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SCO Vs. IBM Leaks Exposed
Xenographic writes "Remember all the fuss about SCO subpoenaing PJ of Groklaw, where they allege that she's funded by IBM because she once got a publicly available document from a volunteer at the courthouse a little before it hit the Court's website? That's nothing. Groklaw has evidence that other materials have been leaked in this case — but they weren't leaked to Groklaw, and they weren't leaked by IBM. Information about the sealed materials in question made its way to Maureen O'Gara, who wrote a story based on inside information, displaying a positively uncanny insight into what SCO was planning, including far more than just the sealed document a SCO lawyer read out loud in open court. Interestingly, several witnesses report that Maureen O'Gara did not even attend that hearing, leaving us to speculate about her source."
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200704072 21422994
OK not really but you can make a case that SCO relies on ibiblio servers donated by IBM. Therefore SCO is supported by IBM just as much as Groklaw is. LOL
SCO wants to punish PJ because Groklaw has spoiled their FUD. They can't find her because she's very shy. They try to depose her because then they'll be able to get all her details. The problem is that they need some way to actually connect her to the court cases. So they concoct this story that PJ is a schill for IBM, IBM supports her and IBM feeds her information that should be secret.
SCO's action is an obvious attempt to shut up PJ. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLAPP It isn't precisely a SLAPP, but it's the same idea. The trouble for SCO is that, as the article shows, they have actually done that which they accuse IBM of doing. Talk about dirty hands. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unclean_hands
Since it was a sealed document that O'Gara spoke of, then it must have been either SCO or IBM which revealed it to her...
But IBM isn't that dumb and has much more to lose than SCO by not following procedure. Oh, and did I mention that SCO was the one which attempted to read a sealed e-mail in open court? So I think SCO, in addition to all their FUD, is now on the breaking-rules path.
"All you need is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure." -- Mark Twain
With SCO's reputation being sh*t, pursuing bogus claims about Unix rights it doesn't even have, facing financial ruin, its officers potentially facing civil litigation for pissing away millions upon millions of shareholder's dollars on this crap, and a handful of other problems, I doubt they really care if they are labeled as hypocrites at this point. It's kind of like a murderer worrying about committing perjury - it can't get much worse once it's gone that far.
Maybe IBM should depose Maureen O'Gara? Find out where all that information came from...
Much the same way that Ken Brown of AdTI had problems believing that Linux wasn't based on the Minix codebase. In fact he had so much trouble that he went ahead and published even after Andrew Tannenbaum (no great friend on Linus' in the past) uncategorically told him that this was not the case.
The thing is though, if you accept the notion of computer programmers (Linus, rms, and all the rest of them) devoting all their spare time to creating a Free Software operating system, who do you find it so strange that someone whose expertise lies in the legal sphere should devote her time to defending the same?
There are people who can't program but who write documentation to support their favourite free software projects. Must we assume they too are secretly funded by IBM?
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Dear god, please, please stop using the word "incredulous" as though it were a synonym to "incredible." A person who has a hard time believing something is "incredulous"; the thing they have a hard time believing is "incredible."
The 'shy' bit, in my opinion, covers a multitude of feelings regarding having your online identity too-precisely connected to your meatspace identity. PJ doesn't have to be socially reluctant in order to not want everyone reading her web site to know real-life details about her, but if she is shy then that just makes these feelings more acute. For example, I am not shy, but I did once have a web site that became very popular for a time. It didn't feature a message board, per se, but I received massive amounts of email from readers, some of which I posted back to the site, etc. So there was a pretty large 'community,' and a certain fraction of that community wanted to know personal details about me. I always deflected these requests. As far as I am aware, none of the several hundred people trying to figure out who I was or what I was like in real life were successful.
Did I have a reason for keeping things 'secret' like that? Maybe not, but there is something unsettling about that kind of scrutiny, something you feel like you want to avoid. I don't blame PJ at all for keeping her real-life details mysterious. It makes a lot of sense to me.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
No, pretty much not. The problem with the moderation on slashdot is that it depends on the same fucking morons who read and post to do the moderation. They don't bother thinking about/reading the articles before commenting, why bother with either when judging comments?
Also, one should never forget that people who are experts in a field have their own resources. I don't know about legal issues (IANAL, etc), but have taken a look at Ken Brown's diatribes and he seems to know nothing at all about operating systems.
Everything that Linus would have needed to create Linux from scratch is contained in a 150 pages book, "Fundamentals of Operating Systems", by A.M.Lister. I wrote a "toy" kernel myself in Basic for a simulated virtual machine, in the early 1980s, when I read that book. Unfortunately, the Tandy CoCo that I had at the time was too limited to run a real OS, although there were people running OS/9 on it.
All this is to say that I find Ken Brown's incredulity much more surprising than the fact that Linus wrote his kernel in spare time. Writing 10000 lines in a year? Heck, I once wrote 2000 lines in a week, tested, debugged and documented. Any programmer knows that for every "algorithm" line that you must ponder and twist and turn this and that way to make it work there are a hundred lines of "boiler plate" that you type automatically after a few years experience.
Therefore, I find it quite natural that someone who is as much interested in legal matters as I am interested in computers would be able to produce an amount of work in that field that would amaze me. Perhaps reading and analyzing a ten thousand pages legal brief would be as easy as writing a ten thousand lines program is for me, if I had the necessary interest, talent, and experience.
Require potential moderators to take a pop quiz on TFA before they are allowed to moderate on it.
That would require the "editors" to read TFA so they can write the quiz. That'll never happen.
But then again, I could be wrong.
Short answer: The court system is always slow, but this case is taking at least twice as long as it normally would, for various reasons that all boil down to SCO not wanting to get to trial.
Long answer: It's not unusual for one of the parties in a court case to try to drag it out, so obviously it's the responsibility of the legal system to make sure that doesn't happen -- too much -- and the system is reasonably good at that. However, it's always the defendant who wants a long, drawn-out trial, in the hopes that by the time the court gets around to ruling the issue will have become moot. So, the legal system is designed to allow the plaintiff to drive the process forward, since the plaintiff is generally interested in getting a judgment ASAP.
In this case, however, it's the plaintiff who has been dragging his heels since the first day, because SCO never really wanted to be in court anyway, because they know they can't win. IBM's ability to drive the case forward is somewhat limited because of their position as the defendant, and anyway they seem more interested in making sure that SCO is crushed into molecule-thin paste than rushing things. The judges appear to have recognized quite some time ago what's going on, and their actions have been mixed. On the one hand, they don't want this thing on their dockets any longer than necessary, so they've been trying to define and follow strict schedules. On the other hand, they definitely don't want this thing coming back to them, and SCO is obviously going to appeal if they lose, so they also have a motivation to take their time and make the case appeal-proof. The best way to do that is to allow SCO lots of latitude, and SCO is quite happy to use every opportunity to slow things down.
Even worse, there are other cases involved here as well, including the Novell v SCO case, which is being heard by the same judges as SCO v IBM. Based on the various scheduling orders and when the judges finally decided to dig in their heels and refuse any more delays, SCO v IBM would be moving fast right now, probably just about ready to go in front of a jury, but the Novell v SCO case was filed last year. Since Novell v SCO will resolve many issues that apply to SCO v IBM, it makes sense to resolve them first. Not only that, but Novell's pushing hard for an early resolution (typical plaintiff behavior) because their claim is that SCO owes them lots of money and the more of it SCO spends fighting IBM, the less will be available to pay Novell. So, Judge Kimball made a decision that Novell v SCO should go first. Very sensible, except that Novell v SCO was just filed last year (or maybe late 2005?) and is still in heavy discovery. The discovery phase will be much shorter than SCO v IBM's was, largely because Novell is driving it hard, but it'll still take a year or so. In the meantime, SCO v IBM just has to wait.
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