Slashdot Mirror
Judge in SCO Case Notes Lack of Evidence
In a follow-up to yesterday's story, Allen Zadr writes "Computer Business Online has an article up today entitled 'Judge astonished by SCO's lack of evidence against IBM'. From the article: "Viewed against the backdrop of SCO's plethora of public statements... it is astonishing that SCO has not offered any competent evidence..." This is exactly what Groklaw has been saying all along, and they have commentary on the news as well."
I don't care if it ref's a previous atricle, it's still enough of a dupe to not be on the front page.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/10/12 54208&tid=123&tid=155&tid=106/
Big f'n surprise. I'm astonished! Absolutely dumbfounded!
Anyone else shocked beyond belief?
Na, me either.
Ain't this a dupe too?
Dug
PS. FP?
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/10/12 54208&tid=123&tid=155&tid=106
Judge astonished by SCO's lack of evidence against IBM
in other news, i'm astonished by the delay in reaction! didn't we all know this, hmm, i don't know, the day of $699?
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
Isn't this a dupe?
The real surprise is that their shares are not going down faster. It annoys me.
This is totally insecure, but very convenient.
That my Linux license is worthless?
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Ha-ha!
Sweet informative mod.
It's a slow news day people - I mean come on, octopus robots, YAWIFI article, and the new Emotio^H^H^H^H^H^HCell processor - this is golden stuff.
Everyone's reaction sounds like Louis in Casablanca... "I'm shocked... shocked to find no evidence to support SCO's case!"
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
that the whole thing is going to disappear. But not before it drags on for a while yet and we'll probably NOT get to see McBride and others charged with any crimes (which I would *love* to see, deserved or not).
... I can dream.
Maybe he'll get caught beating his wife or something
Lets face it. Some people can't see the truth.
:]
Microsoft knows that the bleeding will not stop, they just are putting duct tape (SCO lawsuite) to prevent a flow of their customer base. It gives them a chance to `change their strategies`.
[: Only Sheeps Avoid the FireFox
Implications/Postmortem report at Groklaw
Attorney Reactions to the Kimball Order
Last week when the MPAA/RIAA went after the dead grandmother smittenkitten for uploading copyrighted files, I was hoping some lawyers would lose their jobs.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Slashdot readers astonished by a lack of checking for duped articles.
Or not.
What's more astonishing is that the mainstream press is only now starting to 'get it'...
Blah.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
SCO's case basically rested on the assertion that there is only way to write an enterprise-worthy operating system, the "SCO way." Is it any surprise that a copyright lawsuit based on looking for code on this assertion was going to go down in flames? What's next, there's only one way to build a house or bridge?
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
People made money on what is clearly a pump and dump scam. Go to Yahoo finance, and put SCO in and look at the 2 year graph. People were fooled, there was no case, no evidence, no nothing. This was just Darl being instructed to attack through indirect VC funding, and my guess is he made out quite nicely. The next step is for the IRS and the SEC along with the Justice department to jointly open an investigation regarding this conspiracy. This is no different than organized crime running boiler room pump and dump, it just pretended to be legit.
I have a question for any legal geeks out there. Why are civil suits allowed to proceed at all without any evidence from the prosecutor? This case hasn't even begun and yet the judge has cooperated with SCO in forcing IBM to spend thousands (if not millions) of dollars, requiring huge amounts of man labor which has drug on for almost two years, and at no point did SCO provide any evidence what so ever of there charges. I understand the need for all the evidence to be brought out during the fact-finding stage, before the actual trial, but why does the fact-finding stage even proceed if the prosecutor does not have any valid evidence to provide. Burden of proof is on them, so it seems to me that they should be required to have significant evidence for their accusations from day one.
Why is it that civil cases take so much longer than criminal ones? Even the OJ Simpson criminal case finished 16 months after arrest, and people were all up in arms about how long it was dragging on, and yet this case has been going on for two years and it hasn't even go to the court room yet!
<rant>
This is the sort of tort reform that we need, reducing the burden of frivolous law suits. Not some bullshit capping of damages. By definition those are not frivolous lawsuits because the people were actually found guilty! That isn't even tort reform at all - it is just changing the penalty on some particular offences, and passing off as a tort reform bill rather than a limited-liability asbestos bill.
</rant>
But this is a serious question. There may be consequences that I have not thought of, and I am really interested in hearing why we choose to give the prosecutor so much benefit of doubt.
This is exactly what Groklaw has been saying all along, and they have commentary on the news as well."
It's called due process, and it's something I find vastly amusing.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Betcha SCO is overjoyed. For real! Here's what'll happen next.
Upon hearing the bad news, SCO's stock will begin to tank. Again. And once it gets low enough, SCO-friendly folks will buy a pile of it.
And then Darl will release some outlandish press release, saying that they own the rights to American Cheese or the number 6, and the stock will rise again. After all, they just can't make these claims without something up their sleeve, can they? Three days later, everybody sells. And then waits for the next bit of tangy pseudo-bad-news-for-SCO goodness.
What I want to know is when some judge will finally step in and put and end to this fraud.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Before we dupe stories? How fucking stupid does one have to be as an editor to dupe the same story albeit different articles in a 24 hr period....
[: Only Sheeps Avoid the FireFox :] ... and those of us who would like to use the .focus() method on DIVs and other useful tags.
No Shit!
It'd be great if the companies that paid SCO for "licenses" asked for their money back, since SCO doesn't actually own Unix and the license was basically a fraud. Especially Microsoft's $16 million license. A final twist of the knife.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
"Slashdot Online has an article up today entitled 'Readers astonished by Slashdot's repost of SCO's lack of evidence against IBM'. From the article:
...this:
In a follow-up to yesterday's story
Sheesh.
Deja vu
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=SCOX
Of course this might have something to do with how the stock market works:
Big whoop. Notice they're both posted at the very same minute so it would be likely that one posted at the same time as the other, as exactly like I did :)
D
The company I work for used to do a lot of business with SCO, and we still get holiday cards and whatnot from them from time to time. This past Christmas, we get a nice generic corporate Happy Holidays!-type thing from them. Except get this -
It came postage due.
I kid you not. It's hanging on the wall.
DUPE! DUPE!
That said, YESTERDAY it was a great read to see the Judge say words like "complete lack thereof" (of evidence), etc.
What he meant was this: "I'm not gonna rule in IBM's favor TODAY, but if you don't come up with something that at least creates a DISPUTE by the end of the discovery phase, I'm kicking your ass to the curb!"
I can't wait to see how Rob Enderle and Maureen O'Gara and Laura Didio are gonna spin this one in the trade press...
With all the hoopla about Armstrong Williams and this fake White House news guy Gannon (who runs gay porn sites, no less - Bush must be thrilled given Kitty Kelly's accusations), one would expect these three (and Judith Miller at the NYT, whom the Times Public Editor has accused of spreading White House propaganda that has not been revealed even to her bosses at the Times) to be under investigation for taking Microsoft and SCO bribes.
(Of course, the companies they work for take Microsoft bribes - only they call them "research contracts", but still...)
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Is it even remotely possible for SCO to stop these shenanigans and drop this case at this point and still survive as a company for any period?
Any speculations on what would happen if SCO were to actually say "Oopsey!" at this point and try to just drop the whole thing?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Effective immediately Roland Piquepaille takes credit for all AC posts.
Is it even remotely possible for SCO to stop these shenanigans and drop this case at this point and still survive as a company for any period?
They can drop their case, but IBM already did a full retaliatory patent based counter strike. If they drop, they have nothing to negotiate with later... Not that they stand much of a chance anyhow. (and not that it matters, the SCOX execs have already done a huge pump and dump and it looks like they got away with it)
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Despite their public pronouncements, SCO's case against IBM seems to have evaporated down to a claim that IBM continued to distribute AIX after SCO revoked their Unix license. To which IBM is replying "You had no right to revoke our Unix license, you morons!" Did SCO actually have legitimate grounds for revoking the license, or is SCO going to get bitchslapped by the judge for revoking a license they had no right to revoke? It's beginning to look like SCO's legal strategy was concocted by an 8 year old kid! Doesn't making claims in press releases that cannot be substantiated in court invoke the ire of the SEC? SCO executives appear to be on the express train to federal prison. They made ridiculous unsubstatiated claims, and now they can't back down from those claims, because doing so would only be used as evidence that the whole thing was an ill-conceived "pump-and-dump" scheme in the first place! McBride's best case scenario now is that he drags the whole thing out long enough so that he dies before he gets sent to prison...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Their ticker symbol is SCOX, not SCO. Don't worry, it's a mistake people have been making for as long as this story has been around.
Aside from that, you honestly think the government is going to go after a bunch of white collar criminals without a public outcry?
Oh, that's so cute. I'll bet you believe your vote is actually counted too. Your faith in the system and the government is touching. If only it were justified.
Hell, Enron resulted in a few slaps on the wrist for some people, and the retirements of most the non executive employees were tossed in a blender. And the public was up in arms over that one!
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
The "Slashdot Effect" is now known as repeating yourself over and over again until your webserver crashes.
FLR
before grandma reads about it in WSJ, dead trees version
is part of the court process. In discovery, you pretty much are in court, complete with a court stenoghrapher. In other countries, this process is known as cross examination and actually does happen in a court room - here it usually happens in a lawyer's board room, but it is no less official.
I don't think lawyers recognize death as a valid excuse to escape paying fines to the RIAA/MPAA - especially with their cut of the pie.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
I've noticed a pattern:
Every time something damning for SCO comes out in this case, there is a sharp drop in their stock price.
But it never lasts very long, it seems to (suspiciously) quickly spike back up.
Give me a tinfoil award for this, but I'm convinced that as real investors flee SCO, Microsoft (through some shell) is buying up the jettisoned shares with part of that 80 million they've earmarked for their "Battle against Linux" they publicized some time ago.
Maybe I'm simply paranoid. If I'm wrong, it's no biggie, but if I am RIGHT, then when the judge finally pulls the plug on this fiaSCO and the stock flatlines, Microsoft will be left holding ashes...
Sort of poetic. For a lunatic's idea, isn't it?
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
In other news, SCO will be moving forward using its pattern-matching software to identify travellers' faces during airport screening...
...check out the 5 year chart.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Maybe /. should start having parent + child articles, so that DUPE's show up all under the "previous story".
stuff |
I sure hope IBM sues SCO for Libel, slander, and defamation of character.
You ever see any action movies? Usually the movies will have some scene where the chief good guy/bad guy/bad guy's Top Thug will get challenged by some stupid thug/underling/rent-a-cop, usually spurned on by alcohol/his friends/basic stupidity. We then get treated to a scene where the principal character goes above and beyond what is necessary to deal with the situation. They go further than they need, to demonstrate to other minor characters and to the audience: This person is a badass.
IBM is betting the farm on Linux. This is a new business model if you're younger than about 40 years old; to IBM, free software that sells the service and equipment is how they got big in the first place.
SCO unwittingly played right into IBM's hands. IBM waited for a good six months until SCO had made a ton of public statements (and Groklaw had started really building up a database -- "open-source legal" if you will -- that helped them in this regard). Then, IBM brought forth the counterclaims.
The counterclaims are not geared towards destroying SCO, but they will have that effect. The counterclaims are designed so that IBM can use this opportunity to create a substantive legal precedent for the new license that represents the old business model.
(Editorial comment: It's worth noting that the GPL and FSF are essentially reactionary; Stallman's not so much trying to create a New World Order as to restore the way things were back in the good old days. That's why I say that this new license represents IBM's old business model.)
What's happened with Wednesday's ruling is that IBM is more than they dreamed to get from this case: Not only is the judge clearly siding with IBM, but the judge is so pissed off with SCO that he will now guide the case towards a substantive legal precedent that not only rescues Linux developers and users from this current legal threat, but will stand the test of appeals and time.
Much as fair-use advocates go back to the Sony vs. MPAA suit, Linux businessmen in the future will go back to this lawsuit to show why it's perfectly sound and justifiable to use Linux without any worry. This is our Betamax suit.
SCO (and if you follow the money, Microsoft) really, really shot themselves in the ass with this lawsuit. In attempting to extort money from IBM and give them trouble, they ended up giving IBM the opportunity to get exactly what they wanted. The more that lawyers like Groklaw's marbux and others in the media look at the ruling, the more they realize that not only is SCO about to be destroyed, but Linux and the GPL will soon be ironclad.
When this court case is done, Linux and the GPL will be bulletproof.
That's why this particular frivolous lawsuit is taking so long: Once IBM made those counterclaims, it no longer became frivolous. And the price for the frivolity will be dire not just to SCO, but to every company that supported them.
Over the past year every company remotely connected with SCO has done what they can to distance themselves from them. EV1 apologized for buying Linux licenses. Another company that won Linux licenses as part of a settlement deal had to go on the public record denying that they paid for those licenses. Baystar, the company that put money into SCO on Microsoft's recommendation, backed out and asked for its money back.
Doesn't sound very frivolous any more, does it?
when given to:
1) Replies to dupe articles
2) Replies to SCO articles, which themselves are all dupes anyway.
We need s mod that scores zero for a redundant comment to SCO articles and dupe articles.
In some ways it looks to me as if SCO is trying the "Microsoft defense," where you so outrage the judge that he/she makes some remark that can be construed as unprofessional, and then dig it all out on appeal. Microsoft successfully used this tactic against both Sporkin and Jackson. (if I remember the names correctly)
I just hope the phrase, "it is astonishing that SCO has not" isn't construed as sufficiently unprofessional to justify an appeal.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Alert Elliot Spitzer???
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
No, SCO, as a legitimate company, is already dead. My current project is a SCO OpenUnix -> Linux migration for, perhaps, the last major customer of SCO.
Real life is overrated.
Yeah, we all knew this all along. So why the hell is this case STILL dragging on??? And we is SCO even still in business? I'm tired of hearing about this shit. It's worse that a grade C horror movie...
I submitted this same story with a funnier headline.
Oh wait, that one was posted too.
Evil is the money of root.
They added an "X" on the end of their ticker symbol. It's a sign of their future plans. Once their lawyers are done with linux, they have their sights set on another UNIX-based operating system... And you thought OS X was expensive at $129!
But it sounds like, without issuing a ruling, he's just muttering to himself.
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
What the judge did today was table IBM's Motion for Summary Judgment. The judge could have granted it, ending the case. Instead, the judge (1) let things go on, (2) chastized SCO along the way, and (3) invited IBM to renew its motion later. Could we maybe season our SCO-bashing with a little actual information every once in a while?
Today's news is: IBM Suffers Encouraging Setback in SCO Case.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
They actually have evidence to back that up.
Exactly my thoughts on the matter. Whatever is left of SCO is going to get a taste of its own medicine in the courtroom. Except for one thing - the class action filed against it will not be frivolous, and will probably win once it is shown that SCO's licensing system gives you a license to something SCO never owned, and they knew it all along.
You'd think that one of those thousands of lawyers they've hired would have warned them about this.
If SCO claimed to have thousands of infringing files before, how many will they claim to have once they get the "4 BILLION" lines of code IBM is being forced to turn over to SCO ?
How many extensions can they request to review the code ?
How much court time will be spent on each disputed peice of code, which could number in the millions ?
Not sure why everyone is so cheery about this in light of the two above questions.
SCO the most dispised and ridiculous company trying to abuse law. Every one hates them. No one takes them seriously. Bank rolled by M$, with no other intent than to try and take out Linux. Then others trying to support your bs pulled out because they could see you were going nowhere.
How many clients do SCO have ? very few. Do they do any business ? Not really.
Are it's directors happy people ? No. They are humiliated clowns with no credibility.
SCO kill yourself
This individual
m ages/20040106_d010604-515h.jpg
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/01/i
was detained while attempting to board Air Force One after being detected as possibly being Osama Bin Laden in disguise. He was later released after it was determined to have been a false match.
Supposedly the AIX license was revoked by SCO because IBM broke some trade secret agreement with SCO. SCO dropped their trade secret claim some time ago, but in SCO's mind the revocation still stands. Why? Who knows, but even if it did, it's not valid.
If IBM violated their agreement with SCO, SCO could put IBM on notice to correct the breach within a certain amount of time (I think it was 100 days) or the license would terminate. In typical SCO style, they proclaimed that IBM was in breach of the contract (without specifying the trade secret stolen or what IBM could do to remedy it) and said the license would terminate at the end of the 100 days. To this day, SCO has not specified exactly what IBM did that violated their agreement, although they are doing some hand-waving that it involves porting JFS and other IBM technologies to Linux. So according to the terms set out by the contract, the 100 days haven't started yet.
In any event, the contract involved not only SCO and IBM, but Novell who retained most of the rights to UNIX (which SCO chooses to ignore). Per the rights they retained in the agreement Novell requested SCO to waive IBM's purported breach, and when SCO ignored them Novell waived them on behalf of SCO, as allowed by the contract.
"...read all of TSG's regulatory filings..."
... "Instead of going after people, we're giving people a chance to license," McBride said. Customers with numerous servers will receive discounts, he added.-- Darl McBride, 2003-01-22
Contrast that to the numerous statements to the press over the past two years...
(Courtesy of the quote database at Groklaw)
-
SCO was able to uncover the alleged violations by hiring three teams of experts, including a group from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology math department, to analyze the Linux and Unix source code for similarities. "All three found several instances where our Unix source code had been found in Linux," said an SCO spokesman.-- SCO PR, 2003-06-10
-
"We've been looking at this for months. Every time we turn over a stone, there's something there," McBride said. "If you pull down (Mac) OS X you'll see a lot of copyright postings that point back to Unix Systems Laboratories, which is what we hold."
-
The Linux community on these message boards will get very vocal, many times without even understanding what the underlying issues are. So it's a little bit like being Shaquille O'Neil and driving home from the game that night and listening to the call in show. It can drive you crazy if you listen to every fan that calls in or non-fan. And these chat boards can drive you crazy if you try and follow the logic, or lack thereof that goes on on some of these boards. So I believe what we have to stay focused on is what is the right thing and stay focused on what is the right thing at an industry level and what is the right thing at a customer and industry partner level, and, in the end, try to apply some leadership to the equation to problem to help resolve things.-- Darl McBride, 2003-05-16
-
(My comment on that last one; I'm saltydogmn on the Yahoo SCOX board. Fuck you, Darl, you worthless piece of shit asshole motherfucker.)
-
And during the period of time shortly after filing the lawsuit until recently when they came back and responded, we had a 60 day period there where we turned 3 different teams of code programmers loose on the codebases of AIX, Unix and Linux. And they came back with - independently - we had the three teams - one was a set of high-end mathematcians, rocket scientist, modeling type guys. Another team was based on standard programmer types. A third team were really spiffy on agent technology and how all of this technology was built in the first place. So the three teams came back independently and validated that there wasn't just a little bit of code showing up inside of Linux from our Unix intellectual property base. There was actually a mountain of code showing up in there.-- Darl McBride, 2003-07-21
-
[English: Replacing the illegal code seems unimaginable, even if we would be the first to approve such a solution. But we're talking about millions of lines of code and not a few dozen. On top of that, the pieces that were taken are precisely what makes Linux a viable solution for enterprise deployment, like SMP and NUMA. We therefore invite enterprise users to properly license Linux by purchasing our run-time-only Linux license or downgrading to a version of Linux prior to 2.4, which will probably be enough for some companies.]-- Darl McBride, 2003-10-22
In other words, they are full of shit, and should be put in prison for fraud. Period.
The replies you got mostly addressed the historical usage, though they don't talk about the really ancient days when you did it yourself. I actually think the first <Backspace> keys may have simply been hardware shortcuts for ^H.
These days in HTML you should use the strikethrough tag for the same effect, but it doesn't seem to be supported here on /. (per my limited testing).
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
That makes sense, but if IBM doesn't want to end the case, why did they file a motion to dismiss?
Oh, okay I RRTFA. IBM didn't file a motion to dismiss they filed a motion for summary judgment. That is where I was confused - SCO was the one that filed a motion to dismiss the counterclaims, and I missread that. Summary judgement would require things to be sealed tight at the ends, like another poster said, while dismissal wouldn't. So the judge is probably right about allowing the discovery to wrap up before issuing a summary judgment.
That is why the case has continued to go on - because IBM never filed a motion to dismiss. I understand now.
There's a difference between dismissing one party's claims, and dismissing the entire lawsuit. Even if the judge granted IBM's motion and dismissed every single one of SCO's claims, the case would still be open on IBM's counterclaims.
What is going to happen to SCO now? Do you think IBM will countersue the hell out of them?
What would be REALLY funny is if IBM goes all hostile takover on their asses and buys their codebase. Then open-sources it.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Where can I read about this "pump and dump"? I can't seem to find the Illegal Stockmarket Trading HOWTO.
Support the mob or mysteriously disappear.
SCO's suits and claims that IBM "stole" code or readily lifted it in some way has always rubbed me the same way that Bush administration claims about Iraq's supposed possession of enough weapons to lay waste to Toledo in a heartbeat. Neither side produced indesputable, conclusive evidence, and from the start, people in the know were saying "No they [don't/didn't]." Instinctively, both allegations struck me as wrong. Thank goodness SCO is not a world power, or else we could find ourselves mounting an insurgency against them, too.
-- haaz.
To paraprase a recent /. . . .
l ?tid=109&tid=1 :>
http://slashdot.org/articles/05/02/11/228249.shtm
"If you seal your nose up with industrial-strength super glue, then duct-tape a military gas-mask to your head (with several layers of foil and lead thrown in just for good measure), you can't help but make out the hints(!?) of rot at SCO."
.no
... was 100% right!
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you bash fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a bash terminal for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to grep a dev/null on the hard drive. 20 minutes. At home, on tsch, which by all standards should be a lot slower than bash, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this grep, ls will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even emacs is straining to keep up as I type this.
Hahahahahaha! I kill myself sometimes.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Bingo. IBM wants the case to go on. That was SCO's major miscalculation: They were hoping that Novell, IBM, DaimlerChrysler, Autozone etc were going to settle out-of-court rather than fight. Unfortunately:
:)
* Novell is investing in Linux.
* IBM's investing in Linux and is using the case to validate the GPL.
* DaimlerChrysler, an automobile manufacturer, is highly experienced with quashing frivolous lawsuits of this nature.
* AutoZone etc. is willing to follow the others' leads.
All in all, it's great entertainment.