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The Register vs Groklaw: Who Gets It Right?
microbee writes "Over the past weeks Groklaw has been running a series of articles on new discoveries about SCO and Project Monterey. Surprisingly (to me, as I love both sites), The Register published another article to counter the argument of Groklaw's serials, claiming "it's difficult to envisage Groklaw's conjecture swaying a court case, but it provides SCO with valuable public relations ammunition."" There's also a rebuttal on groklaw as well.
As others are reporting, postings to daddypants@slashdot.org are ignored...
Why not present both sides fully? PJ has already posted a rebuttal to this on Groklaw.
And for the record: Groklaw gets it right
PJ's Rebuttal
Every GrokLaw article has a thread under it entitled "Corrections go here: So PJ can find them" or something of that nature.
The Register article's claims about PJ retracting statements are not backed up by any evidence.
Strange, since PJ concedes that she changed a statement after the article.
Most of this centered around SCO's Third Amendment Complaint. SCO's Third Amendment Complaint claimed that under the Project Monterey Contract IBM had no right to port UNIX to the POWERPC platform, by doing so IBM had broken the contract and misappropriated SCO's intellectual property.
It takes time to research an assertion like this, and only recently have people been able to dig up and post documents relating to the above assertion by SCO.
The problem seems to be that where GORKLAW readers were fully aware of the Third Amendment Complaint, reference to that document was not made in the recent GROKLAW articles (it was evidently assumed).
It is almost certain that Andrew (writing for TheRegister) was not aware of the Third Amendment claim and did not dig deeply enough into GORKLAW's archive to find a copy of the original court document (I am too lazy to do it for you but it is easly accessable on GORKLAW).
It appears that this lacking piece of information has resulted in substantial misunderstanding.
Tom
Yes, she corrected an error in the article. (Concedes?) The point appears to have been a minor quibble about phrasing...though if I wanted to defend this position I should probably check it again. It didn't appear to be major to me at the time that I read it. (And you don't explain why you consider it significant, so I don't know what evidence I should be looking for.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Considering PJ's main focus was to point out that both old SCO (now Tarantella) and new SCO (previously Caldera) were fully aware that IBM was using Unix based technology on the POWER architecture, which appears to be in contradiction to new SCO's current claims.
Of course, this being el Reg, I'm never entirely sure whether or not to take said tariff with a pinch of salt. Overall, I think I'm tending toward not.
It doesn't diminish my my affection for the rag, I just don't take them too seriously when they pull sudden a volte-face in favour of someone with deep pockets.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Look further down in the comments section of that article by PJ. She points out that she did make a minor adjustment in her phrasing of the stopgap phrase in order to be clearer about what she meant. Orlowski misinterpreted her intention, and she promises to try to be clearer in the future.
An integral part of every Groklaw discussion is the "Corrections here" thread. PJ (whose blog it is) bends over backwards to make sure the facts are correct. I can't think of another web site where fairness is upheld so strictly.
This is not to say that PJ and the others posting on the site don't have opinions of course.
she didn't actually change her point of view, but she just clarified a statement as she thought the Register writer misinterpreted it.
PJ's response covers the POWER issue, because that
was the subject of her stories. The reason it is the
subject of her stories is due to SCO's proposed 4th
amended complaint, which seeks to argue that IBM
released AIX on Power without their permission.
Of course, you can be forgiven for thinking this is
peripheral, because Orlofsky's story doesn't mention
it at all. Like PJ, I'm not at all clear what he
thinks he's rebutting in his rebuttal.
However, I agree that it isn't a very good putdown.
Hardly a putdown at all, in fact.
Sorry but this is not a rebuttal of what I said. I said that the Register article's claims:
That remains true: the Register article doesn't specify what statements PJ retracted, with quotes and/or links. So even if the Register's claim were right, it is true that it gave no EVIDENCE for it, which is what I said.As to the correctness of the Register's claims, what PJ "admits" is that she made a small modification to ONE statement. Contrast that with the Register article's claim that:
As far as I can tell, NO phrases have "disappeared", and only one statement has been modified, in a rather minor way. This is hardly vindication for the Register article's overblown claims.Oh, please.
Since when does "open forum" = "unbiased forum"?
In point of fact, I'd have to say that pretty much ALL of the groklaw contributors (by which I mean articles, rather than comments) are pretty much "anti-SCO", but this doesn't mean that the site isn't open.
Last time I checked the T&C you didn't have to promise faithfully to switch your brain off and follow the party line to comment over at Groklaw. Nor does PJ go through every comment ensuring that the purity of the site's Anti-SCO bias is untarnished.
That's near enough "open" for my liking.
Oh, god, here we go again.
The SCO that threatened Microport is not the SCO that is suing IBM.
Santa Cruz Operation != The SCO Group.
This SCO is Caldera. Caldera who used to sell Linux. Remember them?
Got it?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
In 1979, Larry and Doug Michels founded The Santa Cruz Operation ("oldSCO"). Santa Cruz was then partly held by Microsoft. They ported UNIX to the 8086, releasing Xenix-86 in 1983, followed by releases for the '286 and '386 chips. (Both Santa Cruz and Microsoft sold Xenix at various times.)
In 1994, Caldera was founded as a Linux distributor by Ransom Love and Bryan Sparks, financed and guided by Novell founder Ray Noorda.
In 1995, Santa Cruz bought Xenix from Microsoft and UNIX/UnixWare from Novell.
In 1996, Caldera bought DR-DOS from Novell, and promptly sued Microsoft over antitrust.
In 1998, Project Monterey was announced between IBM, Sequent, and Santa Cruz.
In 1999, Microsoft sold off all it's Santa Cruz shares.
In 2000 (January), Microsoft settled the DR DOS case with Caldera for between $60 and $150 million. In March of that year, Caldera Systems reincorporated in Delaware, receiving a $30 million investment from Sun, Santa Cruz, Citrix, Novell and venture capitalists and made an IPO. Ray Noorda then owned 73% of Caldera Systems. In a deal announced in August of 2000 and completed in the Spring of 2001, Caldera bought the server and OS part of oldSCO. OldSCO then changed its name to Tarentella, which (in 2005) sells a nice directory for Unix. At some point after the UNIX purchase, apparently, Ray Noorda stopped giving much guidance to Caldera.
It was widely believed, that Caldera's purchase of Santa Cruz' UNIX group would mean the end of Monterey. Certainly it gave IBM an out, since their Monterey contract specified that a change in control could end the agreement.
In January 2003 IBM made some public statements implying that they were using their AIX knowledge to advance Linux.
In March of 2003, Caldera sued IBM for copyright infringement, I mean trade secret violations, I mean "this has always been a contract case". In July, Caldera changed its name to "The SCO Group".
As far as I know, none of the people calling the shots at The SCO Group (Caldera) have anything to do with The Santa Cruz Operation.
sigs, as if you care.