Microsoft Shown Involved with Baystar and SCO

baryon351 writes "Back a few years ago, when SCO looked like it was hemorrhaging cash, a surprise investment came out of the blue from venture capitalists Baystar. They invested $20 million in SCO and aided their anti-Linux cause, enabling McBride & co. to continue with (now shown incorrect) claims of line-by-line code copying of SCO IP in Linux. Now one of IBM's submissions to the court reveals Microsoft was behind it after all. Baystar's manager says about Microsoft's Richard Emerson: 'Mr. Emerson and I discussed a variety of investment structures wherein Microsoft would backstop, or guarantee in some way, Baystar's investment ... Microsoft assured me that it would in some way guarantee BayStar's investment in SCO.' Despite the denials about their involvement, Microsoft helped SCO continue this charade — and on top of that halted all contact with Baystar after the investment, reneging on their guarantee."

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March 2004:A plea for relief from Microsoft

[NZheretic]

Wednesday, March 10, 2004 A plea for relief from Microsoft's escalating anti-competitive tactics.

An open letter to antitrust, competition, consumer and trade practice monitoring agency officials worldwide.

The role of trade practice and antitrust legislation is to provide the consumer with protection from abusive business practices and monopolies. In one of the most serous cases of monopolization in the information technology industry, the agencies charged with protecting the competitive process and the consumer have utterly failed to stem the offending corporation's anti-competitive practices.

The Microsoft corporation has been under continuous investigation by antitrust policing agencies since 1989. Despite this scrutiny, the Microsoft corporation, using covert and overt anti-competitive business tactics, has maintained an unabated campaign against alternatives to Microsoft Windows operating system platforms and Microsoft applications.

For years the Microsoft corporation has earned around 70% to 80% net profit from sales of its operating systems and application software. Only in areas like Thailand where Linux on the desktop has just begun to gain a foothold has Microsoft stated that it will release versions of its operating system platform and application software at a lower price to Original Equipment Manufactures (OEMs) and retail consumers than is available in the rest of the modern world. Consumers benefit where real competition exists.

The world desktop operating system market remains predominantly monopolized by Microsoft. Over the last decade, Microsoft continued to lever its desktop platform monopoly to the point where it now holds a dominant position worldwide in the application office suite and web browser software markets. On its own, the current USA Department Of Justice (DOJ) settlement with the Microsoft corporation has failed to bring about any restoration of serous competition to the desktop operating system market. Microsoft continues to use similar anti-competitive business tactics in an attempt to monopolize the digital media player and the desktop services server markets. Competing vendors increasingly find that they can no longer compete with Microsoft if they limit themselves to only the traditional closed source model of software development.

In the last six years information technology vendors have adopted techniques and resources from two existing movements geared toward the construction of software. The newer open source movement, represented by the non-profit Open Source Initiative (OSI) corporation, emphasizes the licensing of software in a manner which encourages its collaborative development in an open environment. The older free software movement, represented by the non-profit Free Software Foundation (FSF), focuses on the ethical issues surrounding the licensing of software. The free software movement emphasizes freedoms which are often taken for granted outside of the field of software: the freedom to use, study how something works, improve or adapt it and redistribute.

The Free Software Foundation offers two software license schemes which are compatible with their own goals and those of the Open Source Initiative: The GNU General Public License (GPL) and the GNU Library General Public License (LGPL). Essentially, the GPL and LGPL licenses grant the recipient extra rights than that granted by copyright law. Both licenses insure that a contributer or distributer of a GPL or LGPL licensed work may not further impede downstream recipients the rights granted by the same license. Many developing software in an open source manner have realized that this benefit offered by the GPL and LGPL licenses outweigh any potential losses. The licensing also insures that no contributing or distributing vendor or group of vendors could potentially monopolize the market, insuring that real market competition dictates price. Just as the automotive indus

Re:My firm only uses BSD.

[ettlz]

And it's not like these rumblings haven't come to haunt BSD before now...

Being under oath

[www.sorehands.com]

Except for the fact that Goldfarb was under oath, meaning he goes to jail if he gets caught lying.

Even though it is illegal people do commit perjury. In my case against Star Marketing Group they lied under oath in a declaraction. Mason Stedman claimed that it was the only officer in the company and since he was out of town, he did not receive the summons and complaint. If you look at company's web page shows that that is a lie.

In another case, I had a spammer claim that there is no "affiliate program", both their own corporate web page made reference to it.

Even if caught, these liars will not likely be jailed for it -- such a shame.

Re:My firm only uses BSD.

[Anonymous Coward]

While I'm not the parent poster, I can understand why people who have been in the industry for a long time would trust SCO.

I do think you should consider how SCO was seen in the 1980s and 1990s. They were basically the only vendor who offered x86 UNIX systems of a decent quality that were suitable for commercial use. In the early 1990s, Linux was still rather immature, and wouldn't become viable until several years down the road. The BSD-based systems were embroiled in a legal dispute with AT&T, which severely hindered their development at the time.

While their offerings look rather meager today, SCO systems were quite advanced for their day. SCO XENIX and SCO UNIX, and later OpenServer and ODT, were actually quite a pleasure to use. If you look at most hardware driver disks from the early to mid 1990s, such as those that came with ISA NICs or modems, you'll likely see SCO UNIX, UnixWare, and OpenServer drivers included.

In short, SCO was widely respected by a great number of system administrators. They were an engineering company at their core, and put out great products. Of course, things did change rapidly in the years leading up to the lawsuits. But many system administrators, some who may very well now be managers, had a lot of trust for SCO (or whoever was using the "SCO" name).

Advantages of the SCO lawsuit

[Animats]

The SCO vs. IBM lawsuit has done quite a bit for open source.

• SCO went up against the GPL, and had to back down. Nobody laughs at the GPL any more.
• If someone has to really defend the GPL, it's hard to beat the team of Cravath, Swayne and Moore, the world's leading commercial law firm, funded by IBM, the world's biggest computer company.
• Companies are no longer afraid of legal FUD about open source. That stopped several years ago. Right after SCO threatened big companies, including Goldman Sacks and Damlier-Chrysler, and were laughed off.

The SCO lawsuit has validated open source and the GPL. We don't have to worry about that problem any more.

Re:Suspicions Confirmed

[HiThere]

It's not at all obvious that Sun needed a Unix license. It's never been shown that they actually licensed anything that they didn't already have clear rights to. Possibly they needed to do it in order to put out "OpenSolaris", but that hasn't been demonstrated.

If someone wants to assert that Sun paid the money to finance SCO's lawsuit, I've neither seen nor heard of any specific evidence that contradicts that assertion. Of course, supporting that assertion is another matter. The only evidence to support it is, frankly, speculative. One could equally well assert that SCO was blackmailing Sun, and this was the payoff. No evidence.

All we know is that Sun paid the money, and the timing was, frankly, suspicious. Suspicion isn't proof.

The GPL is a license, not a contract

[Morgaine]

>> it's not a EULA. It's simply a contract

The FSF begs to differ on the latter.

Prof Eben Moglen is the Free Software Foundation's attorney, and of course is strongly involved in framing the GPL's legal content. And in the detailed article "The GPL Is a License, not a Contract", Prof Moglen says very clearly that:

" The GPL, however, is a true copyright license: a unilateral permission, in which no obligations are reciprocally required by the licensor."

It really doesn't get much clearer than that. Read the whole article though for Pamela Jones' typically detailed explanation. Even some lawyers on Slashdot seem to be getting that point wrong.

Re:Suspicions Confirmed

[WindBourne]

Sun obviously needed a Unix license to put out Solaris.

That is 100% false. Sun bought total rights on Unix back in the 80's. SCO had NOTHING that Sun needed. So why the investment? They claim USB and other crap, but SCO has less USB drivers than does Solaris. In fact, there was nothing that SCO had on Solaris. All in all, Sun was simply a partner in this with MS, got caught, and tried to back out like weasels