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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
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!
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.