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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.
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!
What if what was uncovered is that this whole charade was sponsored by a third party that was not implicated in the various SCO trials?
Remind me, what did SCO do?
try to make ends meet, you're a slave to money, then you die
if anything was to be uncovered it would most likely be making the company liable, so you would be incurring hideous costs in order to be able to prosecute a company that no longer exists. hmmmm I think I prefer our courts were doing something other than using our money trying to punish a corpse. Let it go, they are dead and buried.
Actually, there's good reason to suspect the kinds of collusion and deliberate deception that could result in personal liability, including possibly criminal liability, for some of the players.
Solicitation to commit a crime is itself a crime, as is conspiracy.
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
Finding a way to sue Microsoft into bankruptcy is never irrelevant.
I just don't think they'll find anything, MS can do this w/o leaving a trail.
I despise Bill Gates. I hate Microsoft. If we could find a way to break Microsoft up into a dozen smaller companies, I'd be shickled teatless. But, hatred can be irrational too. Purchasing all that crap that SCO has, just to spend millions of dollars worth of manhours poring over the contents, hoping to catch Microsoft doing something illegal seems irrational to me.
Then, if you actually find what you are hoping to find, then what? Spending yet more millions preparing to take Microsoft to court. Millions upon millions more, paying for all the legal counsel.
Phhhttt - all that money is better spent undermining Microsoft's current monopoly status. Go buy an Android and a Chromebook. Sign contracts with several companies that are in direct competition with Microsoft. Donate some Linux machines to a school near you. Hell, start a foundation that donates a few hundred Linux machines to schools in your state, annually.
Do something more useful than feeding the predatory lawyers who will swarm the case you bring against Microsoft.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br