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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."

32 of 273 comments (clear)

  1. Haha! by slashalive · · Score: 5, Funny

    Gotta hope they didnt empty their trashbins!

  2. analysis link contains no data by gwn · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    (the link produced errors when first posted.)

    1. Re:analysis link contains no data by Randy+Wang · · Score: 3, Funny

      Wow. Almost makes me wonder if they just ran out of toner for their printer. :-)

      --
      --- Egads, I glow in the dark!
  3. Coincidental by treff89 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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)

    1. Re:Coincidental by Ibix · · Score: 5, Interesting

      My understanding, from reading Groklaw, is that this is a list of documents that SCO claim they cannot be compelled to reveal for one reason and another (attorney-client priviledge, for example). IBM will have submitted a similar list. The list was initially submitted without court oversight by agreement of both IBM and SCO. However, the list has been re-submitted because (IIRC) SCO are challenging some items on IBM's list. SCO's list is a LOT shorter, this time around.

      Why is it shorter? Could be a genuine mistake by SCO. One suggestion, again from a Groklaw poster, is that it's a tactical ploy by IBM. They agree to an initial unsupervised submission, knowing that SCO will declare (nearly) every paper they possess to be priviledged. They also know that SCO are going to challenge something on IBM's list. As soon as they do so, IBM and SCO have to re-submit their lists, with justifications for each document this time. IBM can do this easily. SCO can't because they don't have justification for much of it. IBM can then stand up and say "look at the lying little bastards, Judge" (however you say that in legalese). Just a theory (I think), but an entertaining one.

      I

    2. Re:Coincidental by ajs · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "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! ;-)

  4. Missing? by AntEater · · Score: 5, Funny

    " there are suddenly 16,209 fewer files in the privilege log"

    That's awfully close to 16,384 missing files. I wonder if SCO is using MS Excel to keep track of their privilege log.

    --
    Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
    1. Re:Missing? by LosManos · · Score: 4, Funny

      hi.

      >That's awfully close to 16,384 missing files. I wonder if SCO is
      >using MS Excel to keep track of their privilege log.

      More probably they are using old intel processors.

      /OF

  5. Re:DAmn by dnoyeb · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

  6. Have they checked behind the copy machines? by physicsphairy · · Score: 3, Funny
    If they're not there, they should try accusing their Chinese employees of espionage.

    Works every time!

  7. Take Your Anti-Corporate Nonsense Elsewhere by mfh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
    1. Re:Take Your Anti-Corporate Nonsense Elsewhere by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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

  8. Re:DAmn by MoonFog · · Score: 4, Informative

    Who says they haven't? Right now it's IBM and others pressing the issue forth in what seems like an attempt to bury this case forever.

  9. I KNOW this goes without saying.... by i_want_you_to_throw_ · · Score: 3, Informative

    but Groklaw DOES cheerfully accept donations. I'm also sure that you went over and gave P.J. at least a couple of bucks didn't you? Didn't you?

    You know folks the cure for FUD is an informed populace. God Bless you PJ. There is a place in heaven for you.

  10. I Dont want to be SCO. by jellomizer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    With many of their lawsuits being thrown out of court, It is just makings IBMs counter Suit so much easier. IBM at least early on in the process asked many of its larger customers to report to them any Time loss due to this lawsuit, including meeting on changing strategy away from Linux or talking about purchasing the Linux License. IBM seems to have a big counter suit coming that will probably cripple SCO. But they will wait untill SCO empties its funds before IBM fights back.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    1. Re:I Dont want to be SCO. by kfg · · Score: 5, Informative

      What purpose would it serve to wait?

      SCO will not have the resources to adequately defend itself. IBM will be able to pound away and, at the very least, force SCO to a settlement on IBM's terms, the very opposite of what SCO had intended by this whole legal schmegegy; and at most leave a smoking crater whose bones it can pick at its leisure.

      SCO goes bankrupt, IBM won't be able to collect anything. Unless that's a false assumption. . .

      Assets man, assets! They claim one rather valuable one in particular.

      . . .why continue spending money on attornies when it's coming out of your own budget?

      The simplest reason is that they are the defendant. The plaintif is in the driver's seat. IBMs only choices are to see out the case or settle. Countersuits are offense as defense; and if someone's been pounding you in the courts you might feel inclined to pound back a little longer and harder than is strictly necessary when you get the upper hand. Especially if you know the suit was only filed in the first place out of some scum sucking corporate business tactic that has no real merit on its own.

      But I believe the more pressing issue is what I wrote in my very first post on the whole SCO "thing."

      Millions for defense. Not one damned cent for tribute.

      IBM does not seem inclined to settle. Go figure. It is simply in IBMs, indeed the entire industry's, best interests to leave a smoking crater where SCO used to stand to serve as a practical example of what happens to people who file a lawsuit in an attempt to force a buyout.

      No matter what it costs. Otherwise you might just as well paint a huge target around your asshole, put sand in the Vaseline, and bend over. ...assuming that SCO loses, and goes bankrupt, don't they get to rise back from the ashes?

      No. There are two kinds of bankruptcy. The first kind is for those businesses that if it weren't for the debt load would still be viable businesses. Somehow, somewhere along the line, they acquired debt that is crushing the company, but business is good. So the courts absolve them of enough of their debt and/or restructure some of it to make them a going concern again. It's a cashflow issue and a win/win for everybody, because a going concern turning a profit is better able to pay debt monies. And taxes.

      This is the sort of bankruptcy that saved Man(Gag!Choke!Vomit!)diva. In the Rolls-Royce case the court was perspicacious enough to realize that the debt of only one division was dragging the whole company down, which was otherwise profitable, and allowed the car division to live on as a seperate entity unencumbered by the debts of the aero engine division, which it liquidated.

      There are also laws to protect viable companies from being bankrupted by court judgments, since a bankrupt company cannot pay the judgment. . .or taxes. A judgement must be within the means of the company to pay it or everyone loses. Thus all those godzillion dollar judgments that you read about juries handing down are always reduced at a later date, or, at the very least, structured in such a way that amounts to a reduction (you owe plaintif $1 a year for a legal eternity, not to exceed payments of a godzillion dollars)

      Then there's the other kind of bankruptcy. Liquidation. The kind applied to the aero engine division of Rolls-Royce. If you're so far down the hole that you not only can't pay your debts, but have no means of producing income either, then you are not allowed to rise from the ashes. From ashes you came, to ashes you shall return.

      In this case the courts absolve you of debts, but sieze the assets of the company to be used in defraying them. Assests may be distributed directly or, as is more often the case, auctioned off to raise money. There's nothing left of a company after this but a piece of paper. They have no debts, but no income, no assets, and very likely a bunch of pissed

  11. Missing documents by budgenator · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The thought occurred to me is that if SCOX, seems to have removed 16209 files from their privilege logs without reason, most likely clerical errors ect.; how is anyone ever going to trust them to maintain anything as complicated as a source tree?

    --
    Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
  12. I feel sorry - by spungo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:I feel sorry - by argent · · Score: 3, Funny

      I feel sorry for SCO's customers.

      Me too, but I've always felt sorry for SCO's customers. I've been one. And, well, even when SCO was real SCO it wasn't very nice being a SCO customer.

      I don't know if I want to go into details. I'd be hear all day, and I need to be watching my blood pressure.

    2. Re:I feel sorry - by argent · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Actually they treated us pretty good [good customer service story deleted]

      I have no complaints with their customer service. It's their software that burned me... over and over and over again.

      xenix wouldn't allow both IDE and SCSI busses on the same system

      Yeh, that kind of thing. And the driver configuration. And the horrible things they did to System V system configuration. And the driver configuration again, because they kept changing it. And doing the same config in 3 places with 3 different tools because the file formats were undocumented. And Secureware. And... oh, god, I can't do this. I WILL stop now.

  13. Inside Baseball Leading /.ers to Law School? by stupidnickname · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This doesn't seem like a stunning development in the case; more of a minor "whoops" with a variety of possible explanations. The documents now seemingly not covered by privilege may or may not be informative, the "whoops" may or may not have been strategic and/or intentional, those documents still claimed as privileged may or may not be disputed based upon lack of information demonstrating the privilege. But it's still inside baseball: there's nothing so new here as to warrant a major news flash.

    What is interesting, at least to me, is the possibility that The SCO Group has unwittingly created an entire generation of technically literate individuals who have also closely followed the inside working of a major lawsuit. Through PJ and Groklaw, and secondarily through /. and other sources, hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of individuals have read actual court documents, debated the meaning of standing, venue, attorney-client privilege, chain of evidence, discovery, and god knows what else.

    This must be resulting in some sort of predisposition in young technogeeks for law school, or at least for thinking about legal issues. I don't want to say that it's a substitute for sitting through a contract law course, or even a legal textbook, but reading a year of comments on Groklaw must be preparing generations of youngish technology people for pursuing law as a career. It's like a real-time moot court on technology issues. The technically-minded can be drawn to the law as just another complex system, one with its own terminology, protocols, communications systems, manuals. Possibly, through following the inside baseball of this case, they might develop enough of an interest in law to choose to hack that system.

    We'll call them the "SCO generation".

    --
    It's over now. That, or it's go time. One of the two. acts of gord
    1. Re:Inside Baseball Leading /.ers to Law School? by aziraphale · · Score: 3, Funny

      Baseball, eh?

      You keep using this word. I do not think it means what you think it means...

      Possibly this is a secret trigger code. Some terrorist cell is waiting for a posting by 'stupidnickname' on the 26th of April. If it uses the word 'Baseball', then the attack should be by land - if 'basketball', then by sea...

      Or, maybe you have a rare psychiatric condition which causes you to substitute the words 'inside baseball' whenever you mean 'legal arguments'...

      Whatever, the bizarre use of language almost caused me to completely overlook the wild generalisation and crazed extrapolation of the rest of the post. Well done!

  14. Only one thing for it... by Zocalo · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Paging Mr. Sarbanes and Mr. Oxley...

    Surely *some* of those 16,000 and change documents are going to be covered by Sarbanes Oxley's data retention requirements. Do Darl McBride and Ralph Yarro have some kind of sado-masochistic desire to be investigated by the SEC or something, because this sure sounds like a hunting license to me.

    --
    UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
  15. Re:Doh... Just make it disappear... by KinkifyTheNation · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

  16. No effect on SCO stocks anymore by AnuradhaRatnaweera · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  17. What is a "privilege log"? by RedLaggedTeut · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Well, I am still not fully sure what a privilege log is but it seems to be a list of documents which were compiled between SCO and its lawyers and are to be protected from court enquiry.

    I guess IBM can be happy that these documents are missing from the list now, since it means they can try to subpoena them.

    --
    I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
  18. Hmmm... by dadjaka · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It makes you wonder. They sent out mail asking for money to make Linux 'legal', and yet they can't keep track of simple files. Hate to think where my money would have gone had I been dumb enough to actually pay up.

  19. So that's where Ollie North went... by advocate_one · · Score: 4, Funny

    I always wondered what happened to him... looks like he's been very busy at the shredders again...

    --
    Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
  20. Utterly wrong on so many levels... by titzandkunt · · Score: 4, Informative


    "Linux was based on Minix. A UnixLite OS designed to run on PCs. However, it was really only a teaching tool. Andrew Tanenbaum repeatedly refused to add the new (legitimate) features the users and even developers asked for. Linus Torvalds set out simply to add functionality to his own version of Minix (the copyright allows use to do so for your own personal use, but you cannot sell or distibute it).

    Over time, in adding functionality to Minix, Linus Torvalds found that he had created an entirely new kernel. I was very similar to Minix but used none of the Minix source code..."


    (Who modded the preceeding garbage "Informative!?)

    Linux began as a development that was hosted on a pc running Minix. Linus set out, from the start, to create a posix compatible kernel of his very own. The idea that he created the kernel by accident is as laughable as it is insulting.

    See here for a a rather more factual account of the development of the Linux kernel.

    T&K.

    --
    Political language ... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable...
  21. Not Missing! by WPIDalamar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  22. Re:Take Your Corporate Apoglism Nonsense Elsewhere by Rob+Kaper · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why oh why? Maybe democracy is more of a long-term thing than you think. Maybe a bloody war is more of a short-term thing than you think.

    And please trade in your illusions for a copy of the constitutional treaty if you get to vote on it, and read it. As EU citizen I am far, far more concerned about the Brussels bohemeth then whether Bush and Cheney make more money on the Iraq war than the UN did on the food-for-oil scandal. At least the former group removed a dictator.

    You're right about one thing though: poverty in the western world is virtually non-existant. It's a statistical joke defined as earning less than half the average income, so every generation nearly doubling its wealth is completely left out of the equation.

    How you turn that into a sad thing, I do not know.

    So relax people, the 21st century is yet another one where life is better than in the one before. Bit off-topic for a SCO discussion but seriously, some people get so pessimistic over nonsense it's frustrating.

  23. Re:Hey! I cheerfully accept donations, too by petecarlson · · Score: 3, Funny

    Because of your willingness to donate to my decesed father, I have decided that I can trust you in the fullest despite the fact that you may be supprised to be recieving this note. I am the sole surviving heir of the Honorable Mr Anonymous Coward. As you may well know, he was the leader of the Teritorial Region's Outer Limit and ammassed massive reserves of -$karmaks which have been deposited in an account here. Due to the new slashlaw imposed after his death, I am in need of a regular account into which I will transfer $100,000,000,000,000 (-K) . As a payment for your troubles, you can keep 100,000,000,000,000 (-K). In order for us to make this transaction swift, Send me your Username and Password as well as your Name, Address, SSN, DOB, Mothers maiden Name, phone number, and bank account number. I am trusting in your descritedness in this sensitive matter.