IBM has two license agreements with SCO. Previously the AIX license has garnered most of the attention. Now SCO is terminating the other license, which I believe was acquired by Sequent before Sequent was acquired by IBM.
99 times out of 100, if there is a solution that provides a substantial portion of the desired functionality, you will be better off using the outside solution, than making one yourself.
If you are that 1 in 100, perform a cost benefit analysis using twice your most conservative estimates for BOTH time and money. If your Return On Investment over the first 5 years is less than 50%/year, don't do it. Otherwise, present your analysis to your boss.
REMEMBER, your time is NOT free. In a university environment you cost about twice your salary. This is true even if you would otherwise be twidling your thumbs or if you offer to do the work during your "free time".
Novell exclusively licensed Unix to company X which in turn exclusively licensed Unix to SCO Group.
If SCO Group wants to claim infringement against anyone for pre 1995 Unix IP, thay have to ask Novell (via company X) to pursue the claim on SCOs behalf.
Novell sees $$ in Linux and wants to please the Linux community.
In order to convince Novell to pursue a claim of infringement, SCO Group will have to disclose the alleged infringements to Novell.
Novell's contract may include grounds under which they are not required to pursue a claim of infringement (presumably Novell isn't required to pursue a case of infringement if the alleged infringer is a direct or indirect SCO Group licensee [as would be the case for any Linux user since SCO Group distributed a version of Linux]).
Novell is thus in a position to make any suit by SCO Group on the basis of infringement (what we all worry about) spectacularly difficult.
"If the only way you can instill loyalty and ethics in your employees is to put a virtual gun to the head of their chosen career, there is something fundamentally wrong with your selection process."
Companies go out of business all the time because they failed to document in writing requirements that their employees and business partners behave ethically. Dozens of employees can lose their jobs because of a single bad apple. If your company isn't signing non-competes, and its business model is vulnerable to raiding by other businesses, your company isn't doing its job and YOU might be the one to suffer.
As far as ethics of employees go, there are very few employees who will turn down a $50K-$100K bonus to go work for a competitor. They have ethical obligations to my company, but family comes first. A smart raider wouldn't make it clear why the employee was hired until AFTER he had joined the raiding company, at which point the employee has no leverage to enforce his ethical standards.
"I'll wager you're not getting the cream of the crop either"
From this statement its clear that you've never been involved in a company that requires non-competes. Prospective employees virtually never reject a reasonable non-compete. In my experience fewer than 10% of non-severance agreement employees even notice or care about a reasonably worded agreement. Even in this thread, the only actual non-competes that people rejected were overbroad agreements that required employees to stop working in the industry.
I'm not baring people from getting a new job. I'm saying that they can't use their job with me as a means of striking it rich with one of my competitors. With a non-compete, I can march into court and easily get a restraining order, something that a non-disclosure agreement does not allow me to do. (Note that I have never had to do this, something I credit to my laying down a solid legal framework in the first place.)
"It also allows you to dismiss an employee on a whim, without fear that your actions will come back to haunt you"
I have had to unilaterally dismiss employees, and I've been pleasantly surprised by their positive attitudes towards my companies after the fact. But if one of my employees were to be angry, it is not his moral right to use his knowledge of how my company operates to ruin my business. The non-compete gives me the legal power to enforce ethical behavior in this circumstance.
If, according to your ethics, it would be reasonable for you to use inside knowledge of a business that fired you to ruin the business, then you're right, I'd rather not force you to behave ethically via a non-compete. I'd rather avoid hiring a person with such ethics in the first place.
I've hired many people and a non-compete is an essential element of my hiring process. There are a small number of companies out there which could gain an enormous advantage by stealing one of my employees and picking his brain. Reasonable NDAs are inadequate protection from this nightmare scenario.
This doesn't materially deter one of my employees from getting a job elsewhere in the industry. 99.999% of all software jobs are still open. It only prevents the employee from using the fact that he worked for me to land a job with my competition, which would gladly pay a premium inside knowledge about my company and technology.
In this market, if you aren't willing to sign a reasonable non-compete, I'll just hire somebody else. The specific benefits of hiring you aren't worth the enormous risk you want me to take. The "balance in the system" that you refer to, is the fact that you can decline my offer.
Upper level management can use the non-compete to negotiate a better severance package, but that's only for positions that would have received a severance package anyway.
You can only lose unemployment benefits if your non-compete causes you to become "unavailable" for work. A non-compete that is specific to a single company (in this case Microsoft) would never result in the loss of unemployment benefits. This guy is either lying or badly misinformed when he claims that turning down the job with Microsoft would have caused him to lose unemployment benefits.
In most states, any non-compete that makes you unavailable for other work would be unenforceable because it is overbroad. And to the extent that there is any ambiguity, lax enforcement by the state departments of employment would allow the employee to continue to declare himself "available" without any serious fear of action by the state.
I've read the court's opinion, and was quite surprised by what it said. If upheld, RIAA and MPAA will have NO LEGAL RECOURSE against decentralized file sharing intermediaries, under existing copyright law. MPAA and RIAA will have three choices:
1. Pursue end users (a very expensive tactic of limited value, other than as a scare tactic).
2. Incentivize end users to stop illeagally trading files, by offering reasonable alternatives (Hey, it worked with me. I'm a Rhapsody subscriber).
3. Pursue new legislation that specifically outlaws providing clients to services such as Napster, Kazaa. (of questionable effectiveness)
Despite some first amendment, and political obstacles, I think that the only reasonable business decision for the record and movie industries is option #3. Options 1 and 2 might provide some modest degree of mitigation to the erosion of industry revenues, but only option 3 has the potential to address the issue head on.
As much as I hate the notion of more regulation on this issue, I think that from a business perspective the RIAA and MPAA need to immediately beseige capital hill. Waiting for the appeal before doing so would be suicidal.
This means that we have to be ready to counter any such effort.
They are not going to ignore all electronic comments, they are going to ignore reject mass-produced comments in which everybody sends an identical message. THIS INCLUDES PRE-PRINTED POSTCARDS.
They are not discriminating between paper and bits at all.
It uses a humanoid design because more humans are willing to spend large quantities of money for something that looks humanoid.
There are very few (if any) tasks for which a humanoid robot is a more effective design, except for those tasks in which the robot is expected to interact with humans.
Nature designs things for survival, not human utility.
Aircraft don't flap their wings because that design is spectaculalry difficult to implement (not to mention poorly suited for the task of transporting large payloads).
You are factually in error. A signed Palladium application CAN share data with third parties. If Universal pictures sells me a movie, their signed movie player WILL be able to transfer the bytes of that movie to another party. [Of course they aren't going to do this, but they can.]
It will NOT be possible for a third party to obtain access by copying the file, nor will it be possible for a signed application to grant another application access by giving that application a string of bits. But the latter is hardly necessary given the requirements of the system.
Slashdot moderation is based as much on whether people agree with your views as whether your comment makes any sense. My top level comment was modded up 2 times and down 3 times, the latter not because it doesn't make sense, but because people hate to see disagreement with the official Slashdot position. Meanwhile random MS sucks posts are at +5.
What you describe is possible in theory, but virtually impossible in practice. It requires that all disk access be accomplished through higher level routines controlled by the OS.
Capability based systems like EROS have achieved a limited version of this only after many years of effort.
The consesus seems to be that retrofiting capability based security onto Linux would be monumentally difficult if not impossible.
If Microsoft asked the EROS folk to add capability based security onto Windows, it would take them days to stop laughing.
So Microsoft can try to do something that is virtually impossible using just software, or they can use hardware to accomplish the same thing at far less cost, and with greater verifiability. It sounds like an easy choice to me.
How does protected mode protect my bank account information, which is sitting on my hard disk? It doesn't.
Encrypt it you say? Then where do I store the key when my program isn't runing? Either I put it on the net (which requires that I be connected to access anything) or I put it on my hard drive (which leaves us back where we started).
THIS is the problem that TCPA, etc. are designed to solve. If the owner of the computer can access information, then a malicious program that he installs can access that information too.
|> Palladium is not going to stop bugs. It will instead sign bugs and say they are "trusted". Big deal!
Palladium will also make sure that signed bugs from the video game I installed can not access data stored by the signed program my bank gave me. This IS a big deal.
A word processor is pretty useless without the ability to share files. Nobody is going to use a word processor that prevents this.
However, your bank will be able to store your account number on your machine such that no program not signed by your bank can access it.
Microsoft's chosen vendors (and Microsoft itself) will not be able to access this bank account number.
As far as whether or not it is proprietary, TCPA is the (theoretically) open platform, Palladium is the proprietary Microsoft thing that could possibly be made TCPA compliant but probably won't be. I don't support Microsoft's continual efforts at creating proprietary protocols, but I do support creating something like Palladium/TCPA.
If Palladium works as it is supposed to, a Palladium enabled application will be able to store data so that no other application can access it, even if the user trusts that application.
This way when I install a game, I don't have to worry that it could steal my bank account information. No program would be able to access my bank account information unless it was signed by the same company as the program that stored the information originally.
Nobody is going to force users of Palladium enabled systems to actually use Palladium. If you are offended that RIAA decides to distribute music that can only be played on Palladium enabled systems, refuse to buy the music. Meanwhile, consider the benefits:
I'm runing hundreds of different programs on my windows machine. If any one of these programs is subverted by a malicious user, all of the information on my machine is vulnerable.
With Palladium, etc. it will become possible for programs to keep especially sensitive data safe from malicious programs operating on the same machine. Now an attacker will have to not only subvert one of the programs that I have trusted, it will also have to defeat the Palladium system.
This is much more difficult than it sounds. It is easy to find a security hole in a machine that is runing hundreds of programs, because only one program out of hundreds has to be defeated. With these trusted computing platforms, software atackers will only have a few possible points of attack, and these have been subjected to much more strenuous security analysis because:
1. There are only a few places that the effort has to be focused and:
2. They were specifically designed for security (unlike just about everything else about Windows).
I don't see how this can be a bad development. At worst its neutral. At best, Palladium will allow me to do all sorts of things on my computer that I wouldn't dream of doing today because of security concerns.
This means that they have to either wind down unprofitable units or make them profitable by raising prices and cutting expenses.
Of course they're going to lose some business. To the extent that its unprofitable business, its the right thing to do. Ultimately this will likely save jobs.
Raising all of your prices, simplifying your price structure and implementing all the changes simultaneously is an example of best business practices for a company in Worldcom's position.
Sprint can afford to acquire business this way (And what better way is there to gain market share than raiding the customer base of a bankrupt competitor). Worldcom is bankrupt and therefore in a fundamentally different position.
1. When large public companies with profitable units go bankrupt, they almost always either re-emerge from bankruptcy, or are sold for substantially more than asset value. Even grossly unprofitable concerns (witness Exodus) are able to fetch a substantial premium to asset value by keeping the key employees in place.
It is flat out wrong to suggest that keeping key employees in place does not have a massive positive impact on value to creditors. For proof, you need look no further than the frequent endorsement of these bonus packages by creditors. They are looking out for their own best interests when they do this. Its their money that's ultimately paying these bonuses.
2. As I mentioned elsewhere, these bonuses are standard practice. Key employees are likely to be made aware that retention bonuses are in the offing before they make alternative employment plans.
3. Right now WorldCom executives have to make a series of difficult decisions on how best to wind down unprofitable operations and prepare profitable ones for sale or re-emergence. Tens of thousands of jobs are at stake. Very complicated negotiations amongst many different classes of creditors are required. Much of the top two levels of management are gone. Firing the remaining managers would plunge the company into chaos, while the new managers spend many months learning enough about the organization to figure out what to do. Its bad for the creditors, bad for the customers, and would most probably cost many thousands of innocent employees their jobs. I understand your emotional reaction, but its terrible policy.
4. This is going to sound harsh, but sysadmins can be replaced. If one quits, another can be hired without significant cost to the organization and its valuation. Working 18 hours a day is great dedication, but it doesn't make them irreplacable. In a multi-billion dollar business like WorldCom, there are many upper level management people whose sudden disappearance, in the middle of a massive restructuring, would cost large quantities of money. (And the more executives that leave, the more important the remaining executives become). Fair or not, ultimately the marginal difference in valuation created by firing a high level executive is much larger than the valuation change produced by firing a sysadmin.
[Serious response to what may or may not have been intended as a funny comment].
Bonuses like this are standard practice when an organization files under chapter 11. Enron was definitely not the first time it happened.
HOWEVER, it is interesting to note that many aspects of Enron's retention strategy were modified. Many of the bonuses were reduced during negotiations with their creditors, and the proposed contract for Enron's CEO during the reorganization was rejected by the Judge overseeing the reorganization.
BTW, bankruptcy judges are empowered to (and do) reverse bonus awards made by companies in the weeks leading up to bankruptcy. [I think they can go back up to one year but IANAL].
Slashdot Mirror
Why is Norway obliged to adopt EU directives if they are not part of the EU?
IBM has two license agreements with SCO. Previously the AIX license has garnered most of the attention. Now SCO is terminating the other license, which I believe was acquired by Sequent before Sequent was acquired by IBM.
99 times out of 100, if there is a solution that provides a substantial portion of the desired functionality, you will be better off using the outside solution, than making one yourself.
If you are that 1 in 100, perform a cost benefit analysis using twice your most conservative estimates for BOTH time and money. If your Return On Investment over the first 5 years is less than 50%/year, don't do it. Otherwise, present your analysis to your boss.
REMEMBER, your time is NOT free. In a university environment you cost about twice your salary. This is true even if you would otherwise be twidling your thumbs or if you offer to do the work during your "free time".
He's got a written letter from Telstra which states that they entered a settlement agreement and lays out the terms of that agreement.
What is to prevent him from walking into court and obtaining damages?
Does Austrailia have small claims court and automatic damage multipliers for consumer fraud like in the US?
So:
Novell owns the rights to Unix as of 1995.
Novell exclusively licensed Unix to company X which in turn exclusively licensed Unix to SCO Group.
If SCO Group wants to claim infringement against anyone for pre 1995 Unix IP, thay have to ask Novell (via company X) to pursue the claim on SCOs behalf.
Novell sees $$ in Linux and wants to please the Linux community.
In order to convince Novell to pursue a claim of infringement, SCO Group will have to disclose the alleged infringements to Novell.
Novell's contract may include grounds under which they are not required to pursue a claim of infringement (presumably Novell isn't required to pursue a case of infringement if the alleged infringer is a direct or indirect SCO Group licensee [as would be the case for any Linux user since SCO Group distributed a version of Linux]).
Novell is thus in a position to make any suit by SCO Group on the basis of infringement (what we all worry about) spectacularly difficult.
"If the only way you can instill loyalty and ethics in your employees is to put a virtual gun to the head of their chosen career, there is something fundamentally wrong with your selection process."
Companies go out of business all the time because they failed to document in writing requirements that their employees and business partners behave ethically. Dozens of employees can lose their jobs because of a single bad apple. If your company isn't signing non-competes, and its business model is vulnerable to raiding by other businesses, your company isn't doing its job and YOU might be the one to suffer.
As far as ethics of employees go, there are very few employees who will turn down a $50K-$100K bonus to go work for a competitor. They have ethical obligations to my company, but family comes first. A smart raider wouldn't make it clear why the employee was hired until AFTER he had joined the raiding company, at which point the employee has no leverage to enforce his ethical standards.
"I'll wager you're not getting the cream of the crop either"
From this statement its clear that you've never been involved in a company that requires non-competes. Prospective employees virtually never reject a reasonable non-compete. In my experience fewer than 10% of non-severance agreement employees even notice or care about a reasonably worded agreement. Even in this thread, the only actual non-competes that people rejected were overbroad agreements that required employees to stop working in the industry.
I'm not baring people from getting a new job. I'm saying that they can't use their job with me as a means of striking it rich with one of my competitors. With a non-compete, I can march into court and easily get a restraining order, something that a non-disclosure agreement does not allow me to do. (Note that I have never had to do this, something I credit to my laying down a solid legal framework in the first place.)
"It also allows you to dismiss an employee on a whim, without fear that your actions will come back to haunt you"
I have had to unilaterally dismiss employees, and I've been pleasantly surprised by their positive attitudes towards my companies after the fact. But if one of my employees were to be angry, it is not his moral right to use his knowledge of how my company operates to ruin my business. The non-compete gives me the legal power to enforce ethical behavior in this circumstance.
If, according to your ethics, it would be reasonable for you to use inside knowledge of a business that fired you to ruin the business, then you're right, I'd rather not force you to behave ethically via a non-compete. I'd rather avoid hiring a person with such ethics in the first place.
I've hired many people and a non-compete is an essential element of my hiring process. There are a small number of companies out there which could gain an enormous advantage by stealing one of my employees and picking his brain. Reasonable NDAs are inadequate protection from this nightmare scenario.
This doesn't materially deter one of my employees from getting a job elsewhere in the industry. 99.999% of all software jobs are still open. It only prevents the employee from using the fact that he worked for me to land a job with my competition, which would gladly pay a premium inside knowledge about my company and technology.
In this market, if you aren't willing to sign a reasonable non-compete, I'll just hire somebody else. The specific benefits of hiring you aren't worth the enormous risk you want me to take. The "balance in the system" that you refer to, is the fact that you can decline my offer.
Upper level management can use the non-compete to negotiate a better severance package, but that's only for positions that would have received a severance package anyway.
You can only lose unemployment benefits if your non-compete causes you to become "unavailable" for work. A non-compete that is specific to a single company (in this case Microsoft) would never result in the loss of unemployment benefits. This guy is either lying or badly misinformed when he claims that turning down the job with Microsoft would have caused him to lose unemployment benefits.
In most states, any non-compete that makes you unavailable for other work would be unenforceable because it is overbroad. And to the extent that there is any ambiguity, lax enforcement by the state departments of employment would allow the employee to continue to declare himself "available" without any serious fear of action by the state.
Won't this new GDI make it far easier to create applications that run on Windows and on other platforms?
At first glance, this looks like a major improvement in openness.
Look here for one of several knowledgeable accounts of the history behind Microsoft's TCP/IP stack that are floating around the web.
Please be more careful before you declare that something has been proven.
I've read the court's opinion, and was quite surprised by what it said. If upheld, RIAA and MPAA will have NO LEGAL RECOURSE against decentralized file sharing intermediaries, under existing copyright law. MPAA and RIAA will have three choices:
1. Pursue end users (a very expensive tactic of limited value, other than as a scare tactic).
2. Incentivize end users to stop illeagally trading files, by offering reasonable alternatives (Hey, it worked with me. I'm a Rhapsody subscriber).
3. Pursue new legislation that specifically outlaws providing clients to services such as Napster, Kazaa. (of questionable effectiveness)
Despite some first amendment, and political obstacles, I think that the only reasonable business decision for the record and movie industries is option #3. Options 1 and 2 might provide some modest degree of mitigation to the erosion of industry revenues, but only option 3 has the potential to address the issue head on.
As much as I hate the notion of more regulation on this issue, I think that from a business perspective the RIAA and MPAA need to immediately beseige capital hill. Waiting for the appeal before doing so would be suicidal.
This means that we have to be ready to counter any such effort.
They are not going to ignore all electronic comments, they are going to ignore reject mass-produced comments in which everybody sends an identical message. THIS INCLUDES PRE-PRINTED POSTCARDS.
They are not discriminating between paper and bits at all.
He won by four votes and there were 23 spoiled ballots. Shouldn't somebody be looking for chads or something in the digital signatures?
THIS IS A TOY!
It uses a humanoid design because more humans are willing to spend large quantities of money for something that looks humanoid.
There are very few (if any) tasks for which a humanoid robot is a more effective design, except for those tasks in which the robot is expected to interact with humans.
Nature designs things for survival, not human utility.
Aircraft don't flap their wings because that design is spectaculalry difficult to implement (not to mention poorly suited for the task of transporting large payloads).
You are factually in error. A signed Palladium application CAN share data with third parties. If Universal pictures sells me a movie, their signed movie player WILL be able to transfer the bytes of that movie to another party. [Of course they aren't going to do this, but they can.]
It will NOT be possible for a third party to obtain access by copying the file, nor will it be possible for a signed application to grant another application access by giving that application a string of bits. But the latter is hardly necessary given the requirements of the system.
Slashdot moderation is based as much on whether people agree with your views as whether your comment makes any sense. My top level comment was modded up 2 times and down 3 times, the latter not because it doesn't make sense, but because people hate to see disagreement with the official Slashdot position. Meanwhile random MS sucks posts are at +5.
What you describe is possible in theory, but virtually impossible in practice. It requires that all disk access be accomplished through higher level routines controlled by the OS.
Capability based systems like EROS have achieved a limited version of this only after many years of effort.
The consesus seems to be that retrofiting capability based security onto Linux would be monumentally difficult if not impossible.
If Microsoft asked the EROS folk to add capability based security onto Windows, it would take them days to stop laughing.
So Microsoft can try to do something that is virtually impossible using just software, or they can use hardware to accomplish the same thing at far less cost, and with greater verifiability. It sounds like an easy choice to me.
How does protected mode protect my bank account information, which is sitting on my hard disk? It doesn't.
Encrypt it you say? Then where do I store the key when my program isn't runing? Either I put it on the net (which requires that I be connected to access anything) or I put it on my hard drive (which leaves us back where we started).
THIS is the problem that TCPA, etc. are designed to solve. If the owner of the computer can access information, then a malicious program that he installs can access that information too.
|> Palladium is not going to stop bugs. It will instead sign bugs and say they are "trusted". Big deal!
Palladium will also make sure that signed bugs from the video game I installed can not access data stored by the signed program my bank gave me. This IS a big deal.
No,
A word processor is pretty useless without the ability to share files. Nobody is going to use a word processor that prevents this.
However, your bank will be able to store your account number on your machine such that no program not signed by your bank can access it.
Microsoft's chosen vendors (and Microsoft itself) will not be able to access this bank account number.
As far as whether or not it is proprietary, TCPA is the (theoretically) open platform, Palladium is the proprietary Microsoft thing that could possibly be made TCPA compliant but probably won't be. I don't support Microsoft's continual efforts at creating proprietary protocols, but I do support creating something like Palladium/TCPA.
If Palladium works as it is supposed to, a Palladium enabled application will be able to store data so that no other application can access it, even if the user trusts that application.
This way when I install a game, I don't have to worry that it could steal my bank account information. No program would be able to access my bank account information unless it was signed by the same company as the program that stored the information originally.
Nobody is going to force users of Palladium enabled systems to actually use Palladium. If you are offended that RIAA decides to distribute music that can only be played on Palladium enabled systems, refuse to buy the music. Meanwhile, consider the benefits:
I'm runing hundreds of different programs on my windows machine. If any one of these programs is subverted by a malicious user, all of the information on my machine is vulnerable.
With Palladium, etc. it will become possible for programs to keep especially sensitive data safe from malicious programs operating on the same machine. Now an attacker will have to not only subvert one of the programs that I have trusted, it will also have to defeat the Palladium system.
This is much more difficult than it sounds. It is easy to find a security hole in a machine that is runing hundreds of programs, because only one program out of hundreds has to be defeated. With these trusted computing platforms, software atackers will only have a few possible points of attack, and these have been subjected to much more strenuous security analysis because:
1. There are only a few places that the effort has to be focused and:
2. They were specifically designed for security (unlike just about everything else about Windows).
I don't see how this can be a bad development. At worst its neutral. At best, Palladium will allow me to do all sorts of things on my computer that I wouldn't dream of doing today because of security concerns.
Worldcom is Bankrupt!
This means that they have to either wind down unprofitable units or make them profitable by raising prices and cutting expenses.
Of course they're going to lose some business. To the extent that its unprofitable business, its the right thing to do. Ultimately this will likely save jobs.
Raising all of your prices, simplifying your price structure and implementing all the changes simultaneously is an example of best business practices for a company in Worldcom's position.
Sprint can afford to acquire business this way (And what better way is there to gain market share than raiding the customer base of a bankrupt competitor). Worldcom is bankrupt and therefore in a fundamentally different position.
1. When large public companies with profitable units go bankrupt, they almost always either re-emerge from bankruptcy, or are sold for substantially more than asset value. Even grossly unprofitable concerns (witness Exodus) are able to fetch a substantial premium to asset value by keeping the key employees in place.
It is flat out wrong to suggest that keeping key employees in place does not have a massive positive impact on value to creditors. For proof, you need look no further than the frequent endorsement of these bonus packages by creditors. They are looking out for their own best interests when they do this. Its their money that's ultimately paying these bonuses.
2. As I mentioned elsewhere, these bonuses are standard practice. Key employees are likely to be made aware that retention bonuses are in the offing before they make alternative employment plans.
3. Right now WorldCom executives have to make a series of difficult decisions on how best to wind down unprofitable operations and prepare profitable ones for sale or re-emergence. Tens of thousands of jobs are at stake. Very complicated negotiations amongst many different classes of creditors are required. Much of the top two levels of management are gone. Firing the remaining managers would plunge the company into chaos, while the new managers spend many months learning enough about the organization to figure out what to do. Its bad for the creditors, bad for the customers, and would most probably cost many thousands of innocent employees their jobs. I understand your emotional reaction, but its terrible policy.
4. This is going to sound harsh, but sysadmins can be replaced. If one quits, another can be hired without significant cost to the organization and its valuation. Working 18 hours a day is great dedication, but it doesn't make them irreplacable. In a multi-billion dollar business like WorldCom, there are many upper level management people whose sudden disappearance, in the middle of a massive restructuring, would cost large quantities of money. (And the more executives that leave, the more important the remaining executives become). Fair or not, ultimately the marginal difference in valuation created by firing a high level executive is much larger than the valuation change produced by firing a sysadmin.
[Serious response to what may or may not have been intended as a funny comment].
Bonuses like this are standard practice when an organization files under chapter 11. Enron was definitely not the first time it happened.
HOWEVER, it is interesting to note that many aspects of Enron's retention strategy were modified. Many of the bonuses were reduced during negotiations with their creditors, and the proposed contract for Enron's CEO during the reorganization was rejected by the Judge overseeing the reorganization.
BTW, bankruptcy judges are empowered to (and do) reverse bonus awards made by companies in the weeks leading up to bankruptcy. [I think they can go back up to one year but IANAL].