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SCO Wants To Destroy Business Records
An anonymous reader writes "SCO, now calling itself TSG, has just filed a motion (Pdf) with the bankruptcy court in Delaware asking it to authorize 'the abandonment, disposal, and/or destruction of certain surplus, obsolete, non-core or burdensome, property, including, without limitation, shelving, convention materials, telecommunications and computer equipment, accounting and sales documents, and business records.'"
The rent to store all those court documents must be astronomic.
They ought to let us bid on them. I bid five hundred dollars.
I should think together we could get that number up to a substantial sum to help them be rid of these burdensome records they can no longer afford to store. Who here would chip in a bit to free SCO of this burden? I bet we could rally a sum worthy of the court taking notice, to salvage these valuable historical records from the shredder.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I scan everything in and store it that way. Costs are a lot lower - and I would imagine that paying an organisation to scan existing paper work might seem costly, but a whole load less that long-term storage.
it's over. let it go
did you forget to take your meds?
There is a fire at the SCO offices ....
'the abandonment, disposal, and/or destruction of certain surplus, obsolete, non-core or burdensome, property, including, without limitation, shelving, convention materials, telecommunications and computer equipment, accounting and sales documents, and business records.'
Only a lawyer could make a sentence so hard to parse with the use of commas!
Remind me, what did SCO do?
try to make ends meet, you're a slave to money, then you die
I do wonder if their attorneys one day thought to themselves, " This company really isn't paying us much for the little they need us for. What if we convinced them that we could sue others and make lots of money. Even if they never win, we get paid boat loads of money until they have nothing left. All in?"
unless relevant to the court proceedings, etc, most businesses toss stuff older than 7 years anyways.
Seriously, Filing court documents so they can destroy documents. The lawyers are simply bleeding the corpse dry. Anyone with a claim is just being stolen from now. OK well continue to be stolen from.
It makes me ill to think how much of a complete and total waste this whole battle was.
There should be a new category of crime. Like War crime. Lets call it Corporate Crime. The instigators and the abusers should be brought to very public tribunal grilled and if found guilty convicted and sent for hard time. These legal blood sucking crooks could be viewed as looters, pillagers, atrocity co-conspirators.
If this were to happen I would think that litigation in the US and across the globe would suddenly drop. Hopefully leaving behind legitimate legal cases.
Are you twelve?
How did you get internet access below that huge rock you've obviously been living under?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
In tech circles (ie: Slashdot's core focus) SCO is infamous for crazy lawsuits claiming they own bits of the Unix/Linux kernel and that everyone was infringing their copyright... It was kind of a big deal for the better part of a decade.
In this community SCO is as well known as Wal-Mart. It's been mentioned literally thousands of times on this site. (8300) vs. only 5000 hits for Wal-mart.
TSG (and I was way ahead of the curve calling them that a few years ago, when they were dragging the SCO name through the mud) is the zombified shell of what was once the Linux company Caldera Systems. Several years ago they purchased most of the assets of the company which was known for years before that as SCO - the Santa Cruz Operation hence SCO.
This purchase was technically structured as a merger with a holding company involved, to produce a 'new' business called "The SCO Group", which then went berserk, forgetting its own history entirely, and attempted to create a new business model by claiming to own Linux and shaking down companies using Linux for 'license fees' supposedly owed. They wound up suing IBM and eventually losing hard, then filing bankruptcy.
Since the original threats and claims were made, through the resulting court battles and judgements, many legions of articles have been posted on this subject. Most readers are well aware of who TSG is, although certainly taking the time to add a link to an overview of some sort would have been a good move. But, that would require an editor actually editting. If you think that will happen you are definitely new here. We get short blurbs that still manage to be wrong most of the time and we like it! If you want to more accurate and in-depth information about this story try http://www.groklaw.net/
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
On slashdot, readers aren't expected to look up or guess who SCO is - SCO is famous around here.
At least for most companies. Most nerds don't have a clue about the document management tools and processes that managers selected (especially 10+ years ago). And also don't understand the government regulations around documents.
It took me almost 8 years of training before I accepted that "copy it to a DVD" isn't a records management process for a large company. Everyone in my company has mandatory yearly "records management" training and as you move up in management, you have training to learn more and more about the reasons. And when you have a bogus (or legit) law suit against you requesting "every mention of X-Corp in all company documents", it makes sense why it's important to destroy records AND record the destruction so the lawyers can respond with "Here's ALL records and here's proof that we don't have anything else".
I know one company that keeps track of cost per document. The average per jpeg image is over $17,000 over it's lifetime. For some images, a lot of that is production or licensing. But most of it is managing the licenses. Even if a developer makes an image for a web site they keep a record of who/when/why/etc so the lawyers can respond when someone claims it was stolen. That all has to be stored, indexed, backed up, accessed, etc. A stack of DVDs in a warehouse somewhere does nothing but cost money. And takes a lot of time to find what you want if/when it's needed. Better to be able to say it doesn't exist for documents that you aren't required by law to keep or have a reasonable expectation that they will be involved in a law suit (in which case you maintain them in the records management system). As much as I dislike SCO, I'd guess they have a lot of records that shouldn't be involved in any lawsuit. If they destroy records that hide a crime, that's a different issue.
This was the first question that popped into my head as well.... GP didn't google too hard.
Here's the brief. SCO used to be a legit company. a while back thy sold off the legit part and split into two companies, Tarantella and SCO, SCO became a troll, trying to charge linux users a 600/server license fee and claiming patents/copyright violations on linux and suing IBM, Redhat and a few other companies using linux.
This is the series of lawsuits that created groklaw.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Operation
Google SCO McBride and you'll have your answer.
TSG is not, and never has been, SCO.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Urghm, typo of name of mickey-mouse company.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Oh hell, I'll throw you a bone.
Here are some other abbreviations that you will run across as you surf The Internet:
RAM: Random Access Memory
MB: MegaByte
LOL: Laughs Out Loud
RTFM: Read The Fucking Manual
Somebody should start a kickstart to buy SCO (TSG). GPL all the source code (and open up all the records if possible). SCO has lots of software. Lots of history in its business records.
Welcome to Slashdot. Here's your background reading material on The SCO Group -- pay particular attention to section 3, Litigation. And what discussion of The SCO Group's litigation would be complete without a mention of Groklaw?
Or instead of looking at Wikipedia, you could search Slashdot itself for "SCO" -- there are about 650 hits for stories related to SCO's lawsuits. One of particular interest is the original one: SCO Sues IBM for Sharing Secrets with Unix and Linux . [There are earlier stories that mention SCO, but that's the one that put them in the bullseye.] That one is technically still active AFAIK, though it's been stayed during the bankruptcy.
There were hourly slashdot articles about SCO once upon a time. They are well known enough for the audience here, those who missed that saga can google.
Finding a way to sue Microsoft into bankruptcy is never irrelevant to me.
There. Fixed that for you.
I just don't think they'll find anything
So if you believe with utmost certainty that MS can pull a hocus pocus act, why exactly then should one spend taxpayers' money on said fishing expedition in the name of the public good (not your personal interest/infatuation/cause/whatever, but public good)?
, MS can do this w/o leaving a trail.
I can't prove it, but I can say it - Stephen Colbert
perhaps they could, like, you know, let everybody else in the world take a whack at their crap...I'm sure they could get enough volunteers, especially if Darl stood at the head of the line as a test dummy.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
the devil comes, the devil goes, the names are disposeable, the evil is not.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Having the past 7 years of sales records take up 3 sheets of paper helps
balance out the volume of legal papers stored.
The simple answer here is to transfer your records (legally) onto a planet just before it is demolished by the Vogans. The angle we need to work though is that the rest of SCO is on the planet too.
(Personally I always felt it wasn't the psychologists that wanted the Earth destroyed, but the Guide itself, remember the paltry entry for the Earth? Why waste precious electrons, if you're planning on destroying something?)
The only trouble with that is that Gates doesn't seem to want redemption, he wants people to love him, or at least not loathe him, and playing like he gives a damn about other human beings has been key to that. Sorry, but every dollar he gives, no matter how worthy the cause, is TAINTED and STAINED with the villainy of how he obtained it, and the fact that he benefits from the good press he gleans from breaking off bits of chump-change here and there negates the benefit, which is of course why that braying jackass has to put his fucking name on everything. He wants to make sure people know it was HE who was doing this.
If Al Capone lived to taste freedom again, and became a philanthropist, and founded an organization with the aim of cleaning the graffiti off the mean streets of Chicago, he'd still be a thug and murderer or conspirator to commit murder, and no amount of shiny facades of buildings, free of tags and markings would make up for what he did.
If Gates ANONYMOUSLY, and without seeking aggrandizement for it, gave away ALL the ill-gotten gains he has, it STILL wouldn't make up for the permanent damage he did to the computer software industry, it still wouldn't fix all the aggravation he's caused with his company's shitty, inferior and unfairly uncompetitive garbage products that crushed the competition with illegal corporate leverage and underhanded backroom dealing, rather than by producing a product that was actually SUPERIOR to their competitors. They have been making (and continue to make) software that is deliberately buggy and insecure so that you would need to have your head examined if you were even considering running it on your computer without having it get updates automatically. Consequently, since you can only be assured of updates if your computer's software is properly registered, (the one part of the system that never seems to need to be fixed, you notice...) you MUST register it which means it MUST be a legitimate, legally purchased and PAID FOR copy (speaking specifically of Windows but who knows how many other of their "products" this is true of...) or you're vulnerable to attack.
Hence, if you want to be safe, you must register your software, which means you must purchase it legally, which means if you're using pirated Microsoft software, you're stupid. I normally wouldn't object, you have a right to be paid for your work if you want to be and if it's YOUR work, but they make their shit insecure deliberately just to FORCE you to pay them. Shitty.
Don' t forget ...
JFGI: Just Fucking Google It
Seems especially pertinent in this case ;)
.... that went bankrupt, ultimately causing Ubuntu and Gnome to decide that it was up to them.
We need to get rid of old junk. You know, shelving, broken lighting fixtures, kitchen supplies, and a dead human body. No big deal.
You are describing Caldera. But Santa Cruz Operations - SCO - was different. It was a Unix company that sold a commercial SVR3.2 version of Unix for x86 based servers. Essentially, they were the leading Unix on that platform, with some challenge from some other Unix vendors, such as Interactive Unix (later acquired by Sun), Consensys Unix - in fact, for a short while, even Dell had a Unix version called Dell Unix (which was really short lived). Oh, and when Sun came out w/ Solaris, they ported it to the x86, so that was another contender. When Novell bought Unix Systems Labs from AT&T, they made a Netware aware Unix called Unixware, which they later sold to SCO, along w/ Unix Systems Labs. So SCO ended up being the only company that ever did an SVR5 version of Unix - Unixware 7.
Once Caldera and SCO merged, the problem that they had was that the SCO products - SCO Unix and Unixware, which were old, was still making good money for them, and the plan was to try and replace that profitable product with a more modern, but less profitable product, since Caldera was one of several Linux distros out there in the market. SCO could never figure out how to make its Linux business as profitable as its Unix business was, and that was when they took on this strategy. While hindsight is 20/20, what they could have done, amongst other things, could have been to try building all the cool features of Linux into Unixware, and offering that as the product for businesses, while having Caldera Linux as the development platform for all those things, instead of trying to cannibalize what was working for them, even though it was dated.
But one thing that Caldera was Case Exhibit A of was the idea that a Linux company could be profitable. Except Red Hat, nobody has figured that out - a lot of Linux distros since Caldera have gone out of circulation, while VA Linux, another Linux company that had an IPO of $11B during the dotcom bubble, too died out later. Another thing SCO might have done might have been to adapt the FBSD licensing model and have semi-functional liberated versions, while having fully-featured unliberated versions of their software.
The SCO-IBM lawsuit is probably the most memorable lawsuit in the software industry. See this comment: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3431143&cid=42785079. Only a tiny fraction of people frequenting /. would need to told about the SCO lawsuit.
Unlatch the Black Gate of Armonk. Release the Nazgul. The skies will be blackened again.