth
would sink the ship without having a lifeboat. I whole heartedly believe as do most others that MS is the sole driving factor behind all of this. I have never seen a company as hell bent destined to sink as SCO. What other possible motive do they have??
Got Code?
Now that SCO has dropped the trade secret argument, Perens dismantles their remaining arguments in his column. Hopefully IBM and RedHat are reading it.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I said at the time that it was a really bad idea for the Netscape guys and Scott McNealy to start this particular type of pissing contest. In the first place the DoJ would have given Microsoftr a much tougher time if they had stuck to the original case rather than getting into the Web and Java stuff where the case was very weak.
But more importantly the motives of Sun and Netscape looked to be mostly about how to set up an alibi for their own monumental incompetence. Oh dear, company folded, must have been those evil guys in Redmond not my own incompetence...
Oh well at least this time that fool Jackson won't be involved.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
I can hear the wailing of their rapidly falling stock and it makes me giddy, but really I just can't wait for the sound it will make at the end of its vertical journey ;-P
5468652047616D65
DM: Pssst, hey buddy, come'ere
Passerby: Who are you and what do you want?
DM: Wanna buy a valuable license? (opens trench coat)
Passerby: What's it a license for?
DM: I can't tell you, if I tell you I would have to kill you, but truuuusssssttt me, it contains license to use some valuable IP!
Passerby: How Much?
DM: How much you got?
Passerby: (pulling out his checkbook) I only have 12 dollars and 15 cents left in my account.
DM: That'll do.
Passerby: Who do I make the check out to?
DM: Corporate Attorneys Suing Humanity, but you can abbreviate and just make it out to C.A.S.H
The Matrix is real... but I'm only visiting!
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...)
Hello, it looks like you're trying to set up a conspiracy against Linux! Would you like to:
...
* Hire S2
* Write a letter to MS asking for money
* Buy 10,000 SCO licenses
Sidepoint: if we refer to MS as M$, microserf, etc., what must they be calling us in Redmontland? Something obscene, I don't doubt
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.
It is official; NASDAQ confirms: the SCO Group (SCOX) is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered SCO Group when NASDAQ confirmed that SCOX market price has dropped yet again, now down to less than a half of its October trading price. Coming on the heels of a recent NASDAQ report which plainly states that SCOX has lost more market capitilization, the market serves to reinforce what we've known all along. SCO Group is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by being dead last in a recent NASDAQ Losers list.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict SCO's future. The hand writing is on the wall: SCO Group faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for SCO because SCO is dying. Things are looking very bad for SCO. As many of us are already aware, SCO continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
UnixWare is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core users. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time SCO Group CEO Daryl McBride and Chris Sontag, the SCO vice president only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: SCO Group is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Window's leader Bill Gates states that there are 70 users of Linux. How many users of UnixWare are there? Let's see. The number of UnixWare versus Linux posts on Usenet and Slashdot is roughly in a ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there must be about 70 * 5 = 350 UnixWare users.
Due to the troubles of the Lindon, Utah company, abysmal sales and so on, the SCO Group may go out of business and be taken over by Microsoft, who sells another troubled OS. Now that UnixWare is also dead, its corpse is to be turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that SCO Group has steadily declined in market share. SCO Group is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If UnixWare is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. UnixWare continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, UnixWare is dead.
Fact: the SCO Group is dying.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/30/36116.html
HILARIOUS. And using licenses to shit as an example is so appropriate.
Corporatism != Free Market
The Technical Committee is responsible for enforcing the Final Judgement from the MS anti-trust case. You can submit complaints about MS possibly violating the Final Judgement to them. However when I emailed them, they sent me back the following reply:
I do not agree with their assessment as they are charged with enforcing the Final Judgement, which states the following:
I think that MS's alleged behavior in the SCO matter clearly falls under that section and warrants an investigation. But the Technical Committee is saying that this is not their job. However, I saw no qualifiers on their website limiting their enforcement to particular sections of the Final Judgement. Perhaps when a clearer picture of MS's actions emerges, they will be more inclined to investigate but I suspect it will fall to the Justice Department to investigate.Frylock: That's not a toy!
Master Shake: You say that about everything you own. You should own toys. They're fun.
Just one example. When the same news sources reported that 5.6% unemployment under Clinton Good, but currently report that 5.6% unemployment under Bush is Bad, they're liars.
The difference is that under Clinton, the number of jobs actually increased. Under Bush II, there's a net loss of about 2.3 million jobs.
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...
Check out:
/ /s 2.com/index.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20010425142653/http:
From wayback you can see there site has changed many times. It used to be owned by someone else and in the mid 90s was a sports site. A few years back we find things like:
S2 is a second-generation entrepreneurial venture firm that specializes in developing and accelerating companies that commercialize emerging technologies across a wide spectrum of industries.
S2 is headquartered in Salt Lake City, UT, with additional offices in Redmond, WA, Detroit, MI and Columbia, SC. S2 Capital, the company's affiliated financial firm, is located in Charleston, SC.
They really did have a lot of offices as you can see:
S2 - Headquarters
56 East Broadway
Salt lake City, UT
84111
v.801.415.2100
f.801.415.2101
info@s2.com
S2 - Central States
123 South Main
Royal Oak, MI
48067
v.248.837.1400
f.248.837.1401
S2 - Southeast
1200 Main St. ste. 1000
Columbia, SC
29201
v.803.772.5922
f.803.733.6799
S2 - Northwest
8195 166th Ave. NE ste. 101
Redmond, WA
98052
v.425.882.2893
f.425.881.5773
S2 Capital
418 king St.
Charleston, SC
29403
v.843.722.8670
f.843.937.8518
I just found this help-wanted ad on Monster.com. My keyboard is now full of coffee! Find it here.
Job Description: SCO Unix Contractor
Qualified candidate will need to recover root passwords and change them, plus store securely for future use if need be.
Candidate needs to be able to understand file structure & applications running on machine(s) & determine if it is possible for the contractor to support the systems until June of this year.
Ohhh, my side hurts from laughing so hard! I wonder what the story is behind this one....