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SCO Gives up on Linux Website
Richard Mathias writes "Following on from the posting a month ago, where SCO said it was going to launch a new website to counteract Groklaw and give its side of things - well, now the company looks like it's given up on the whole plan. It was originally supposed to be at Prosco.net, then SCOinfo.com, but both have holding pages and a spokeswoman has said it may never happen at all because of "legal and management concerns"." Update: 11/03 01:10 GMT by T : editingwhiz writes "Despite earlier published reports, SCO Group is indeed still planning to post a lawsuit-information Web site under a new name, SCOinfo.com, company spokesman Blake Stowell told IT Manager's Journal today. So SCO is not throwing in the proverbial towel after all. But does it really make any difference? (IT Manager's Journal is part of OSTG.)"
Looks to me that website was to Groklaw what Elgoog is to Google - a fun but twisted way to look at reality... :-)
- Leon Mergen
http://www.solatis.com
You can only throw shit for so long before your arm gets tired.
SCO is still around? Thought they died months ago.
Fernandes cited "legal and management concerns about the content of the website" as precipitating the review but declined to comment on specifics.
I have a feeling that they knew they would have very few supporters on that site. They would probably spend more time astroturfing and fighting off the "bad" posts than they would "spreading the truth".
They have enough lies coming out in press releases do they really want to have a site that lies constantly? Wouldn't that just be more fodder for those on the pro-Linux side?
First time I ever saw a site slashdotted before it went live...
In order for their idea to work, they'd actually need to have real and factual material to put on their Groklaw 'archrival'. Otherwise the new site would've been ripped appart.
So in summary, They Had Nothing.
Brandon Petersen
Get Firefox!
Means they didn't have the money to put towards it. That website would not be the profit center that the lawsuit will be. All resources must go to the lawsuit, while there are still resources to be found.
For those who haven't checked lately, SCOX has been trading at around 3.0 lately.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Again this proves that the SCO suits are all media driven to spread FUD about Linux, to help their "friends", Microsoft, and to manipulate their stock price.
Once Groklaw started to show people the facts of the case through legal filings and great research, SCO started coming undone, because we know they are Caldera, they contributed to Linux, released Unix code, helped IBM with project Monterrey and didn't object at the time to PPC AIX, indeed advertised the fact! We see their lies in their own words where they repeatedly contradict themselves.
-- oldthinkers unbellyfeel ingsoc
SCO? Who'd have thunk it.
scocucks.com
Timang tinggi tinggi
parang sudah asah
alang alang mandi
biar sampai basah
I have a feeling that they knew they would have very few supporters on that site
IIRC, SCO weren't going to permit posting. My suspicion is that SCO realised that it'd be deadly dull with no posting. (It's a tribute to Groklaw volunteers that Groklaw manage to make a very dry topic quite interesting - without volunteers I doubt SCO could have given "watching paint dry" a run for its money).
This is where the serious fun begins.
I can't even imagine how depressing it must be to work at that place. Can't even manage to put up a website with their version of the truth.
Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
Guess they figured out that it is easier to track down lies in websites than in complex legal documents, speeches and interviews.
This way they can continue to make snide remarks about groklaw beeing owned by IBM without backing their claims.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
They were not going to allow posts from the public, as does Groklaw - their site was to be nothing but their voice, with no comments from the peanut gallery. As such, the concern for trolling/astroturfing/conflicting opinions was non-existant.
The more likely explaination was that, in the absense of such posts, the only thing their site could have would be either court documents a la Groklaw (which would do them no good), or statements from SCO, which would find their way into the courts, and as such would have to be true or they would expose SCO to (more) problems in court. When SCO legal informed them of this, SCO probably realised that there was no benefit in doing this.
www.eFax.com are spammers
...was forbidden. If not, it should be.
Oh, damn, I said "SCO". Doh, I said "SCO" again! GD, There I go again. "SCO" right there in print.
Auughhh! Crap. I just can't keep from saying "SCO".
SCO. SCO. SCO. SCO. SCO.
Sorry for that folks. The author has comitted suicide for saying "SCO". Oooops, sorry for saying "SCO". Ahhhh, sorry for saying "SCO again". Oh, no. There I go saying "SCO". Forgive me...
INSERT INTO comment VALUE('Doh!') WHERE user='you';
SCO doesn't have much on it's side. The more they encourage effort on the part of their adversaries, the more they have to lose. Perhaps they believed that in this overly intellectual property-conscious land, they would get sympathy, but if so, that was a miscalculation.
SCO dumps Linux crusade website
Having second thoughts thanks to 'legal concerns'.
By Robert McMillan, IDG News Service
The SCO Group is reconsidering its plans to launch an alternative to the Groklaw.net website that was due to go live yesterday.
Nearly one month after promising to launch the site that would provide information on SCO's various legal disputes, the company is having second thoughts on the project, said Janielle Fernandes, a spokeswoman for the software vendor. "It's still up for debate whether the website will ever go up," she said.
Fernandes cited "legal and management concerns about the content of the website" as precipitating the review but declined to comment on specifics.
After having its every legal move dissected on the Groklaw.net website for more than a year, SCO executives decided to launch a website of their own, devoted to giving their side of the argument. It should have gone live on 1 November - yesterday.
SCO originally said the site would use the domain name Prosco.net. That name has now been dropped in favor of SCOinfo.com, although both now resolve to a blank screen with the message: "SCO is anticipating that it will use this site as the future home for all information relating to SCO's pending lawsuits and related issues. For current information about SCO's suit against IBM, please visit www.sco.com/ibmlawsuit, and about SCO's suit against Novell, please visit www.sco.com/novell."
"The name was changed to support the purpose of the website," she said. "The purpose is to provide factual information regarding SCO's litigation, thus the name SCOinfo.com." Whether and when SCOinfo.com will ever contain this information is still up for debate within the company, Fernandes said.
SCO is presently involved in a number of legal disputes with IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Autozone and DaimlerChrysler - all stemming from its insistence that it owns the copyright on part of the open source Linux kernel.
Started shortly after the 2003 launch of SCO's multi-billion dollar lawsuit against IBM, Groklaw began as a Web log for Linux enthusiast Pamela Jones, a paralegal working for a law firm at the time. It has evolved into an open-source project itself, where legal filings are meticulously dissected by an army of volunteers.
Netcraft hasn't confirmed it yet. :-)
I'm sure the site will be up just as soon as they present some actual evidence of how IBM done them wrong...
"I'm a scientist! I don't think, I observe!" - Dr. Clayton Forrester
At SCO ? I mean how likely is that ? These are people who think that attacking IBM is a good company move. This means either two things
1) The site was actually a good idea
2) SCO management have gone past insantiy and out the otherside, potentially a large number of times.
I doubt its 1, so it must be 2, which is fantastic as all we need to do is wire them up to a magnet and coil and that constant rotation from sanity to madness will enable us to create cheap, non-polluting energy. The only by product of this generation would be an increase in Slashdot posts around the madness peak, but hopefully we can pull that energy in as well.
Other potential energy sources included the quantum state of Iraqi WMDs, but unfortunately their state has now resolved itself.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
and a spokeswoman has said it may never happen at all because of "legal and management concerns"."
Maybe they looked at their own argument and realized it even looked stupid to them.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
SCO has noticed code violations in other website which are directly taken from our own site.
;)
;)
Due to this we have pulled our site to prevent further theft and will be taking legal action to defend our interlectual property.
Examples of stolen code include:
- used on many lines in may pages.
- used on many lines in may pages.
- used on other pages and I guess we should have used XHTML too
On consultation with out lawyers they said this case whad a good chance of being profitable, although they didn't say who for
Read "legal and management concerns" as "We're tired of DDoS attacks and getting rooted by people who know more about *nix than we do."
he he
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
I would buy one share. Is it possible to get the share in paper format that will look nice framed? Might make a good history piece.
How many sites can they afford to astroturf and DoS? There's Slashdot, Kuroshin, Google, Grocklaw itself. All of those efforts cost money but have failed to one extent or another. I doubt they have the money to keep it up.
No one was going to read their goofey fanboy site anyway. It's hard to make a community out of brand loyalty to a product no one is buying. You can fool some all the time and everyone some of the time but you can't fool all the people all the time, not even the press.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
when they researched the term sock-puppet. (Mainly the Usenet usage where a kook creates dozens of alternate identities to agree with himself; but usage of a cheap puppet with a hand up its bum works too.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
scowho.org ?
Hrrm... I usually just sign my name.
``Legal concerns'' probably means their lawyers told them: ``If you do this, we won't be able to maintain the fiction that you have a case.''
``Management concerns'' probably means that management didn't think it would pump the stock up enough to make up for the lawyers jumping ship.
See what I've been reading.
I seem to recall several several times that if you are involved in a court case, you should keep your mouth shut. Maybe the lawyers are telling SCO execs that this is a dumb idea.
By the way, I am not a lawyer, and taking this as legal advice without asking a real lawyer is like drinking poision to see what it tastes like.
"legal and management concerns" is pronounced "fear of being sued for libel".
Servlet v2.4 container in a single 161KB jar file ? Try Winstone
Stop by and take a look....unfortunately I couldn't locate a place to leave "Comments" and "Feedback" to their FUD.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Firstly, I must object to your subject, "Perhaps occasional lying is better than constant?". It assumes that the managers of the company under discussion, SCO, are deliberately spreading falsehoods. This is not an objective fact. You risk sounding like a zealot by using such strong language in this regard.
Also, if SCO is already, as you claim, partaking in regular 'lying' by means of press releases, what is the principal difference between this behavior and setting up a website that also regularily 'lies'? In no way do you explain why that would be as great a leap as you claim. I am puzzled as to your logic here. Perhaps you would care to elaborate on this issue?
Without the darkness, how would we recognize the light?
Groklaw: Provides legal docs; presents a point of view which does not get media coverage; and, allows people to discuss the issues.
They already have a repository for legal docs somewhere on their main site. Their highly publicized press releases are partisan to their viewpoint. They are not really interested in posts from people in the "community" because there is no community; they are more unilaterally despised than any other computer company today, perhaps in the last ten years.
QED, a website would have been a redundant waste of the precious little money they have left.
They would probably spend more time astroturfing and fighting off the "bad" posts than they would "spreading the truth".
Well, they said in their initial announcement that they wouldn't allow comments, so that wouldn't have been a problem.
do they really want to have a site that lies constantly? Wouldn't that just be more fodder for those on the pro-Linux side?
This, I think, is the crux of the matter. Assuming they ever really planned to do this (it may have just been a PR stunt designed to help their stock out for a short while), I think they probably realized they had a problem when they started trying to decide exactly what to put up, and where they were going to get it from.
Some of their options were:
I think (still assuming they ever intended to do this) that they started trying to figure out what they could put up that would be legally safe (no libel, etc.), helpful to their image and not make them look like a poor Groklaw imitation, and they came up empty.
Oh, two other potential problems with pulling the material from Groklaw just occurred to me: First it might open them up to charges of copyright infringement. Although the court documents are public domain, any formatting is copyrighted. PJ licenses everything under a creative commons license that does not permit commercial use, so using Groklaw's stuff could land them in yet another court case. Second, it would definitely open them up to more criticism; they're accusing others of "stealing" their IP and talking a great deal about the sanctity of IP and the importance of honoring it, so it would look really bad for them to be accused of "stealing" from Groklaw.
Oh, one more problem: It's a bad idea to speak in public about ongoing court cases. Thanks to SCO's regular violation of this bit of wisdom, Red Hat, Novell and IBM have been able to construct their recent filings with large doses of SCO words, mixed with a bit of explanatory text. SCO has said so much to screw themselves that the attorneys on the other side were probably more excited about this new source of material than anyone. I'm sure the lawyers told Darl and co. yet again that they should really keep their mouths shut. SCO obviously isn't inclined to listen to such advice, but maybe they caved this time, based on all of the other problems.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
"Fernandes cited "legal and management concerns about the content of the website"
The lawyers must have finally beat some sense into the management at SCO. What would this gain them? Nothing. What would it do? provide more material for Slashdot to bash SCO over the head with. More material for IBMs lawyers to bash SCO over the head with. And more bills for SCO to pay to have there lawyers review everything they post to make sure it didn't do more harm than good.
What probably happened is they showed some of the first information that they wanted to post to the lawyers. And after the lawyers edited it all was left was the SCO logo and pictures of the SCO Christmas party.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
While we have all joined each other in loud, hearty guffaws at the rate at which SCO as a company has driven itself to hell without aid of handbasket, I must take a moment for an aside.
According to the SCO website, they are still attempting to deliver a UNIXWare(R) product. This means that they *must* still have technically savvy folks working for them. Slaving over a hot pentium all day to cook us up some UNIXWare(R) goodness. How do they find the strength to get up in the morning and make the drive to work? For that matter, how does Darl McBride? The writing has been on the wall for quite a while now. How many of them are just hanging in, hoping for a long enough tenure with the company to get *something* out of all their hard work?
This only causes to reenforce in my mind an earlier (albeit drunken) revelation I had about the truths of the online community that is /. I am sorely tempted to register a holding company, some Corporation designed to hold stock. I know there are legal Corp Classes that are allowed to do such things. Get everyone on every online forum I can find to be shareholders of the Holding Company and use all share money to outright purchase SCO and end this once and for all.
I mean, they do have *some* validity to the claim that they own UNIX(R) Source. I'm not quite sure how much they truly own lock/stock. But what happens when their bubble *does* bust? We all know it's coming, we all know it's going to happen. Think that which is the UNIX(R) Source will suddenly become automagically opened?
Most likely Microsoft or some other non open friendly giant will swoop in at the last minute and purchase up what remains of the UNIX(R) Source so that it will forever remain in a corporate collective somewhere. If it is Microsoft, they would probably begin the litigation anew. After they ran patents for everything and anything that looked like it might clear the US Patent Office in favor of the new owners.
"Genius may shine aloof and alone, like a star, but goodness is social, and it takes two men and God to make a Brother."
Has anyone noticed an absolute lack of "SCO headlines" since May? http://www.sco.com/company/news/ Really wicked change in PR-direction, is it not?
Makes sense. I expect the lawyers and management pointed out that SCO would certainly never say anything about someone else that was not 100% true, and a program of wild accusations would be unseemly for a respected member of the community.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I was actually emailed by a sco representative who wanted to link to one of my animations on their website. Here's most of it:
-----------------
We are putting a site together that will go live on November 1 and have a link on the site called "Just for Fun."
We would like to link to your site to give people access to "Steve the Linux Super Villian." It's absolutely hilarious and we would love to profile that on this section of the site, just to show people that we have a sense of humor.
May we have your permission to link to your site from our site?
-----------------
To which I replied:
ABSOLUTELY, WITHOUT A DOUBT, NO.
Obviously they didn't notice my Penguin Blood Ninja FiaSCO animation.
I'm not too surprised by today's news!
Over on the stock front, SCOX is at $2.93 today, continuing the long, slow slide of the last year. Since July, the price decline has been almost a straight line on a linear scale. The market cap seems to be tracking how much cash SCO has left, which means the market is valuing SCO's UNIX rights at zero.
The content is essentially: the web site may never be activated due to management and legal issues. The spokesperson refused to supply either the specific reasons or flatly state the site will never open.
So much speculation and comments on so little substance. Indeed, you need a different headline on this story.
You mean other than not owning Linux and having no case, right? Cause that didn't stop SCO before...
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