Slashdot Mirror
SCO Found No Source Code In 2004
doperative writes "A consultant hired by SCO in 2004 to compare UNIX and Linux, with the thought he could be used as an expert at trial, says that, after days and days, his comparison tool found 'very little correlation'. When he told that to SCO, it paid him and he never heard from SCO again."
It's probably due to some contract thing - but imagine how many fewer annoying articles about SCO and Darl would have been avoided had this guy gone public years ago.
No real surprise there, just verification. SCO got itself in a tight spot financially and was looking for a scapegoat, with many SCO contributors moving to linux at the time linux made it convenient to blame, the backing of big companies contributing to Linux made them perfect target to get money. Their entire case was based on the theory that if people who used to work on SCO were now working on Linux then they must copied code...it sounded feasible to them and I assume their hope was that it would be seen feasible enough to slip through without much investigation.
So, my head is spinning, because what I'm thinking is: does this demonstrate that SCO knew there was no basis for their copyright infringement claims against IBM, Novell, AutoZone, and the world, at least by 2004? We'd have to do discovery on the matter to know for sure, but if they deliberately buried evidence, I would imagine it could impact damages due to SCO's victims, not just from SCO but conceivably from SCO's lawyers as well, should it be established that the litigation was frivolous and SCO knew it way back in 2004. I'm sure SCO's lawyers will have a long song and dance about it to deny it all, but it's certainly a huge red flag to me.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
That's all well and good, but all this would prove is that SCO knew that one guy they contracted couldn't find a basis for their claims, not that they knew the lawsuit was baseless. Or do you think that SCO's lawyers are the only ones that have ever shopped around for multiple expert witnesses before keeping the one that best supported their claim?
Read this part to understand why it is still relevent (there are, after all, still cases pending):
So, my head is spinning, because what I'm thinking is: does this demonstrate that SCO knew there was no basis for their copyright infringement claims...
It does not.
"Argument from ignorance, also known as argumentum ad ignorantiam or appeal to ignorance, is an informal logical fallacy. It asserts that a proposition is necessarily true because it has not been proven false (or vice versa). This represents a type of false dichotomy in that it excludes a third option, which is: there is insufficient investigation and therefore insufficient information to "prove" the proposition to be either true or false. Nor does it allow the admission that the choices may in fact not be two (true or false), but may be as many as four; with (3) being unknown between true or false; and (4) being unknowable (among the first three). And finally, any action taken, based upon such a pseudo "proof" is fallaciously valid, that is, it is being asserted to be valid based upon a fallacy.[1] In debates, appeals to ignorance are sometimes used to shift the burden of proof."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
That's all well and good, but all this would prove is that SCO knew that one guy they contracted couldn't find a basis for their claims, not that they knew the lawsuit was baseless.
I think the point is the guy they contracted found evidence that there was no correlation between contents of SCO and Linux source trees.
It's not a matter of him not finding anything; it's a matter of him finding something; that is, evidence that would have been beneficial to their adversary in court, that they did not provide to the court.
In other words, legal misconduct. When you are subpoena'd for evidence, you have to make all evidence available, not just evidence that favors your viewpoint; if you had intentionally destroyed records/evidence because they don't favor your viewpoint, then that's misconduct that could increase their liability.
This has been publicly known since 2005: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO-Linux_controversies#The_Michael_Davidson_E-Mail
You do not have to produce your expert's analyses to the other side or the court under the Federal rules.
It seems mighty obvious that SCO's lawsuits aimed to drain Open Source company and community resources, and to spread FUD about the IP status of Open Source code. SCO knew all along that there was no way it could win, as even their own experts were telling them so, yet they went on for years and years fighting a fight that couldn't be won. That goes against the basic formula of a copyright/patent troll, because in those cases the driving motivator is profit, and lack thereof means there's no point to keep going.
As SCO's first lawsuit was against Microsoft, who immediately settled for millions, my tinfoil headgear is picking up some very suspicious signals...
Well, he was probably running on SCO, not Linux or FreeBSD.....
This is called expert witness shopping. The guy performed ethically and SCO did a very standard thing. Most people who do expert witness work avoid being a "hired gun." A hired gun is an expert who can be told what to testify. Obviously having such a reputation will make it easy for opposing counsel to rip your credibility to shreds. So when a legal team needs a particular opinion, they hire several experts, none of whom are hired guns, and ask each of them to look at the issues and render an opinion. One of those opinions might be more helpful to the case that the others. That will be the expert that they put on the stand. This guy was hired, his opinion wasn't helpful, they paid him and moved on.
/.'s formatting? Lots of posts today are double spaced, including this one!
The key thing to remember here is that different experts legitimately have different opinions and there is nothing inherently unethical about this process.
BTW what is up with
-- QED