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SCO vs. IBM Battle Over Linux May Finally Be Over (networkworld.com)
JG0LD writes with this news from Network World: A breach-of-contract and copyright lawsuit filed nearly 13 years ago by a successor company to business Linux vendor Caldera International against IBM may be drawing to a close at last, after a U.S. District Court judge issued an order in favor of the latter company earlier this week.
Here's the decision itself (PDF). Also at The Register.
Here's the decision itself (PDF). Also at The Register.
Groklaw is not completely closed down - just running in stealth mode. All the recent court filings still show up there. Other updates show up now and again. Note that the link in the summary to the decision itself takes you to ... groklaw. Commentary and discussions do continue on other boards and forums, but not with the same focus that groklaw brought.
Ah, here it is, from 2008. However my memory didn't completely serve - this was PJ warning us that it wasn't over, even though most of the net thought SCO was toast.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...
#DeleteChrome
Damn it is that what happened? I had no idea.
I thought it was just too much work for too little return.
Copied straight from Wikipedia for those like me who didn't know.
Jones was widely respected by journalists and people inside the Linux community. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols wrote, "Jones has made her reputation as a top legal IT reporter from her work detailing the defects with SCO's case against IBM and Linux. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that her work has contributed enormously to everyone's coverage of SCO's cases." [23]
Despite the high regard of Jones' peer journalists and the Linux community (or possibly in part because of it), a number of prominent attacks against Groklaw and Jones occurred. These attacks were documented and addressed in detail, on Groklaw and other web sites and also in court as part of the SCO litigation.
During the first week of May 2005, Maureen O'Gara, writing in Linux World, wrote an exposé claiming to unmask Jones. Two weeks before O'Gara's publication, McBride said that SCO was investigating Jones' identity.[22] The article included alleged, but unverified, personal information about Jones,[24] including a photo of Jones' supposed house and purported addresses and telephone numbers for Jones and her mother.[25] After a flood of complaints to the publisher, lobbying of the site's advertisers, and claims of a denial-of-service attack launched against the Sys-Con domain,[26][27] Linux Business News' publisher Sys-Con issued a public apology,[28] and said they dropped O'Gara and her LinuxGram column. Despite this assertion, O'Gara remained with Sys-Con; as of 2009, she is the Virtualization News Desk editor at Sys-Con Media, who describe her as "[o]ne of the most respected technology reporters in the business" and has her work published in multiple magazines owned by Sys-Con Media.[29]
SCO executives Darl McBride and Blake Stowell also denigrated Jones, and claimed that she worked for IBM.[30] Jones denied this allegation,[31] as did IBM in a court filing.[32] During an SCO conference call on April 13, 2005, McBride said, "The reality is the web site is full of misinformation, including the people who are actually running it" when talking about Groklaw, adding also "What I would say is that it is not what it is purported to be". Later developments in the court cases showed that McBride's statements to the press regarding the SCO litigation had limited credibility; very few such statements were ever substantiated and most were shown to be false. For example, McBride claimed that SCO owned the copyrights to UNIX, and SCO filed suit to try to enforce these claims.[33] The outcome went against McBride's claims. The jury found that SCO had not purchased these copyrights.[34][35] SCO appealed this ruling and lost.[36] McBride also made a claim to the press that there was a "mountain of code" misappropriated to create Linux.[37] When SCO finally presented their evidence of infringement, which centered on nine lines of error name and number similarities in the file errno.h, Judge Wells famously said "Is this all you've got?"[38] Professor Randall Davis of MIT later made a convincing demonstration that there were no elements of UNIX which might be copyright protectable present in the Linux source code.[39]
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Damn it is that what happened? I had no idea.
Yes, it happened (though the investigators found the wrong Pamela Jones). The reason PJ closed down Groklaw was because of NSA spying. The general supposition, based on her final Groklaw article, is that she received an NSA demand to spy on her users, but her conscience would not allow her to do so. So she stopped doing Groklaw so she wouldn't have anything to spy on.