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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 ....
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?
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.
You have either a terrible memory or you weren't around at the start of this...
back in about 2003, a Linux distribution by the name of Caldera bought the Unix part of SCO (the other part went on to continue trading under a different name)
Then. in a moment of utter insanity, they decided to sue IBM under allegations that IBM had included their UNIX "property" in the linux kernel...
Millions of man hours of searching later. people came up with about 5 lines of code that were so generic it was impossible to copyright them,..
So, the IBM trial went on and on and dragged other companies into the mess...
Microsoft "invested" in SCO, presumably to keep the trial going.
Novell disputed what SCO actually claimed to own...
Last year (or was it 2011) the novell case finally concluded that SCO didn't own any of the copyrights they were suing IBM over in the first place.
IBM have yet to countersue, but there's so little of SCO left now it's probably no longer worth it.
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.
I worked at Caldera when they bought SCO. I also left a few months after the acquisition. Prior to the SCO purchase, Calera was a fun Linux distribution company. We were doing really great things such as building the first GUI install, incorporating Webmin for a GUI admin utility, and having DRDOS to run all your DOS programs within Linux. They were great times. Then, the acquisition happened. Departments at Caldera began to be dismantled, and senior management replaced. I left, and took note as Ransom Love (who was a great person to work for with a great vision) sold his stake and left. Darl McBride didn't exist at the time, no idea where he came from. However, all the Caldera employees that worked hard to make the distribution what it was at the time left long before the litigation.
Sarten-X's guide to reading legal text:
First, ignore everything. Seriously, ignore anything anybody's ever told you about the legal document, because it doesn't mean anything. The exact written words don't mean anything, nor does anything verbal spoken about the document. What matters is what a judge would think about the document and the actions people take because of it. The written words are just to clarify what the writers want a judge to think about. This is why having a lawyer read documents is so important: The lawyer understands the legal history behind the words used, and can better predict what a judge will decide.
Next, start reading. Legal texts are usually long and complex, to clarify every mundane discrepancy that might lead to a disagreement, so skip over all of that. Also skip over any section headings, because they're usually ignored by judges (and remember, it's the judges that matter), being meant only to help find useful parts of the document for particular situations. Instead, pretend you're back in primary school first learning to read. Split each sentence into its basic parts: A subject and an action. That will tell you the main meaning of the sentence. Then look for what's not included - any exceptions or omissions that might be covered in other sections of the document.
Condense any synonyms. Exact word choice can make a huge difference on a judge's decisions, so lawyers will use multiple words with the same overall meaning to give their clients options. For example, simply getting rid of paperwork at the end of its useful life might involve shredding or incinerating it, which is "destruction". If some pages get lost or forgotten during shredding, they might be considered "abandoned". If someone picks up the forgotten pages and drops them in the trash can, that's "disposal". A well-written contract would specify which of those actions are allowed and which, if any, are not. While this verbosity makes the document much clearer if a judge needs to read it, the unfortunate side effect is that the document seems repetitive on cursory review.
Finally, consider consideration. Most contracts require that each side give up something, and without that mutual concession nothing would happen. For example, I give up my legal right to the exclusivity of publishing this comment, and Slashdot's corporate overlords agree to publish it, among various other services. When reading a legal document, keep an eye out for what obligations you're agreeing to, and what the other parties are agreeing to.
That's it. That's all there is to reading legal documents. As opposed to a literary work, legal documents are written for accuracy and precision rather than ease of reading. As opposed to a computer program, they aren't so much instructions as they are suggestions to the judge. Most justice systems are based around the notion that the law describes what's right or wrong, and judges determine whether particular laws apply to particular situations.
TL;DR: If you need a TL;DR version, hire a lawyer.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.