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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."
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".
Bernie Madoff was pointed out repeatedly to the SEC and they did absolutely nothing.
If I have learned anything from the SCO case is that regulators are mostly lazy asses that only go after "high profile" celebrities (like Martha Stewart) to make it *look like* they're doing something. Nailing the Ivan Boeskys of the world comes once every 15 years. In between, it's business as usual.
Real thieves wear shiny suits and everyone looks the other way.
--
BMO
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.
whomever is behind (financing) this crap
Look at the timeline. We know who financed it.
August 18 2002, Michael Davidson finishes his code comparison for SCO. It's summed up with "we had found absolutely nothing, i.e., no evidence of any copyright infringement whatsoever,"
August 28 2002, McBride said Linux does not infringe SCO's copyrights, and that they would not ever make such a claim.
March 2003, McBride says the case is solely about IBM not living up to "contract violations"
April 2003, Microsoft pays SCO $16M for "unix licenses" that it doesn't need.
May 2003, McBride claims that Linux infringes it's copyright, and contains "millions" of lines of SCO code.
August 2003, Microsoft arranges for Baystar to invest $50M in SCO
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
(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.
As I recall, it was proven that Microsoft arranged the Baystar investment by eWeek.
As for whose money sits in the Baystar Capital investment pool, there is no public disclosure requirement of such things for private equity firms and hedge funds. And it's a large fund, so it's clearly not just Microsoft people's money, but given the nature of the relationship documented between Baystar and the Microsoft people who brought this deal to them, I can assure you there's some money from senior Microsoft people there, at the very least.
In any case, the guys at Baystar realized they were pawns in a big game after a short while and pulled out what they could. See this story.
Basically they wrote off $37M of their investment for some common stock in SCO (hahaha). Which went on to finance SCO's legal actions for several more years before they finally went kaput.
Baystar, having invested over $1.5B in equity deals since inception, this was a relatively small write-off. Probably an annoying blip in their overall results, part of the price of cultivating their relationships with Microsoft senior executives.
You believe news until they start talking about you.
News -sounds- believable. That's what they are all about.
I saw 3 different sources write about 3 completely different and totally unrelated things I was involved in (not even opinions, just plain information) and every time it was so hopelessly, blatantly wrong and inaccurate I kept my palm to my head wondering what kind of moron it takes to screw it up so completely, take plain, simple, public and common facts and get them reversed, mangled, confused, mixed up and beaten into a shape of something quite known but totally irrelevant.
Three different journalists, relating three completely different things to various unrelated media of completely different focus, and each of them managed to fuck it up completely and write total lies - not intentionally, just displaying total incompetence and complete lack of any basic understanding of the subject.
I think this is inherent to the industry. This must be something about psyche of people who choose the job. Just like all psychiatrists are slightly crazy, all reporters seem to be short on the skill of understanding of the world.
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This was after Markopolos sent a 19 page memo to the SEC with 29 red flags that something was amiss with the Madoff operation. Some of the red flags that Markpolos listed were trivially easy to verify. For example, Madoff listed that he traded on the Chicago Board Options Exchange. However the volume of trades that Madoff was reporting meant he would have to do more trades on certain days than were posted on the entire exchange on those days. And not a single broker from the exchange remembered making a trade with Madoff ever. The SEC never talked to anyone on the exchange or verified the volumes.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Markopolos also sent information to prominent US newspapers and they did the same as the SEC did -- nothing significant. This is why I believe the claims of "big press" that we need to preserve investigative reporting are bogus -- "big press" has already abandoned real investigative reporting.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!