SCO Missing 16,209 Files?

FileSortingZombie writes "After all the allegations by SCO that IBM is abusing or dragging out the discovery process, over in this story on Groklaw you can read about IBM's objections to what SCO is producing in discovery, not the least of which is that there are suddenly 16,209 fewer files in the privilege log, and IBM wants to know what's become of them. Are they unprivileged, lost, destroyed, already produced, or quite simply gone? As of yet, no one seems to know. All told, IBM found fault with some 76% of their claims, especially one case where IBM says that SCO appears to be trying to claim that a conversation it had with an IBM employee should be considered confidential. One helpful Groklaw reader went so far as to put up this analysis of the complaint on his Web site for those interested in just how objectionable IBM found SCO's filing."

Comments

DAmn

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this crap still going on? This hasn't been thrown out yet?

Re:DAmn

[dnoyeb]

The marketing firm known as SCO has of course deep pokets due to their financing and elimination of any productive branches of their business.

Not only have they marketed their Linux FUD, but appearantly they are good at marketing themselves as valuable as well. Else why would any sane company continue to fun this obvious lawyers party?

analysis link contains no data

[gwn]

... seems to be the nature of SCO's whole case...

(the link produced errors when first posted.)

Coincidental

[treff89]

This is a great example of the corporate corruption plaguing the courts and, ultimately, the globe. Why were these files not seized by court officials if they are so important? In any case, IMHO there should be some form of penalty applied to SCO if these documents really could have had significant sway in terms of the court case. This is a criminal offence? (IANAL)

Re:Coincidental

[ajs]

"if these documents really could have had significant sway in terms of the court case."

You are confusing this with a criminal case where the police seize evidence. This is a civil case, so there is a discovery process.

SCO (the party that filed the complaint in the first place) can do whatever they like with their documents, but every time they pull a stunt like this, their chances of winning this case (which were pretty much limited to litigation risk from the start) drop by an order of magnitude, and the chances that the judge will simply throw the case out of court go up to compensate. Ultimately, they could even be charged with a criminal offense, depending on how blatant it is that they did this to obscure the facts, as opposed to simple incompetence.

To look at it the other way around, imagine how awful it would be if, every time someone sued your company, your books were seized. I can just see the denial-of-service type attacks now. Want to cripple IBM? Sue them just before they file their taxes! ;-)

Take Your Anti-Corporate Nonsense Elsewhere

[mfh]

We are lucky to have something Marshall Berman has enlightened us about and it's called modern progress -- companies can learn and evolve. They don't have to stay the same! They can change!

This is a great example of the corporate corruption plaguing the courts and, ultimately, the globe.

Just because people set up a corporation for the purpose of defrauding an industry -- don't blame all corporations. If we held every single corporation to blame for incorrect practices of employees and management, the economy would collapse. What many businesses are missing today are change mechanisms. Every company is doing something wrong right now. It's the duty of those who work there that see the impropriety to blow the whistle on bad practices, internally and if that fails, externally. If the company in question has the correct business systems in place to enable internal practice auditing to occur, then the company will survive.

Certain people are responsible for SCO's incorrect business philosophy. Let the focus be on them, and what they did wrong, and how they manipulated little old lady stockholders into shelling out big bucks for no reason whatsoever.

Re:Take Your Anti-Corporate Nonsense Elsewhere

[Anonymous Coward]

Certain people are responsible for SCO's incorrect business philosophy. Let the focus be on them, and what they did wrong,...

That's one of the main criticisms of corporations. All the privileges of citizens*, none of the responsibility.

* although these days they seem to have more privilege than citizens

I feel sorry -

[spungo]

for SCO's customers. Ok - the management should be put in front of the firing squad, but the bulk of their employees and their customer base will turn out to be the real victims here. An ideal solution to this fiasco would be the incarceration of McBride/Stowell, and some reputable outfit picking up Unixware and OpenServer for a song, and continuing with their support.

Re:I feel sorry -

[budgenator]

Actualy they treatd us pretty good, we had a app that ran on SCO xenix, a dental office management program, well eventualy we ran out of disk space, and our VAR quoted some seemingly ridiculaous price to upgrade the system, I asked "Why can't you just slap in a SCSI disk in the machine, and move the full directory over to it and clear up the problem" and there answer sounded like BS to me so eventualy I call SCO Tech support about it. They asked who we were, and the system serial number. It turned out the the serial didn't match our liciense, but belonged to a doctor in an other town near the VAR. They contacted the VAR and it turns out that they "lost" our operating system disk set, and during a rebuild, they "borrowed" a disk set from the other practice to get us going. Well the VAR almost lost their reseller license over this, and SCO sent us a box containing a properly licensed version of SCO xenix, and gave the answer that xenix wouldn't allow both IDE and SCSI busses on the same system.

Y2K was a different story, we were had to down load the Y2K patches to a windows machine, slap in a linux cd to raw-right them onto a floppy disk, then load the patches onto the unix machine ( no networking installed on the machine). SCO at that time was basicly a building with the lights on but nobody home.

Re:Contempt

[Analogy Man]

A few findings of contempt (with fines) and potentially disbarring some of their lawyers would push these guys back under the rocks they live under.

If the abuse of the courts is so obvious why wait for an IBM counter suit.

Re:Doh... Just make it disappear...

[KinkifyTheNation]

If you can't beat them, destroy all evidence that you tried.

No effect on SCO stocks anymore

[AnuradhaRatnaweera]

There was a time every single news item on the case used to boost the value of SCO scocks. Not anymore; the hype has died down.

Re:Is this the same SCO ???

[Shag]

No, this is not the same SCO. From my hazy, it's 2:30 AM memory:

The Santa Cruz Operation was, by somewhere in the late '90s or so, not doing so well. Strangely, people seemed interested in this newfangled "Linux" thing. So SCO got borged by Caldera. I forget whether Caldera was already part of the Canopy group at that point, or became a part of it later, but bits of Caldera went into what's now called The SCO Group and what's now called... Tarantella, if I recall.

Not Missing!

[WPIDalamar]

Good lord people, these documents aren't somehow gone. Go RTFA.

1. A while back they claimed a whole bunch of documents as privileged.
2. Now they don't.

What's "missing" is an explanation of why, not the documents themselved. Since they're not privleged, it would go to reason that IBM can now compell them to turn all of those over, only when they do this will we learn if the documents are missing.

It only helps IBMs case all the more

[puppet10]

that even though it may be a tactic, that they (SCO) happen to be lying little bastards.

Re:So that's where Ollie North went...

[Varka]

There's always the possibility that it just wasn't funny. Varka

Re:Take Your Corporate Apoglism Nonsense Elsewhere

[Dun Malg]

poverty in the western world is virtually non-existant.

Do you live in a small town or something? I welcome you to visit practically any major US city and see the multitude of homeless for yourself.

To be fair, homelessness isn't a poverty issue so much as it is a mental health issue. The vast majority of the homeless aren't there simply because they can't find work. It's a shameful situation, to be sure, particularly when such a large portion of the homeless are veterans; but it's not about poverty. Poverty is what you see in rural central america or africa.

Re:I KNOW this goes without saying....

[prgrmr]

In the IBM case, groklaw shows 436 documents, but does not have the text for all of them, but we'll used that number anyway. In 25 months, that's 17.5 docs per month. If we swag an average of 5 pages per doc, the per month download fee is seven bucks. Some people spend twice that on coffee in a week. (Also, Pacer doesn't bill in increments less than $10, so it truly become a per month event).

The real cost involved with the docs is hosting them all and providing the bandwidth for the world (or at least slashdotters) to access them. Oh but wait, that's donated too.

The real *value* PJ provides is her time and analysis, and for that I thank her. But that doesn't excuse people pointing to what amounts to trival aspects of doing what she does and making more out of it than what it is. After all, she's presumably making a living off this as well. And I am most definitely NOT arguing that she shouldn't, just that some of her groupies need to get a reality check.

Re:I Dont want to be SCO.

[snorklewacker]

It's wonderfully colorful and evocative language ... I only wish it were true. IBM Legal will do what is best for IBM, and if it means not drawing out the execution of SCO and coming to some meagre settlement after which SCO withdraws all claims, they are not only inclined to do so, they are more or less obligated.

My thinking is that Novell might just decide to buy out ("buy back" might be more appropriate) what's left when IBM is done with SCO. It won't be much -- it wasn't much before the suits -- but it'll consolidate the ownership of Unix a little more, and anyone still running OpenServer is certainly a ripe migration target.

SCO will go out with a whimper, not a bang. I'm Joe Q. Pundit, and I approve this message.