Slashdot Mirror
A Discussion of SCO's Fate With Groklaw's Pamela Jones
An anonymous reader writes "The SCO Group's current fate can be neatly summarized by the title of Pamela Jones' very first article on the case, back in May 2003 — 'SCO Falls Downstairs, Hitting its Head on Every Step.' In the intervening years PJ and Groklaw can be credited with unearthing and exposing many of the flaws in SCO's case, most notably, obtaining and publishing the 1994 settlement in the USL vs BSDi case. An article at the ITPro site interviews PJ about SCO, the impact of Groklaw and future of free software and the law."
The world's only surviving livewriter.
Pamela Jones deserves a lot of credit. She challenged big corporations with deep pockets, which was personally risky to her. SCO did try to get her involved in the lawsuit.
Interesting also in the article: she mentions she saw what's underneath the corporate media and analysts. Yes, there is a lot of corruption there: you can "buy" favorable reviews with quid pro quo. And no one seems to object, that's just the way business is done. It's not so easy to fight: when you are young, you don't have the power to be different, and if you object, you are out on the street. As you get older (and more senior), you finally can object, except by then you have been doing it for years. So that makes you either an hypocrit, or at a minimum people will be able to come after you for past actions. Any solutions?
So just say thanks to Pamela for what she did.
The SCO cases could drag on for years, or they could end next month. It's hard to say. Groklaw just covering SCO is enough for now.
As SCO management is discovering, they have far less control in bankruptcy than they could before. They were able to control the pace of the pre-bankruptcy cases because they were the plaintiff in most of them. It's different in bankruptcy. The bankruptcy judge, the U.S. Trustee, and the creditors are in charge. The bankruptcy judge keeps shooting down SCO management's wierd legal ideas.
Yahoo Finance says it all: "SCOX is deficient and bankrupt."
This is an excellent example of the power of an educated public. Groklaw would try to educated the public, not just grab a headline. As more people notice this, and it becomes popular / profitable, perhaps media can start to have more depth than a puddle. I think it is awfully nice to get more then a biased cursory glimpse at a story once and a while...
The rise of the Internet in the late 90s was promised by pundits to be a grand revolution of ideas and information. Frankly, it has turned into Eternal September more than naught. :P With Groklaw, it has shown what the promise of what the Internet could be. One person with an opinion and information could share with the rest of the world. With grass roots aid and collaboration, a personal blog has become THE resource of one case and, in some cases, a source of information about Intellectual Property law. Vivà la revolución!
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
PJ - also known as the person who IBM loves since they don't have to pay to give them a big helping hand...
Although she does deserve a nice bonus from all the companies that were aided by her efforts.
She made a place where people could discuss and analyze the case, thus enabling many different minds to come together and put their different strengths to greater benefit. You give people access to the info and let them think for themselves, and you give them power. You also get people lining up to try and help.
Both her and Ray (for the RIAA cases) deserve a lot of credit for putting together a compendium of info that would be way too time consuming for people to get for themselves. They see what is going on in different cases, and can connect the dots. While we were in a sense helping out corporations, we were also helping out ourselves, and without the place to go to get the info and a safe place to discuss it, it wouldn't have happened.
So Thanks PJ, you helped open the window to what SCO was trying to do, and showed what they were hiding. And this is why people are afraid of the open source and info movements - they don't want people able to see what they are up to (such as borrowing code, not disclosing hard to find info, etc).
Dogged determination. Referential integrity in the face of astounding, if typical, high-priced FUD.
Three Cheers to a friend of the open source community, diligent, tenacious, and gleeful in that determination.
Integrity counts. Pamela Jones is a champion of the OSS community and the values it stands for.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Circumstantial evidence suggests, though, that she's just obsessive about her privacy, in a way that puts even the tin-foil hat crowd at Slashdot to shame. Certainly Maureen O'Gara went far enough to publish her address, after which the Pamela Jones living there moved suddenly... so there is a real privacy-obsessed Pamela Jones, who may or may not be the same as the one on Groklaw.
Mostly, though, I'm surprised to see SCO employees posting on Slashdot- you'd think they'd be too busy looking for new jobs to troll here. Of course, if they are still 'working' for SCO, they might as well be browsing Slashdot during the day...
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Darl Mcbride not only managed to drive a somewhat successful company totally into the ground in the space of 3 or 4 years but also managed to totally alienate them from the entire industry and turn the company name into a pariah. Nevertheless he has been personally rewarded in salary and performance benefits in millions of dollars in that time.
We badly need to fix the system where incompetent shysters like him can't even get into that position, let alone be personally rewarded for catastrophic failure.
I mean, what on earth were the SCO board thinking when they agreed his last performance bonus?
Scox was as good as dead before the scam - look at their financials, it's a verifiable fact. If not for the scam, scox would have been gone three years ago.
Darl is making $34K a month, which is not bad for a small-time Utah scammer.
Msft got 4.5 years of premium Linux FUD, for about $50 million - hardly pocket change for msft.
BSF pocketed, at least, $50 million.
Riamondi sold his shares in the high teens.
None of the guilty have been punished in any way, and they are not likely to ever be punished.
IBM has probably spent about between 50 and 100 million defending itself against the bogus lawsuit.
Msft has sent this stern warning: "if you want to contribute to Linux, you better be ready to spend tens of millions in lawyer fees, and spend the next five years in court." Can you say "chilling effect?"
People like PJ feel that they need to cheerlead. But, if you objectively examine the facts, I think you will find that in most respects, scox has already won.
Groklaw is something that professional lawyers read to obtain information. Can you imagine *any* lawyer reading Slashdot for information? I cannot.
I can. Easily. B-)
Seriously, though. I can also imagine a GOOD lawyer reading Slashdot - for leads, ideas, arguments, legal theories, and inspiration (just for starters). But then he'd CHECK them - with dependable source and reference documents, credible witnesses, traceable, certified experts, etc.
Slashdot is a rumor mill. Sometimes it's mostly mist and mirrors. But often where there's smoke there's fire.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way