SCO Asked O'Gara To Smear Groklaw 96
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "PJ of Groklaw has found some really interesting documents coming out of the never-ending SCO trial. Specifically, in SCO v. Novell, SCO doesn't want the jury to find out about the email Blake Stowell (then a PR guy for SCO) sent to Maureen O'Gara that asked her to 'send a jab PJ's way.' For those who don't remember that far back in the SCO saga, the 'jab' was when O'Gara wrote an inaccurate, rambling and irrelevant 'exposé' on PJ which got O'Gara fired for violating journalistic ethics after angry readers complained to the publisher — an act which caused Ms. O'Gara to tell SCO, 'I want war pay.' For those wondering how they can keep going after that final judgment against SCO over a year ago, it's hard to do the saga justice without glossing over everything, but the short version is that SCO ran to bankruptcy after they were mostly dead, but before becoming completely dead. That automatically stopped all the cases against SCO due to standard bankruptcy court rules, then SCO effectively re-litigated a bunch of issues via bankruptcy court rules. Currently, they're accusing Novell of 'slander of title' over copyrights that two different courts have ruled SCO does not own, and we're waiting to see if a jury will reach the same conclusion. They're also trying to use the company's lawsuits as assets and to sell them to various SCO insiders so that the legal wranglings can continue even if nothing is left of SCO. From the very start, SCO has always been the type to fight dirty."
Zombie SCO (Score:3, Funny)
After 7 years, I invoke Rule 303.
Rule 303, to the head.
It's the only way to kill zombies.
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BMO
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Just nuke it from orbit.
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You are now put on notice that you must rent "Breaker Morant" before the weekend is out.
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BMO
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kill -9 has no effect on a zombie, so SCO will only go away when the universe reboots.
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SCO *IS* dead, if you want it *GONE* you need to toss a Phoenix Down at it!
Re:whaaa (Score:4, Funny)
Hey, I got an idea: If they renamed themselves to WHAA, they'd fit right in with the rest of the litigious copyright posse!
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Fighting dirty is one thing (Score:4, Interesting)
But the SCO fiasco is an outright fraud. This has to be one of the most blatant abuses of our legal system I can remember. Why didn't the SEC anal probe McBride and put an end to this charade? You'd think that was part of their job. There were certainly enough complaints filed.
Pathetic this joke of a company is still alive.
Re:Fighting dirty is one thing (Score:5, Informative)
Bernie Madoff was pointed out repeatedly to the SEC and they did absolutely nothing.
If I have learned anything from the SCO case is that regulators are mostly lazy asses that only go after "high profile" celebrities (like Martha Stewart) to make it *look like* they're doing something. Nailing the Ivan Boeskys of the world comes once every 15 years. In between, it's business as usual.
Real thieves wear shiny suits and everyone looks the other way.
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BMO
Re:Assumed competence (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it's not incompetence. When they actually decide to go after someone, they are typically very competent. People actually go to jail for very long stretches of time.
It's just that it's terribly infrequent that they do their jobs and initiate actions against fraud.
That's laziness.
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BMO
Re:Assumed competence (Score:5, Informative)
This was after Markopolos sent a 19 page memo to the SEC with 29 red flags that something was amiss with the Madoff operation. Some of the red flags that Markpolos listed were trivially easy to verify. For example, Madoff listed that he traded on the Chicago Board Options Exchange. However the volume of trades that Madoff was reporting meant he would have to do more trades on certain days than were posted on the entire exchange on those days. And not a single broker from the exchange remembered making a trade with Madoff ever. The SEC never talked to anyone on the exchange or verified the volumes.
Re:Assumed competence (Score:5, Insightful)
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The only 'investigative reporting' that happens in MSM is once a year the NYT gets one big article off. That's it, and even that amounts to just about nothing.
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Or is it that they are underfunded? I think this is a question which must be asked. It is easy to claim incompetence or laziness but without the funds to do the work there's only so much they can do. I don't know the answer to this question but I'd sure like to know.
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The SEC's budget for FY 2009 was $913 million and they had about 500 lawsuits going.
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You've just missed what their actual job is. Their job is to make the crazy financial sector our economy is hitched to look like something other than a legalized ponzi scheme and casino set up to let insiders fleece the unwashed masses at will.
Madoff was being too obvious, so they had to nail him. I have no idea what Martha Stewart did to piss them off. My best guess is that they were afraid she wasn't far enough inside to be trusted with big tip-offs.
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One is legal, one is not. One gets bailed out by the federal government when the bubble pops, one doesn't.
There are other cosmetic differences as well, but if you dig deep enough, you can see that they're fundamentally the same at the core, at least as they're currently implemented.
At one time, the stock and credit markets had an actual connection to economic production to distinguish them from casinos and ponzi schemes, but that's long gone. That's not to say there aren't any involved who still try to crea
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More like they have buddies in big bad congress that they can't lay a finger on without getting de-fanged.
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Lawyers are bad enough, but this is just another example of corruption in the press. I usually get modded down everytime I even allude to the press being less than superheroes. Well... here it is. A newsclown got caught spinning a web of crap. What is my motivation to believe anything presented to me by a dying, obsolete, yet still popular media? In these days of technological advances and information wizardry I still can't get the most basic fundamental ingredient necessary to adjust my life to; the truth.
Re:Assumed competence (Score:5, Insightful)
You believe news until they start talking about you.
News -sounds- believable. That's what they are all about.
I saw 3 different sources write about 3 completely different and totally unrelated things I was involved in (not even opinions, just plain information) and every time it was so hopelessly, blatantly wrong and inaccurate I kept my palm to my head wondering what kind of moron it takes to screw it up so completely, take plain, simple, public and common facts and get them reversed, mangled, confused, mixed up and beaten into a shape of something quite known but totally irrelevant.
Three different journalists, relating three completely different things to various unrelated media of completely different focus, and each of them managed to fuck it up completely and write total lies - not intentionally, just displaying total incompetence and complete lack of any basic understanding of the subject.
I think this is inherent to the industry. This must be something about psyche of people who choose the job. Just like all psychiatrists are slightly crazy, all reporters seem to be short on the skill of understanding of the world.
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I've had similar experiences, which started my earnest mistrust of the press. I suppose,like politics, those who want to do it, should be the very ones barred from it.
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If they actually understood anything, they'd be doing that instead of journalism?
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It's because journalists frequently major in journalism, so all they know how to do is write articles; they don't necessarily know how to do anything but bang on a keyboard.
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i suspect that as long as some big corp is not making an embarrassment of the government in the eyes of the general public (and SCOs fight over unix is anything but mainstream) the regulators are probably told to be hands off so as to not disturb the "invisible hand" in action. These days, they are one and the same, as big corp get government elected, and government makes life easy for big corp, as long as big corp do not behave in a conspicuous way...
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Ö'Gara fired? (Score:5, Informative)
How can Mrs. O'Gara be fired when her publisher touts her as:
"Maureen O'Gara the most read technology reporter for the past 20 years, is the Cloud Computing and Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media."
at http://maureenogara.sys-con.com/ [sys-con.com]
sys-con being the slimeballs^Wpublisher where the PJ hit piece was published 5 years ago and for which she was supposedly "fired".
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I consider her just another confidence trickster that goes where the easy marks are.
Re:Ö'Gara fired? (Score:5, Informative)
Interesting - looks like they un-fired the bitch when nobody was looking.
The announcement of her firing is dated May 10, 2005. According to Sys-Con's archive [sys-con.com], they did stop publishing her for a while, but she came back exactly one year and one day later. And it's also worth noting that the editors who forced her out are no longer working at Sys-Con.
Motto (Score:3, Funny)
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Are you talking about the resignation of the editorial staff [slashdot.org] that happen after the Fuat Kircaali interview? [slashdot.org]
Fuat Kircaali being the publisher of the Sys-Con properties, and the interview and resignations occurred later in the week after the start of Maureen O'Gara's, uh, "furlough".
Re:Ö'Gara fired? (Score:5, Informative)
The fact that they rehired her later is no surprise. Back then, it was clear to everyone that SYS-CON had no clue why O'Gara's behavior was massively unethical, and only fired her because they got a lot of complaints (plus a claimed DoS, though their web sites never seemed to be down at any time). The editorial staff of the Linux branch of SYS-CON already didn't like her, and they all left over the issue.
Zombi ULTD (Score:2)
Welcome to the world of Zombi Unlimited!
SCO needs to more than die. (Score:4, Insightful)
SCO and whomever is behind (financing) this crap needs to be held responsible and pay, figuratively, they and their minions and overlords need to die (pretty much the case now) and then go to hell. By going to hell, I mean people and corporations/organizations behind this crap need to pay, lots. The legal system should make it clear you cannot play the system like this without suffering.
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Read some of the back articles on Groklaw. While it hasn't been 100% successfully proven that SCO's financiers were Microsoft, they look like the most likely suspect.
Re:SCO needs to more than die. (Score:5, Informative)
As I recall, it was proven that Microsoft arranged the Baystar investment by eWeek [eweek.com].
As for whose money sits in the Baystar Capital investment pool, there is no public disclosure requirement of such things for private equity firms and hedge funds. And it's a large fund, so it's clearly not just Microsoft people's money, but given the nature of the relationship documented between Baystar and the Microsoft people who brought this deal to them, I can assure you there's some money from senior Microsoft people there, at the very least.
In any case, the guys at Baystar realized they were pawns in a big game after a short while and pulled out what they could. See this story [cnet.com].
Basically they wrote off $37M of their investment for some common stock in SCO (hahaha). Which went on to finance SCO's legal actions for several more years before they finally went kaput.
Baystar, having invested over $1.5B in equity deals since inception, this was a relatively small write-off. Probably an annoying blip in their overall results, part of the price of cultivating their relationships with Microsoft senior executives.
Re:SCO needs to more than die. (Score:5, Interesting)
whomever is behind (financing) this crap
Look at the timeline. We know who financed it.
August 18 2002, Michael Davidson finishes his code comparison for SCO. It's summed up with "we had found absolutely nothing, i.e., no evidence of any copyright infringement whatsoever,"
August 28 2002, McBride said Linux does not infringe SCO's copyrights, and that they would not ever make such a claim.
March 2003, McBride says the case is solely about IBM not living up to "contract violations"
April 2003, Microsoft pays SCO $16M for "unix licenses" that it doesn't need.
May 2003, McBride claims that Linux infringes it's copyright, and contains "millions" of lines of SCO code.
August 2003, Microsoft arranges for Baystar to invest $50M in SCO
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"Whoever is." When using who(m)ever, the subject is always "whoever," and unless the verb is "is" or another linking verb, the object is "whomever." Linking verbs like "is" take objects in the nominative form (the form used for subjects) because they refer to states, not actions. This posting has been brought to you by the International Union of Grammar Nazis. Enjoy your day!
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If you want to be really pedantic, 'whom' is a dative (indirect object, object of a preposition (ablative in Romance languages), and instrumental (separate case form for sweorda in many Anglo-Saxon texts)) form from the Anglo-Saxon 'hwaem'. The accusative (direct object) form was be 'hwone' which became 'who,' not 'whom'.
So it's 'To whom did you speak?' and 'Who did you hit?' and 'Who hit you?'
Or, you could shut the hell up and just accept that Modern English is already, and is still becoming, more and mor
Re:When the Republicans talk tort reform... (Score:5, Interesting)
It was never about linux. IBM was just a convenient brick wall to drive the company into to get an excuse to funnel the money out of SCO.
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Normally whoever is paying the bills for a losing cause would stop. In this situation the legal money is going to Darl's brother so IMHO the corpse of SCO is getting milked to the max for the McBride families benefit.
It was never about linux. IBM was just a convenient brick wall to drive the company into to get an excuse to funnel the money out of SCO.
I strongly doubt that.
The reason I doubt it is I don't believe SCO's business held any significant value. Caldera Linux was around at a time when Linux distributions were ten a penny, and many of the companies behind those distributions have since gone to the wall. Theirs offered nothing new.
When they bought the rights to the SCO brand name and the Unix business from what is now Tarantella, they were buying a Unix OS which runs on x86 commodity hardware but had far more particular hardware requirements com
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Value? No, it didn't have any. Caldera was the one Linux distro that you couldn't even give away at an enthusiast's meeting (I witnessed the failure).
Money? That's an entirely different matter. As much as the official party line tries to say otherwise, it's not that unusual for a 'respectable' business to have lots of money even while having no value. It's the money they wanted to siphon out. The catch is, they had to leave the shell undisturbed so only the select few would get the money. If they just disso
is there nobody with a hickory stake? (Score:2)
can't we jab this vampire and release the evil? I have it, line the courtrooms with mirrors!
Can PJ take legal action against Maureen O'Gara? (Score:1)
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As PJ is an old fashioned lady watching TSCOG burn is all the action she needs
Re:Can PJ take legal action against Maureen O'Gara (Score:5, Interesting)
We've seen this movie before .. (Score:4, Funny)
SCO objects to letting jury see the O'Gara (their own witness) emails:
SCO: Your honor, I object!
Judge: Why?
SCO: Because it's devastating to my case!
Judge: Overruled.
SCO: Good call!
Guaranteed that most of the jurors have seen "Liar Liar" and that they'll see the similarities to SCO.
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Furthermore, I doubt if PJ would have much problem getting pro bono attorneys to litigate this for her, just for the sheer fun of bitchslapping someone who is desperately asking for it.
What lawyer would voluntarily risk getting stuck to this tar baby? We've seen how SCO has been playing this for the last 7 years. I don't know that she'd get that kind of support.
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Can she? Sure, you can effectively sue anyone you want in this country for just about any reason you can dream up. Would she win? Who knows. But the truth is PJ has way too much class and dignity to draw out a fight in the court systems for this. In every article she writes she always takes the high ground and always attempts to point out the FACTS of a case and uncover the truth. She puts a great deal of emphasis on truth -- taking great pains to uncover all details and facts of a particular argument
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She won't, for one very good reason -- the safety of her friends and family.
IANAL, but wouldn't PJ need to reveal her name on the court papers that initiated the suit against O'Gara? Even were that not the case, O'Gara's lawyers would stop at nothing to force her to reveal her identity (demanding the right to question her on the witness stand would probably be easiest, but I'm sure there are other tricks they'd try if that didn't work.) Given the level of ethics demonstrated by O'Gara, McBride, and others
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Yes, that and she places a great amount of value on her privacy. People should try and respect that of course.
What Maureen did was deplorable and for that she forever tainted her reputation as a journalist. The Internet never forgets.
There should be a vampire/zombie law (Score:2)
There should be a vampire/zombie law, that should apply to cases like this: everyone still trying to make this case go forward, gets a wooden stake through their hearts, or the most likely places where the hearts are supposed to be based on general human anatomy.
That, and then cut the heads off and burn them and then drop the ashes into 3 separate volcanoes.
Re:There should be a vampire/zombie law (Score:4, Funny)
You'll never kill SCO until you destroy all of Darl McBride's horcruxes. Rumor has it he has more than the Dark Lord himself.
O'Gara's style: destroys notes after story (Score:4, Informative)
In O'Gara's transcribed testimony she states that after she writes a story she destroys the notes that were used.
That is not what journalists are supposed to do. What it indicates is that the "journalist" wants the story to replace the notes rather than the story be supported by the notes.
Full deposition
http://scofacts.org/Novell-OGara-deposition.pdf [scofacts.org]
http://scofacts.org/Novell-OGara-deposition.txt [scofacts.org]
Page 29
1 O'Gara
2 Q Do you have the notes of the
3 short phrases still?
4 A No.
5 Q What is your practice of the
6 short phrases, if you will, in terms of
7 whether you keep them or not?
8 A I throw everything out.
9 Q When do you do that?
10 A If not when the story is
11 written, then every week, and I've been
12 doing that since 1972.
I Hate MoGTrolls (Score:5, Funny)
I *really* *hate* MoGTrolls.
The WalMart down the road was selling Mini Maureen O'Gara Trolls (MoGTrolls) for 2 cents a piece. That was even less than the 5 cents a piece I paid for those damn monkeys ... so I figured "What have I got to loose?"
So I bought 250 MoGTrolls for $5.00. I mean, what's 5 buck, right? What could possibly go wrong?
I took my 250 MoGTrolls home. I have a big car. One of them insisted on driving. Its' name was Maureen O'Gara (all the MoGTrolls answer to Maureen O'Gara). It was retarded, even for a troll. In fact, now that I had them outside in the daylight, it was obvious that they were all "more than a few bricks short of a full load." I couldn't let the MoGTroll drive, so I kicked it in the head. It LIKED being kicked in the head! WTF? So I obliged it by kicking it some more. Soon, all the MoGTrolls were kicking each other and giggling like crazy, snot running down their ugly troll faces. This made it hard to drive, but we finally made it home.
I herded them into the basement. They didn't adapt well to their new environment. They stopped kicking each other, and just sulked. Then they began pulling the hair out of each other. It quickly became a mess. Oh, and nobody told me that MoGTrolls aren't toilet trained. I googled and yahoo'd for "toilet training MoGTrolls", but all that came back was "lots of luck, sucker!" and "never been done."
The novelty of having 250 MoGTrolls had worn off.
The MogTrolls got out of the basement and kept trying to use my computers, even though everyone knows that MoGTrolls can't write for shit. They kept on, though, and started posting all sorts of weird, distorted stuff. I mean REALLY bent! So my ISP cut me off. I hate MoGTrolls.
I had to find another ISP. And the damn MoGTrolls got me kicked off that one, too. I went from high-speed cable to adsl to dialup to - well, lets just say that TCP/IP over a clothesline really sux. I can only post when my neighbours are doing their laundry. I feel SO low having to steal bandwidth through their underware flapping in the breeze!
Did I mention that I hate MoGTrolls?
At least by now I knew why the MoGTrolls were so cheap - nobody would want one. All they do is sit around and make rambling random noise and emit noxious vapours, and excrete stuff that even the dogs don't want to sniff ... and dogs will eat their own puke!
I didn't know what to do - I was at wits end. So I went out to the local Home Depot and bought some muriatic acid, the stuff you use on concrete. I took one of the MoGTrolls and dipped it into the muriatic acid. The acid turned into goo. I poored some on the sidewalk outside, and it quickly melted the ice. Unfortunately, it also completely removed the top inch of concrete. The city had to replace the sidewalk. I got the bill last week. I hate MoGTrolls.
I decided to kill them all and throw them in the garbage. Do you have any idea how HARD it is to kill a MoGTroll? They're worse than cockroaches! You can drop a load of bricks on them, squish them flatter than a penny after the train's gone over it, and next morning they're back at it again, spitting, being mean, and just looking butt-ugly as usual.
So I tried to have a garage sale. I TRIED to make them look half-way decent, but MoGTrolls are like SCO stock - no amount of lipstick will make that pig look good. Not only did I not sell a single MoGTroll; the police gave me a fine for disturbing the peace. All the kids in the neighbourhood are having nightmares, and the school has to have a psychologist on staff full-time to deal with all the trauma that being exposed to a whole herd of MoGTrolls can cause in young minds. I hate MoGTrolls.
I tried to flush one down the toilet. It didn't work. It's still there. Then I had one wet gibbering MoGTroll, 1 acid-stained MoGTroll, and 248 dry MoGTrolls, and one blocked toilet. The MoGTroll won't come out of
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Mod parent +8 Actually Fucked Up.
Funny, mind you.
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Walmart should have paid you to take the MoGTrolls.
Idea: turn them loose on Y! SCOX. Plenty of troll food there. They should find it an ideal environment.
One of these days the book has to be written. (Score:4, Insightful)
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And if Novell actually loses those copyrights then all hell will break loose.
I'm curious how SCO v. Novell will impact SCO's other lawsuits.
And what's up with the trial court denying a stay so that Novell could appeal to SCOTUS?
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Not fired at all (Score:5, Interesting)
(emphasis mine) Each individual comment might be justifiable, but with that much repetition she's clearly trying quite hard to cast the Drizzle crew in a bad light. Why? Take a look at this gem too.
Uh, yeah. You mean the Google that created BigTable, and the Facebook that created Cassandra? How could someone write a story that's partly about Cassandra and still predict that Cassandra's creator would "stick with" MySQL? What would motivate such behavior? It's hard to avoid the conclusion that O'Gara will gladly smear whoever someone asks her to smear. The only question in my mind is: who asked this time? Serial plagiarist [aralbalkan.com] and SEO shop Sys-Con is clearly complicit too, and the idea that they would ever fire anyone for ethical reasons is just laughable.
She still serves a purpose (Score:3, Funny)
Self-dealing (Score:3, Informative)
The judge needs to nail SCO to the wall for abuse of process.
They're also trying to use the company's lawsuits as assets and to sell them to various SCO insiders so that the legal wranglings can continue even if nothing is left of SCO.
Two words: fraudulent transfer.
An attempt to evade justice, or the ruling of the courts, by fraudulently transferring property after the case was initiated against them.
This is just like trying to transfer your bank account balance and your house to another family member, after someone sued you for damages you caused them, or for not paying a huge debt.
If the transfer occured after the case started, the courts can generally recognize it as fraudulent, unwind the transfer, and penalize you.
It would definitely apply if you as an individual attempted to evade judgement in such a situation.
The courts need to stop treating corporations as above the law, and apply the same rules.
Re:Self-dealing (Score:4, Informative)
Unfortunately, they're actually getting approval for at least some of this from the bankruptcy court. (The mobile business they claimed would eventually keep them afloat even with the UNIX business sinking? Selling it to Darl for $50K, and with the court's approval).
Prison Might Help (Score:3, Insightful)
Nonsense legal postures taken by scum bags such as SCO might be much more rare if we had laws that would put people like this under the jail house for a few decades.
What is slightly disconcerning (Score:3, Interesting)
Is that this case is now before a jury that knows absolutely nothing about SCO's past history (as is with any jury trial I guess). In the pretrial hearings SCO was asking that any juror that had a college degree be disqualified. What I think we are going to see here is a plaintiff that will tell a sob story about those mean Novell and IBM corporations that ruined their businesses and lives. How their stock price was driven down into the ground until they were delisted, how they lost all their customer base, how they lost their good name in the market, how they had to start eating ramen and mac everyday, etc. etc.
The point being is that anyone who has observed this case from the beginning (and who is not paid by Microsoft or SCO) has mostly all come to the same conclusion: That SCO are corporate raiders looking to cash in on the success of Linux. Everyone, including some inside SCO have also come to the conclusion that no parts of Linux infringe upon anyone's proprietary code or was misappropriated.
This trial is three weeks long. It disturbs me that those who have not had a chance to be privy to SCO's dishonesty and malice could possibly side with them.