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SCO Wanted To Gag Torvalds, Moglen

Posted by kdawson on from the can't-say-that dept.

An anonymous reader passes on word of court documents filed by IBM on Friday. The documents contain a copy of a letter, dated 2004, from SCO to IBM's lawyers stating that they tried to keep Linus Torvalds from making disparaging public statements about SCO, speculating erroneously that IBM was the principal funder of OSDL, where Torvalds worked at the time. Quoting: "The company also tried to silence Eben Moglen, the Columbia University professor who, until this month, was a director of the Free Software Foundation, and Eric Raymond, a controversial open-source advocate, saying they claimed to be IBM consultants."

7 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. Alternate link to the same story by psaunders · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here.

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    1. Re:Alternate link to the same story by only_human · · Score: 2, Informative

      The parent link directly above is much better, although it contains the same text as TFA, much of it is anchored links to supporting information.

  2. Re:No mention of PJ??? by only_human · · Score: 4, Informative
    It is mentioned in the linked article:

    SCO also sought to silence Groklaw, a website that follows cases involving open-source software.
  3. Everyone is just copying from Groklaw by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Groklaw "broke" the news April 28 http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200704281 9571717

    Since then all these "anonymous sources" just cite from PJ, without properly giving credit. The second paragraph in the groklaw article reads:

          It also wanted Linus Torvalds, Eben Moglen, and Eric Raymond to be prevented from commenting publicly about the litigation.

  4. Re:How do gag orders work and is it Constitutional by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    It's a court order. Just as a judge can order you to appear before a court, a judge can order you not to say things relevant to a case if he or she thinks that you could be disruptive to the case. Violation of a gag order would be considered non-protected speech because gag orders are only used for things like ensuring that a trial is fair (so there has to be something important at stake) and they are only temporary when they are used.

    If a judge made an obviously bad gag order you would have a chance to defend yourself at your contempt hearing.

  5. Re:Eben gagged himself by Adhemar · · Score: 2, Informative

    Eben gagged himself, in a way, by retiring from his work on the GPL3

    Oh, come on. Eben Moglen's stepping down from the board of directors of the Free Software Foundation. That's nothing near "gagging himself". He's still a professor of law and history of law at Columbia University. He's still the Chairman of Software Freedom Law Center. He's still allowed, able, capable, and free to make as much comments on SCO as he wants.

    He specifically stated in his blog post announcing his stepping down from the FSF that he wants devote more time to writing, teaching, and the Software Freedom Law Center. He considers his years-long FSF work on the GPLv3 as "almost finished", anyway.

  6. Re:SCO stock delisting? by RobertLTux · · Score: 2, Informative

    its not that splits don't count its that the split/dump/resplit/redump cycle will most likely cause thier stock to break one of the other trigger values so even if they do a 10-1 reverse split if the stock then dumps 90% of value (currently trapped investors bailing out) SCOX will ram into the "market cap" triggerwall.

    of course then we have the problem that there are a few different PSJs that will cause massive damage to the cases if they go the not TSCOG way.

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