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SCO Asked O'Gara To Smear Groklaw
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "PJ of Groklaw has found some really interesting documents coming out of the never-ending SCO trial. Specifically, in SCO v. Novell, SCO doesn't want the jury to find out about the email Blake Stowell (then a PR guy for SCO) sent to Maureen O'Gara that asked her to 'send a jab PJ's way.' For those who don't remember that far back in the SCO saga, the 'jab' was when O'Gara wrote an inaccurate, rambling and irrelevant 'exposé' on PJ which got O'Gara fired for violating journalistic ethics after angry readers complained to the publisher — an act which caused Ms. O'Gara to tell SCO, 'I want war pay.' For those wondering how they can keep going after that final judgment against SCO over a year ago, it's hard to do the saga justice without glossing over everything, but the short version is that SCO ran to bankruptcy after they were mostly dead, but before becoming completely dead. That automatically stopped all the cases against SCO due to standard bankruptcy court rules, then SCO effectively re-litigated a bunch of issues via bankruptcy court rules. Currently, they're accusing Novell of 'slander of title' over copyrights that two different courts have ruled SCO does not own, and we're waiting to see if a jury will reach the same conclusion. They're also trying to use the company's lawsuits as assets and to sell them to various SCO insiders so that the legal wranglings can continue even if nothing is left of SCO. From the very start, SCO has always been the type to fight dirty."
After 7 years, I invoke Rule 303.
Rule 303, to the head.
It's the only way to kill zombies.
--
BMO
When will SCO die?
But the SCO fiasco is an outright fraud. This has to be one of the most blatant abuses of our legal system I can remember. Why didn't the SEC anal probe McBride and put an end to this charade? You'd think that was part of their job. There were certainly enough complaints filed.
Pathetic this joke of a company is still alive.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
How can Mrs. O'Gara be fired when her publisher touts her as:
"Maureen O'Gara the most read technology reporter for the past 20 years, is the Cloud Computing and Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media."
at http://maureenogara.sys-con.com/
sys-con being the slimeballs^Wpublisher where the PJ hit piece was published 5 years ago and for which she was supposedly "fired".
Welcome to the world of Zombi Unlimited!
Léa Gris
SCO and whomever is behind (financing) this crap needs to be held responsible and pay, figuratively, they and their minions and overlords need to die (pretty much the case now) and then go to hell. By going to hell, I mean people and corporations/organizations behind this crap need to pay, lots. The legal system should make it clear you cannot play the system like this without suffering.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
can't we jab this vampire and release the evil? I have it, line the courtrooms with mirrors!
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I'm not a lawyer so I don't know but I would hope she could.
There should be a vampire/zombie law, that should apply to cases like this: everyone still trying to make this case go forward, gets a wooden stake through their hearts, or the most likely places where the hearts are supposed to be based on general human anatomy.
That, and then cut the heads off and burn them and then drop the ashes into 3 separate volcanoes.
You can't handle the truth.
LOL.
As PJ is an old fashioned lady watching TSCOG burn is all the action she needs
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Resistance is futile, you will be sued! Life as you known it is over! Your technological distinctivness will be sold as ours!
Hey, I got an idea: If they renamed themselves to WHAA, they'd fit right in with the rest of the litigious copyright posse!
In O'Gara's transcribed testimony she states that after she writes a story she destroys the notes that were used.
That is not what journalists are supposed to do. What it indicates is that the "journalist" wants the story to replace the notes rather than the story be supported by the notes.
Full deposition
http://scofacts.org/Novell-OGara-deposition.pdf
http://scofacts.org/Novell-OGara-deposition.txt
Page 29
1 O'Gara
2 Q Do you have the notes of the
3 short phrases still?
4 A No.
5 Q What is your practice of the
6 short phrases, if you will, in terms of
7 whether you keep them or not?
8 A I throw everything out.
9 Q When do you do that?
10 A If not when the story is
11 written, then every week, and I've been
12 doing that since 1972.
Normally whoever is paying the bills for a losing cause would stop. In this situation the legal money is going to Darl's brother so IMHO the corpse of SCO is getting milked to the max for the McBride families benefit.
It was never about linux. IBM was just a convenient brick wall to drive the company into to get an excuse to funnel the money out of SCO.
You are under the impression that they're competent and they're just lazy.
I think it's more of a case of incompetence or being overly "lawyered" - just a bunch of lawyers who have no clue about the underlying industry they're supposedly regulating, whether it's securities or technology.
Everyone in the SEC should be fired.
FTA: "One can say quite a lot in legal filings, and get away with it, but there is a line where it becomes libel, when it is gratuitous, and that language is gratuitous." That looks like a shot across the bow. If taking these things to court would solve the problem then that is where they must go--I have my doubts. Also FTA "[...] the then-publisher apologized to me publicly, but she [Maureen O'Gara] says in the deposition she's not sorry a bit.]" This is why our public dialog is so toxic these days. PJ is the honest broker in this. She has offered criticisms of SCO, their lawyers and the case--who hasn't. But she has also posted verbatim every public document she could get a hold of. That a presumed journalist would get so nasty and feel no remorse for the drivel she wrote to try to destroy an honest broker is telling. Anyone who hires her does so with full knowledge of her character and deserves to be tarred by this episode as much as she does.
I *really* *hate* MoGTrolls.
The WalMart down the road was selling Mini Maureen O'Gara Trolls (MoGTrolls) for 2 cents a piece. That was even less than the 5 cents a piece I paid for those damn monkeys ... so I figured "What have I got to loose?"
So I bought 250 MoGTrolls for $5.00. I mean, what's 5 buck, right? What could possibly go wrong?
I took my 250 MoGTrolls home. I have a big car. One of them insisted on driving. Its' name was Maureen O'Gara (all the MoGTrolls answer to Maureen O'Gara). It was retarded, even for a troll. In fact, now that I had them outside in the daylight, it was obvious that they were all "more than a few bricks short of a full load." I couldn't let the MoGTroll drive, so I kicked it in the head. It LIKED being kicked in the head! WTF? So I obliged it by kicking it some more. Soon, all the MoGTrolls were kicking each other and giggling like crazy, snot running down their ugly troll faces. This made it hard to drive, but we finally made it home.
I herded them into the basement. They didn't adapt well to their new environment. They stopped kicking each other, and just sulked. Then they began pulling the hair out of each other. It quickly became a mess. Oh, and nobody told me that MoGTrolls aren't toilet trained. I googled and yahoo'd for "toilet training MoGTrolls", but all that came back was "lots of luck, sucker!" and "never been done."
The novelty of having 250 MoGTrolls had worn off.
The MogTrolls got out of the basement and kept trying to use my computers, even though everyone knows that MoGTrolls can't write for shit. They kept on, though, and started posting all sorts of weird, distorted stuff. I mean REALLY bent! So my ISP cut me off. I hate MoGTrolls.
I had to find another ISP. And the damn MoGTrolls got me kicked off that one, too. I went from high-speed cable to adsl to dialup to - well, lets just say that TCP/IP over a clothesline really sux. I can only post when my neighbours are doing their laundry. I feel SO low having to steal bandwidth through their underware flapping in the breeze!
Did I mention that I hate MoGTrolls?
At least by now I knew why the MoGTrolls were so cheap - nobody would want one. All they do is sit around and make rambling random noise and emit noxious vapours, and excrete stuff that even the dogs don't want to sniff ... and dogs will eat their own puke!
I didn't know what to do - I was at wits end. So I went out to the local Home Depot and bought some muriatic acid, the stuff you use on concrete. I took one of the MoGTrolls and dipped it into the muriatic acid. The acid turned into goo. I poored some on the sidewalk outside, and it quickly melted the ice. Unfortunately, it also completely removed the top inch of concrete. The city had to replace the sidewalk. I got the bill last week. I hate MoGTrolls.
I decided to kill them all and throw them in the garbage. Do you have any idea how HARD it is to kill a MoGTroll? They're worse than cockroaches! You can drop a load of bricks on them, squish them flatter than a penny after the train's gone over it, and next morning they're back at it again, spitting, being mean, and just looking butt-ugly as usual.
So I tried to have a garage sale. I TRIED to make them look half-way decent, but MoGTrolls are like SCO stock - no amount of lipstick will make that pig look good. Not only did I not sell a single MoGTroll; the police gave me a fine for disturbing the peace. All the kids in the neighbourhood are having nightmares, and the school has to have a psychologist on staff full-time to deal with all the trauma that being exposed to a whole herd of MoGTrolls can cause in young minds. I hate MoGTrolls.
I tried to flush one down the toilet. It didn't work. It's still there. Then I had one wet gibbering MoGTroll, 1 acid-stained MoGTroll, and 248 dry MoGTrolls, and one blocked toilet. The MoGTroll won't come out of
If somebody pays you to knowingly and willfully make false and defamatory comments about someone else, that sounds like a pretty open and shut case if libel to to me. Furthermore, I doubt if PJ would have much problem getting pro bono attorneys to litigate this for her, just for the sheer fun of bitchslapping someone who is desperately asking for it. Come on PJ, take the bitch to court -- we'll all turn out in our red dresses to root for you!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
SCO: Posterchild for Tort reform. If this company's antics don't demonstrate how utterly broken the US legal system has become, nothing does.
SCO objects to letting jury see the O'Gara (their own witness) emails:
SCO: Your honor, I object!
Judge: Why?
SCO: Because it's devastating to my case!
Judge: Overruled.
SCO: Good call!
Guaranteed that most of the jurors have seen "Liar Liar" and that they'll see the similarities to SCO.
World-Harassing Association of America? That one will emerge once the various *-AAs decide to join forces.
Ezekiel 23:20
(emphasis mine) Each individual comment might be justifiable, but with that much repetition she's clearly trying quite hard to cast the Drizzle crew in a bad light. Why? Take a look at this gem too.
Uh, yeah. You mean the Google that created BigTable, and the Facebook that created Cassandra? How could someone write a story that's partly about Cassandra and still predict that Cassandra's creator would "stick with" MySQL? What would motivate such behavior? It's hard to avoid the conclusion that O'Gara will gladly smear whoever someone asks her to smear. The only question in my mind is: who asked this time? Serial plagiarist and SEO shop Sys-Con is clearly complicit too, and the idea that they would ever fire anyone for ethical reasons is just laughable.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
The judge needs to nail SCO to the wall for abuse of process.
They're also trying to use the company's lawsuits as assets and to sell them to various SCO insiders so that the legal wranglings can continue even if nothing is left of SCO.
Two words: fraudulent transfer.
An attempt to evade justice, or the ruling of the courts, by fraudulently transferring property after the case was initiated against them.
This is just like trying to transfer your bank account balance and your house to another family member, after someone sued you for damages you caused them, or for not paying a huge debt.
If the transfer occured after the case started, the courts can generally recognize it as fraudulent, unwind the transfer, and penalize you.
It would definitely apply if you as an individual attempted to evade judgement in such a situation.
The courts need to stop treating corporations as above the law, and apply the same rules.
Nonsense legal postures taken by scum bags such as SCO might be much more rare if we had laws that would put people like this under the jail house for a few decades.
Back to mediæval English law!
Champerty
Who wants to buy shares of my lawsuit?
I learned that on Groklaw, btw.
I'm sure they'd start suing crying babies for copyright infringement even before the ink was dry on the paperwork to change their name.
She won't, for one very good reason -- the safety of her friends and family.
IANAL, but wouldn't PJ need to reveal her name on the court papers that initiated the suit against O'Gara? Even were that not the case, O'Gara's lawyers would stop at nothing to force her to reveal her identity (demanding the right to question her on the witness stand would probably be easiest, but I'm sure there are other tricks they'd try if that didn't work.) Given the level of ethics demonstrated by O'Gara, McBride, and others involved in this case I think that would lead to serious danger for PJ.
Furthermore, I doubt if PJ would have much problem getting pro bono attorneys to litigate this for her, just for the sheer fun of bitchslapping someone who is desperately asking for it.
What lawyer would voluntarily risk getting stuck to this tar baby? We've seen how SCO has been playing this for the last 7 years. I don't know that she'd get that kind of support.
John
Normally whoever is paying the bills for a losing cause would stop. In this situation the legal money is going to Darl's brother so IMHO the corpse of SCO is getting milked to the max for the McBride families benefit.
It was never about linux. IBM was just a convenient brick wall to drive the company into to get an excuse to funnel the money out of SCO.
I strongly doubt that.
The reason I doubt it is I don't believe SCO's business held any significant value. Caldera Linux was around at a time when Linux distributions were ten a penny, and many of the companies behind those distributions have since gone to the wall. Theirs offered nothing new.
When they bought the rights to the SCO brand name and the Unix business from what is now Tarantella, they were buying a Unix OS which runs on x86 commodity hardware but had far more particular hardware requirements compared with Linux, fewer features and a reputation for being downright hostile to even relatively seasoned Unix admins. Lots of companies with SCO-based systems were looking seriously at Linux-based alternatives.
The obvious thing for Caldera/SCO to do would have been to write a compatibility layer for Linux allowing applications compiled for SCO to run unmodified under Linux (handy for customers who bought their application software years ago and source code may no longer be available), and then punted this as an upgrade path to what few SCO Unix users remained. This would have given them a solid base of customers to start with which they could then build on.
Instead they announced that Linux contained masses of code stolen from Unix (a claim which they must have known was false because they had access to all the evidence to demonstrate this one way or another) and started suing anyone they could think of - on at least one occasion, this involved a former customer. (Great advert for your business there, guys. "Stick with us or we'll sue you!")
I can honestly only come up with two logical reasons for this:
1. McBride has a serious addiction to crack cocaine. I've lived with crackheads, it's not a pretty sight. They seem to think all sorts of odd things are sensible.
2. There was an ulterior motive behind all the suing.
While 1. is tempting to believe, I find 2. rather more compelling. McBride's too clean cut to be a crackhead.
... PJ need to reveal her name ...
Pamela Jones
Now we have a pretty reliable bullshit barometer.
Twinstiq, game news
O'Gara: Reinforcing the 'con' in Sys-Con
Twinstiq, game news
Can she? Sure, you can effectively sue anyone you want in this country for just about any reason you can dream up. Would she win? Who knows. But the truth is PJ has way too much class and dignity to draw out a fight in the court systems for this. In every article she writes she always takes the high ground and always attempts to point out the FACTS of a case and uncover the truth. She puts a great deal of emphasis on truth -- taking great pains to uncover all details and facts of a particular argument.
Conversely, at every opportunity, SCO has used sneaky, underhanded, backroom tactics. They have used rumor, inuendo, lies and gossip. The fact that these folks are LDS mormons freak me out because they are the exact opposite of what I always knew about mormons.
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.
Yes, that and she places a great amount of value on her privacy. People should try and respect that of course.
What Maureen did was deplorable and for that she forever tainted her reputation as a journalist. The Internet never forgets.
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.
Is that this case is now before a jury that knows absolutely nothing about SCO's past history (as is with any jury trial I guess). In the pretrial hearings SCO was asking that any juror that had a college degree be disqualified. What I think we are going to see here is a plaintiff that will tell a sob story about those mean Novell and IBM corporations that ruined their businesses and lives. How their stock price was driven down into the ground until they were delisted, how they lost all their customer base, how they lost their good name in the market, how they had to start eating ramen and mac everyday, etc. etc.
The point being is that anyone who has observed this case from the beginning (and who is not paid by Microsoft or SCO) has mostly all come to the same conclusion: That SCO are corporate raiders looking to cash in on the success of Linux. Everyone, including some inside SCO have also come to the conclusion that no parts of Linux infringe upon anyone's proprietary code or was misappropriated.
This trial is three weeks long. It disturbs me that those who have not had a chance to be privy to SCO's dishonesty and malice could possibly side with them.
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.
> IBM was just a convenient brick wall
Previously Caldera had purchased DRI from Novell, or at least the rights to DRI's products including DR-DOS. They used this to sue Microsoft over anti-trust issues and settled for an alleged $160million.
Buying 'Unix' from Santa Cruz was apparently a second attempt at doing this shake down. This time they attempted to sue IBM over contracts. Specifically IBM had written JFS and had put this into Linux. JFS was also in AIX so Caldera had done the sums: 2 + 2 == $4billion. There was a clause in the AIX SVRx licence about 'derivitive works' requiring to be kept undisclosed. Caldera/SCOg 'cancelled' IBM's perpetual and irrevokable licence and then sued for copyright infringement when they continued selling AIX.
Actually the JFS in AIX was version 1 and the JFS in OS/2 was a completely different rewrite that was the basis of the Linux version. Novell had also overridden SCOg's cancellation as they are entitled to do.
The 'line's in Linux' was another attempt at finding _something_ to sue over.
As a Mormon, I'm also appalled. Business and money seem to have gotten the best of these guys. "It's ok to lie", they must be thinking, "it's just business."
Value? No, it didn't have any. Caldera was the one Linux distro that you couldn't even give away at an enthusiast's meeting (I witnessed the failure).
Money? That's an entirely different matter. As much as the official party line tries to say otherwise, it's not that unusual for a 'respectable' business to have lots of money even while having no value. It's the money they wanted to siphon out. The catch is, they had to leave the shell undisturbed so only the select few would get the money. If they just dissolved the entity, the small stockholders might get some of it, and that was intolerable.
They couldn't write a compatibility layer because they had already jettisoned anyone even vaguely capable of doing anything of value. The only people left were the parasites that run things. That's why they had money but no value. If they hired actually productive people, they would have to let them have some of the money. Again, that was intolerable.
Like anyone who has no actual productive ability, they had to turn to crime, but unlike most, they had enough money already to stick with legalized crimes.
There's your motive, keep the plundered old rust bucket afloat long enough to offload the cash.
Sorry, I had no idea they rehired her when we stopped looking. But they really did fire her, once.
- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property
PJ's name really is Pamela Jones. The problem with a lawsuit is that it would expose her address, etc. Pamela Jones is a common name. She can have a private life without hiding that. But if her address gets out for the crazy SCO types? All bets are off.
Would not a combined private Novell+SCO definitely own all the Unix IP? And then what happens, beyond the to-be-expected positive article from O'Gara?
Interestingly, going to Sys-Con Media's "about us" web page finds a commentary by O'Gara.
http://www.sys-con.com/?q=general/aboutus.htm