Slashdot Mirror
Grokking SCO's Demise
An anonymous reader writes "You have already heard the news that the SCO Group's US$5 billion threat against Linux is effectively finished. It was the Web site Groklaw.net that broke the news and posted the complete 102-page ruling; after that, it was picked up by mainstream media and trade press.
In fact, it's Groklaw that has covered every aspect of SCO's legal fights with Linux vendors IBM , Novell and Red Hat and Linux users Daimler Chrysler and AutoZone ever since paralegal Pamela Jones started the site as a hobby in 2003. This feature does a great job of chronicling Groklaws' hand in the demise of SCO's case."
If, after looking at everything carefully, you conclude that the GNU/Linux people were right, how can you call what they say, "partisan crowd noise" ? Perhaps you need to remove that M$ beam from your eye. GNU/Linux people correctly identified the motives, facts and outcome of this trial in days. Then they meticulously documented every bluff, bluster and lie from the SCO/M$ PR people threw out over years in their criminal abuse of the judical system. How can anyone possibly hold the same level of credibility for M$/SCO and GNU/Linux advocates after all of that? This is only something you can do if you are a dedicated MicroSoftologist. It is completely irrational.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
SCO is dead!? I just bought a new SCO Source license yesterday for $699! Why wasn't I told about this sooner? Thanks a lot, guys.
Anyway, I'm still glad I have the peace of mind of fully licensing all of SCO's Unix intellectual property within my installation of Ubuntu. If you'd like this peace of mind, buy today at:
http://www.caldera.com/scosource/
Now does anyone know where I can purchase a rock that wards off tigers?
I'm a big tall mofo.
Perhaps instead of expending all that time, effort, money, and resources on suing the whole world (and causing the whole world to expend a similar amount of time, effort, money, and resources to defend itself), SCO should have concentrated on making technically superior products, marketing them effectively, and earning the rewards that come from making good business decisions. But no, they had to go play the lawsuit lottery. Well, playing that lottery is gambling and is no different than going to a casino and throwing millions on a Poker table. Maybe you'll win, but probably you won't.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
Groklaw is the best thing to come out of SCO's mess. Thanks PJ.
The way TFA starts about the August 10th ruling, you could think it was a recent event. The author refers to the summary judgment decision of 8/10/2007.
Since then there was a trial, and currently the bankrupt SCO is waiting for the final judgment to be entered to appeal - mainly that year old decision.
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
Some folks are still willing to see SCO as the 'comeback kids' (Found from a Groklaw link from today
And, of course, McBride is still harping about how misguided all the 'naysayers' are. Ah, corporate message control - so consistent, no matter the insanity of what is said.
I guess that's the point of freedom - for every choice that can be used to help build something greater, there is also choice to harm others. It's too bad that so much freedom ends up being used to crush the freedom of others for minimal short-term benefit, like those of SCO (which in turn was at least partly on behalf of Microsoft's FUD campaign).
Ryan Fenton
Ryan Fenton
Umm, has anyone else noticed TFA is claiming the judge's ruling from over a year ago was made last week?
From the article:
Did Groklaw really have an impact on those court cases? Naaah.
I love Groklaw as much as the next guy, but this article is truly worthless; it just reads as worthless praise for groklaw without even so much as a particular.
And SCO is a nice pelt to hang on the fence for anyone getting similar ideas. The SCO case was a stereotype of every piece of misinformation MS had ever put out about Linux and they got crushed. It's also a good example for companies thinking about getting in bed with Microsoft, which financed this whole charade. I wonder if Sun will ever live it down that they were part of the clown posse?
IBM showed a lot of foresight and got to dish out a little payback to MS over the OS2 incident. You can't buy that kind of advertising and then using it to tweak Redmond was priceless.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Groklaw was certainly informative, and it is nice to see major media give a nod of thanks to an internet site that had done their research. What I wonder is where is Groklaw to grok next?
I'd vote for Groking RIAA, big time.
Grok IP law and squelch that mess once and for all.
And since it the season, groking certain political parties (or all of them) would be nice.
Pamela has taught us (well, at least myself) quite a few things about tech and the law:
* Legal matters may be messy, disgusting things, but in a perverse way, being a lawyer or judge often requires as much (if not more) logical and mental discipline than programming ever did.
* This crap takes time. Five years... five years! Just to throw out what folks who knew better (read: those of us who lived/worked/breathed Linux) saw instantly as an obvious cock-and-bull scam by a dying dot-bust corporation.
* There's a lot going on behind the curtain. Without Groklaw, Microsoft could have credibly denied being any part of the proceedings, and would've been almost perfectly insulated from the whole SCO mess. Now, they're painted with 98 shades of evil, and the tech community at large** has even more reason to reject them unless absolutely necessary.
* Most folks think that IT/Tech is pretty insulated and isolated from the usual crap that infects most businesses. Groklaw proves otherwise. As much as we'd like to be otherwise, we're just as mired and smothered in politics and legal crap as any other commercial endeavor.
I highly recommend Groklaw as a solid starting point for any CS student, perhaps as a semester or two of curricula... just to get the students to realize just what the hell kind of crazy world they're signing on to.
** I mean real techs who use multiple platforms, not "Em-See-Ess-Aaay's" who happily swallow Redmond's Kool-Aid (among other fluids) on a near daily basis.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Exactly how is this the power of open source? Looks to me more like the power of high priced corporate attorneys.
What is this article doing that is great? At best it is a 100,000 foot view of the past 5 years...but there is no "chronicling" going on.
The information in this article is barely worthwhile to someone who knows nothing about the SCO case (and that type of person wouldn't care about Groklaw anyways), and has ZERO information in it for everyone else.
It's a simple matter of complex programming.
Like donating to the site. It's a massive amount of work that PJ has put into the site. So if you got a few bucks, donate. Sorry, but it has to be said and PJ won't say it.
Although many of us pointed out the question of Novell's
ownership of the actual copyrights at the outset, why isn't the
law structured to eliminate much sturm and drang by hoisting
this test out of the loop as an initial cutoff? Or were
the parallel lawsuits invoked without common sense
serialization just done for fun? I suspect the real reason
is that the motion practice follies made for good
billable hours...
It is kinda like how people say "we won" when their favorite sports teams win.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
Thing is, I believe that SCO knew it was doomed from the start, but did it anyway.
McBride still made millions of bucks off of the deal, as did most of SCO's principals. Unless/Until there's criminal proceedings for SEC violations, they probably don't care, and are only making noises for long enough to provide plausible deniability. In short - they got their dough, and they probably don't care what happens to SCO from this point on.
SCO lasted five years longer than it probably would have if it had simply died quietly as Yet Another Dot-Bust Carcass.
Finally, most corps know nowadays that getting into bed with MSFT is a sure recipe for disaster. PlaysForSure, HD-DVD, Windows Defender, OS/2, and numerous other smaller examples are proof-positive of just how badly you get burned in any partnership with MSFT... unless of course you're Microsoft. I think only NBC has managed to not get raped in a MSFT partnership (and even then, only because of NBC's vastly different market segments).
As for Sun? I think they simply got caught in the crossfire. They were looking to license SVR permanently so that they could protect (and eventually open-source) Solaris. Otherwise, they were (and are) hating life anyway, as market dynamics dictate that buying pricey Sparc-based servers is kinda stupid for most applications.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
In fairness to Sun, Sun actually got something from their SCO agreement. They paid SCO for the right to essentially open source Solaris as some parts of Solaris were covered by their Unix agreements. The problem was SCO didn't have the right to grant Sun this ability. Only Novell has this right. MS on the other hand, paid tens of millions of dollars for things they haven't used yet. Maybe future versions of Windows will use parts of legacy Unix and the newer Unixware, but I doubt it.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It isn't the "spite-driven, FSF worshiping Zealots" who sound bitter, my anonymous friend.
I don't care why you're posting AC
I have always wondered who Pamela Jones is. This lady is very meticulous in what she does and I congratulate her. I have done an image search on Google and got some images.
But I am not sure the images I get in the search actually represent Pamela Jones. Googling my own name returns images other than mine!
Request: I am looking for a kind slashdotter to help me put a face on the name "Pamela Jones" of Groklaw.net.
Thanks.
The real turning point in the case was when IBM decided to fight SCO's claims and put Cravath, Swaine, and Moore LLP on the job. Cravath is very good; they say of themselves "Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP is known as the premier American law firm.", and nobody laughs. They're very organized and thorough. Cravath was the first firm to use litigation support systems (developed by IBM for an IBM case). They can't be snowed with documents; they'll put enough people and hardware on the job to deal with truckloads of materials when necessary. At times, the staff for a single case has filled a sizable office building. This is expensive, but it works.
It works especially well when the other side has voluminous but bogus claims. That's what happened with SCO. All SCO's claims were analyzed by that huge staff, checked, and countered. In the end, SCO had nothing left.
Groklaw reported on all this, but Cravath really did the work.
Oh, I don't think the SEC has even started yet. Those things take time, and the SEC is waiting for the legal fallout to happen first. This is a typical pattern for the SEC as well, where they wait for all of the normal legal evidence to come out in the various lawsuits, and then add the final insult to injury in the end.
Too bad the SEC couldn't have saved the shareholders (*cough*) some grief by more closely investigating the pump and dump accusations. From what I've seen, besides the compensation on the part of the senior execs at SCO, the only other people who've made money on SCO were those who shorted the stock. Even that wasn't a fantastic deal due to the protracted nature of this legal fight.
I will say that this company seems like the ultimate zombie that just can't be killed. They've used up at least seven of the nine lives that should have killed them a long time ago, and yet they keep coming back for more. I'm really interested in seeing just how much longer they can last... and wondering if the creditors who are taking over the company ownership need to get their head examined for wanting to continue the lawsuits. Then again, who is so incredibly stupid as to loan money to SCO with the hopes that it will someday be paid back?
There was an AC who was bitter
That frosty piss belonged to twitter.
For twitter is boring
When he's karma-whoring
Ain't he a loathsome critter?
Ignore this signature. By order.
Darl, is that you doing AC posts to Slashdot again?
Well actually Microsoft used to be 98 shades of evil. Then they tried to make evil pretty for the MillEnnium. After that they grew to 2000 shades of evil. Eventually they became eXPerienced at being evil. Finally nowadays they've moved to a much broader form of evil. A VISTA if you will.
SFU is a licensed port os System Vr4 running on Windows. It's not BSD based and never was. Also, remember that Xenix was sold to The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) and Microsoft made agreements with them about what they could and couldn't do. SCO later sold all their Unix intersts to Caldera, and changed their name to Tarantella, and Caldera became the "new" SCO.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
What is most incredible to me is that Darl McBride and company will be able to walk away from this... humbled and humiliated publicly, but nonetheless able to walk away and try to do the same all over again. Everyone knows what they did was socially and economically unethical, and yet the corporate Old Boys' Network simply views what they did with a knowing wink and a nod. In the back social rooms, McBride will laugh and joke and reminisce with other CEOs about his stunt, and perhaps even be offered a few sage tips how he can improve his chances the next time. For people like this, there's always a next time because they never pay the full consequences of their actions.
"If SCO's lawsuit failed because Novell rather than SCO owns UNIX, does that mean Linux is now infringing on Novell IP rather than SCO IP?"
I would say give a resounding nope! to that question. First of all the lawsuit failed because SCO couldn't find any evidence that Linux infringes any of their/Novells IP at all. The APA was just the final nail in the coffin. SCO couldn't find anything even remotely tangible in Linux when compared to the AT&T/Novell code base. If they had found anything they wouldn't had their whole case thrown in whole out the window after having gotten years of extensive discovery without finding anything.
Linux is in the clear and Novell isn't much to worry about. Most if not all of the AT&T code base is in the clear because of the agreement with BSD that made any BSD code or derivative in the clear. That makes it very hard for eg. Novell to make claims against Linux or any *nix derivative. That and the fact that UNIX is a standard that Novell doesn't own or control. AT&T isn't UNIX, AT&T is a UNIX variant.
Its actually more likely that Novell infact infringes on the Linux kernel than the other way around. I havent researched but i guess an audit of SUSE or OES would turn out some questions to investigate, like NSS and novfs and how they interact with the kernel etc and if sourcecode is avaliable.
HTTP/1.1 400
If, after looking at everything carefully, you conclude that the GNU/Linux people were right, how can you call what they say, "partisan crowd noise" ?
Ain't nothing sacred about being right. People become partisan because we believe that there's something 'right' about that partisan attitude. Sometimes we're right. Sometimes we're wrong.
PJ is, in this case, both clearly pro-Linux and clearly right. She claims and I believe) that if things were coming out tha would have been clearly bad for the linux side, she would have documented it just as clearly (unhappily but clearly).
As somebody else intimated, pretending to be unbiased is one of the prime inauthenticities. Journalists (unfortunately) get taught to write like they're dispassionate (no matter how biased they are -- or are told to be -- about what's going on). It really messes up the people who buy that line.
That's part of the reason why I like (pseudo) amateur rags.... they'll actually say things like "We hate so and so. we think you should to, and here's why (no matter how sucky the reasons why may be). That way, you at least know their bias, and can read around it.
PJ is about the best I think we can hope for: She's open about her bias and attempting to produce the most clean record possible inside of that bias. Sge states her bias and her opinions, and then gathers together as much of the documentation a spossible so that you can check her opinions against reality.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Then the court system is rotten to the core. :) :)
Luckily it isn't
How do you think a paralegal site should (and could) influence a court case significantly?
The courts must (and i bet they would) have decided the same way without Groklaw.
Of course Groklaw was sorely needed to dispel the fud and to keep concerned people informed.
It balanced SCO quite well, even with its 'partisan noise'
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Let the names of the "expert testimony" scumbags that aided and abetted the SCO scam; selling themselves for a few dollars at the expense of their good names. Two come to the top of the list: Marc Rochkind and Thomas Cargill.
May their names be soiled with SCO for all time.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
The ".PK" means that they are "pink sheet" - penny stock, less than one dollar a share. The "Q" means that they are in bankruptcy. So the stock was originally called SCOX, then they declared bankruptcy and fell below $1 (I forget the order), and now they're SCOXQ.PK.
Perhaps I'm missing something here. When did SCO have a major run-up on their stock?
From what I understand, SCO was one of the most heavily shorted public stocks ever. So much so that a number of even stock brokers who know what was going on with the lawsuits were discouraging clients from getting too aggressive on the stock in this way.
BTW, a short position can have a varying window that you need before you "buy it back". It all depends on the contract that you sign, although I would agree it tends to be in the range of a few weeks to a few months... not the years and years it has been with SCO lately. I do remember that shortly before it was delisted on NASDAQ, the price suddenly shot back up briefly, and there was quite a bit of speculation that it was due to some large groups of folks covering their short positions. That was about the only "good news" I've seen with this company since the lawsuit was initiated.
As far as the folks who were in a "long position" on SCO.... they're screwed. They now have a bit of computer history in terms of the paper their stock certificates represent, but only for collectors of that sort of esoteric historical document.
Most of the unix people seem to be going with Solaris rather than Linux.. Linux is definately around but doesn't seem to be strong in the commercial companies.
That's so not true it makes me wonder what partisan or corporate bias you bring to the table.
I've been employed in the financial industry for some years, working for large multinational banks and hedge funds on three continents. While Solaris does have a large installed base, every employer I've worked for, without exception, is actively migrating away from Solaris to Linux. Not all third party packages are ready on Linux yet (Reuters rendezvous and Kondor+ have been culprits in the past for requiring legacy Sun systems we would otherwise have decomissioned), but just about everything UNIX in-house is written to run on Linux.
Even Virtualisation on Solaris stinks compared to Linux and even *gasp* Windows. Xen and VMWare at least allows for live migration, while Solaris virtualisation won't offer migration capabilities until "sometime mid-to-late next year" (according to the Sun rep I spoke with at a Sun Virtualisation conference in London).
I'm not saying Solaris is dead, or doesn't have a place in a corporate environment (I administer quite a few Solaris 9 and 10 servers myself), but to claim "most unix people seem to be going with Solaris rather than Linux" implies a lot of wishful thinking, or I suspect a very small, cherry picked sample base.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I seemed to have missed the part about the judge reading Groklaw. What Groklaw did was useful and interesting, but to say they had a hand in the demise of SCO seems a bit over the top.
I wonder if Groklaw can find something useful to do after SCO? So far, when it is ventured into other areas, its record has been spotty. There was a lot of inaccuracies in its coverage of OOXML standardization, for instance--I'd often read things there, and then follow the references to the original sources, and find out that the Groklaw reporting was just plain wrong.
I hope Groklaw can turn into an accurate site for legal issues beyond SCO, and not just degenerate into another anti-MS site where accuracy is not important as long as the story is anti-MS.
SCOX was at 0.66 during the week of 24 Jun 2002. It was at 1.09 the week of 10 Feb 2003.
After the lawsuits were filed, it went up to 20.50 on 15 Oct 2003.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Well, for the sake of pedantry: if we take the view that any sexual act with someone without a normal adult humans mental facilities constitutes statutory rape, then it follows that any sexual reproduction prior to humanity reaching its current level of intelligence was rape.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.