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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."

7 of 96 comments (clear)

  1. Ö'Gara fired? by klingens · · Score: 5, Informative

    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".

    1. Re:Ö'Gara fired? by M.+Baranczak · · Score: 5, Informative

      Interesting - looks like they un-fired the bitch when nobody was looking.

      The announcement of her firing is dated May 10, 2005. According to Sys-Con's archive, they did stop publishing her for a while, but she came back exactly one year and one day later. And it's also worth noting that the editors who forced her out are no longer working at Sys-Con.

  2. Re:When the Republicans talk tort reform... by dbIII · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:SCO needs to more than die. by schon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  4. Re:Can PJ take legal action against Maureen O'Gara by Fr33thot · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  5. I Hate MoGTrolls by tomhudson · · Score: 5, Funny
    The MogTroll

    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

  6. Not fired at all by Salamander · · Score: 5, Interesting
    If Maureen O'Gara was fired from Sys-Con (http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050510114214525) then why is she still able to spout disparaging crap there (http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/1318133)?

    Rackspace has picked up the Drizzle team that Oracle cast off when it acquired Sun ... Rackspace evidently wants its new boys, who were not the core pillars of the MySQL engineering team ... Kicked out of Oracle they say

    (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.

    The smart money is betting that even if a good number of high-volume web sites go down this route, an even higher number such as Facebook and Google will continue with relational databases, primarily MySQL.

    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.

    --
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