Leaked Memo Says Microsoft Raised $86 million for SCO

badzilla and numerous others wrote in with this: "Eric S. Raymond's Open Source site has a new Halloween memo. The Halloween X memo, which ESR says he received by email from an anonymous whistleblower inside SCO, appears to confirm Microsoft's alleged funding of SCO's anti-Linux initiative. And the actual dollar amounts are much larger than previously rumored!" The consultant is discussing his fee for bringing in this business, in the first few lines of the email.

Wow

Another good reason not to buy Microsoft products... They give your money to try and prevent you from using anything else than Windows.

Re:Wow

Yeah, but they're not funneling money to Yugo to sue GM and it's consumers.

Re:Wow

Starting in 1922, General Motors bought up many of the nation's
electric urban and interurban light rail systems, including
the excellent streetcars that served Los Angeles, converted them
to internal combustion engines, and deliberately managed them into failure.
Before this time, good electric streetcars made an automobile
unneccessary in many urban areas.
See http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/4518

Re:Wow

Absolutely. But Ford is not backing lawsuits against GM by a third party. And doing it under cover of darkness. The Baystar deal was a front for what would (will) probably be anti-trust violations on Microsoft's part. If Microsoft wanted to support SCO, there are legal ways to do it. Not by using other companies (Baystar> as cover-ups.

The bigger question is...

...why is everyone automatically believing an "anonymous e-mail?"

Eric himself says "I cannot certify its authenticity."

I'm sure everyone believes Microsoft has something to do with SCO (to not believe such would go against the Slashdot mindset), but this doesn't actually prove anything. Everyone's discussing it as if it's automatically true.

Valididy "Confirmed"

"Post-Postscript: According to Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of CNET, SCO confirmed today (04 March) that this memo is legitimate." reads the end of the article linked. Perhaps...

Re:Wow

It's generally accepted that the big automakers certainly used whatever resources (legitimate or otherwise) they had to 'torpedo' Preston Tucker back in the 40s...

Re:Wow

No, I believe that it is in the public interest that we hold all companies to legal standards and that those standards, by necessity, should be higher for monopolies. However, I think that it is obvious that some companies, like Enron, are completely out of control with no regard for law or business ethics, while others, like Baxter Healthcare and 3M are responsible actors. You have to admit that just because GM sued Ford buyers in 1903 does not make it plausible that they would do so today, even in secret by proxy. If MS did pay SCO to sue Linux users, it is an extreme case. Although IANAL, I would be shocked if it were legal

Re:Wow

Actually, it's their money. When you pay for gas, "your money" will eventually reach terrorists under that logic.

Anyway, objectively, and using available evidence rather than assumption, none of the "Halloween memos" have ever been confirmed as being real.

Given that the idea that MS is backing SCO has been a popular conspiracy theory since Groklaw was born, isn't assuming this is true jumping the gun a bit?

When the non-geek media went ahead and assumed that the Mydoom virus was authored by Linux zealots, without objectivity or evidence, merely because the assumption made sense, everyone cried bloody murder.

Re:Wow

Maybe ESR was lied TO. I have not seen pointy ears on him, so I doubt that he has perfected the mind-meld. The mail come from "an anonymous whistleblower inside SCO." It could also be "an anonymous disgruntled liar employee inside SCO."

In short, while this mail MAY be true, it is far from a certain thing yet.

Re:Wow

As ESr points out himself on the site - let the lawyers subpoena the mail, then we will all know if it is true or not.... anyway, truth is subjective at best, and the real question is "what does it matter?" nobody needs *proof* that MS hates Linux/OSS, and what difference does it make that SCO got backed for 10 mil or 100 mil? We all know that they are in the endgame right now, and from where I am standing the whole SCO case has not done much to damage my considerable Linux business. If anything, it did Linux some good - it got a lot of people asking that otherwise would not have cared, and people asking is always a great opportunity to evangalise.

Re:Wow (FUD ALERT)

Little bit of FUD analysis here from an amateur. Feel free to discredit me as well but I think this is a sneaky posting that has sneakily been given a higher moderation.

Actually, it's their money. When you pay for gas, "your money" will eventually reach terrorists under that logic.

There is no logic in this response either. By the same mislogic buying American Flags will eventually get into the hands of people who kill babies. Spending money at all means that someone else gets to spend money and so on. The fact that oil->terrorist is a give away that this AC is stuck in some old discussion about the old anti-drug commercials. Probably a conservative shill for hire who has run out of 'gas'(Pun intended)

Anyway, objectively, and using available evidence rather than assumption, none of the "Halloween memos" have ever been confirmed as being real.
I am not sure if this is correct or not, but it is good to just say something like this as it is hard to prove whether something has been proven. This same statement can be used almost verbatim about every piece of journalism that has ever dealt with leaks, or witness accounts.

Given that the idea that MS is backing SCO has been a popular conspiracy theory since Groklaw was born, isn't assuming this is true jumping the gun a bit?
I don't want to dig around but MS has been an investor in SCO for years. There is no conspiracy theory there, it is financial relationships. Drawing Groklaw into this for no apparent reason is a bit of distraction and an attempt to sully as many targets as possible. The reality is that we aren't questioning whether or not MS has the right to give money to SCO but whether SCO has any product besides harassment law suits, and if it does not, should it's shareholders be supporting this continuous legal effort. If the entire rationale of SCO is as a hired bully for MSoft, then they have no future.

When the non-geek media went ahead and assumed that the Mydoom virus was authored by Linux zealots, without objectivity or evidence, merely because the assumption made sense, everyone cried bloody murder.

This is good. Totally off topic. It is always good to try to require individuals to operate based on no bias when you can't win an argument. Objectivity and evidence are not required in discussing any of this. We are not only allowed to use our experience, and perception, but are encouraged to do so, as that is a useful technique towards investigating matters. Until we are in a court of law we can discuss conjecture, and theories quite healthily.

----

Re:Wow

Anyway, objectively, and using available evidence rather than assumption, none of the "Halloween memos" have ever been confirmed as being real.

Oops, factual error. See the FAQ [opensource.org]. Memos I and II were publically acknowledged by Microsoft, and ESR sez III and VII were also acknowledged... I haven't seen evidence of acknowledgement of those last two myself, but I don't have much reason to doubt ESR either. Memos IV, V, VI, and IX are commentary on publically released documents, not leaked documents.

Re:Wow

Another good reason not to buy Microsoft products... They give your money to try and prevent you from using anything else than Windows.

Microsoft is also contributing money to the Bush campaign( the administration quoted as saying that outsourcing is good for everyone and plans to do nothing about it): http://www.whitehouseforsale.org/ContributorsAndPa ybacks/pioneer_search.cfm [whitehouseforsale.org]

Re:Wow

>big well funded companies like that tend to cover all their bases.

This is generally true, Microsoft does appear to contribute more to Replublicans [commoncause.org], but that has shifted over time:


Of the nearly $1.2 million in PAC and soft money contributions Microsoft contributed between 1995 and 1998, 72 percent went to Republicans. But during the first 18 months of the 2000 election cycle, Microsoft, aware of the closeness of congressional races this fall, has upped its giving to Democrats. Of the $2.3 million Microsoft has given in PAC and soft money this election cycle, 55 percent has gone to Republicans

Microsoft spokesman Rick Miller told Roll Call that the company largely follows a "very basic business strategy to giving and that's a 60/40 approach - 60 percent to the party in the majority and 40 percent to the minority." Miller added, however, that while two years ago, Republicans were Microsoft's defenders, now the company is also seeing a number of Democrats take up its cause.

Re:Wow

Microsoft is also contributing money to the Bush campaign( the administration quoted as saying that outsourcing is good for everyone and plans to do nothing about it)

I'm no fan of the Bush Administration, but they are right here. Outsourcing hurts the folks that get outsourced, but the rest of us win. The people that can do the job the cheapest get the job, the basic goods and services we use get cheaper, our standard of living goes up, etc. etc. Again, the person who loses a job is hurt, but it's often temporary. Because we all benefit from the individuals loss, we should support temporary benefits while that person changes careers.

From the Economist, Feb 19th 2004 (the India issue):

EARLIER this month, President George Bush's chief economic adviser, Gregory Mankiw, once Harvard's youngest tenured professor, attracted a storm of abuse. He told Congress that if a thing or a service could be produced more cheaply abroad, then Americans were better off importing it than producing it at home. As an example, Mr Mankiw uses the case of radiologists in India analysing the X-rays, sent via the internet, of American patients.

Mr Mankiw's proposition, in essence, is the law of comparative advantage, first postulated by David Ricardo two centuries ago and demonstrated to astonishing effect since. Yet the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, Dennis Hastert, joined Democrats in their rebuke of Mr Mankiw for approving of jobs going overseas; another Republican called for his resignation. The White House gave Mr Mankiw only lukewarm support -- unsurprisingly, since Mr Bush recently signed a bill forbidding the outsourcing of federal contracts overseas. And the Democratic presidential contenders? Mr Mankiw had just written their attack ads.

...

She uses the example of cheaper IT hardware, one of the main aspects of globalisation in the 1990s. Most of the drop in prices for PCs, mainframes and so on was caused by the relentless advance of technology; but she still thinks that trade and globalised production -- all those Dell Computer factories in China, for instance -- was responsible for 10-30% of the fall in hardware prices. These lower prices led to higher American productivity growth and added $230 billion of extra GDP between 1995 and 2002, equivalent to an extra 0.3 percentage points of growth a year.

These days, software spending is increasing at twice the rate of hardware spending, as businesses struggle to make their new computers work better. The manufacturing sector is where such integration has gone furthest. In many other parts of the American economy, the process has barely begun -- particularly among smaller- and medium-sized businesses. Mr Mankiw's example of the Indian radiologist shows how the internet could help lower costs and raise productivity in health care. Who would object to that?

I'd add more, but the Economist doesn't have a free online site. If you don't mind paying $2.95, you can read the whole article [economist.com]. Or, you can find someone who doesn't mind putting the whole article on the web [cfo.com].

A great book for learning basic economics is Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science [amazon.com] by Charles Wheelan. And, of course, a subscription to the Economist can't hurt.

It's painful to see outsourcing move from the manufacturing sector to the service sector, but we're better off because of it. Keep your skills up-to-date folks, and think about those management jobs.

Re:Wow

four words for you: Race To The Bottom.

Re:Wow

If minimum wage were lowered substantially, and various labor restrictions on corporations were lifted, then small and medium sized business could actually afford to do business here, and the larger ones would realize that the cost of moving offshore is too great for the decrease in labor cost.

Yeah, why move jobs to the third world, when you can move the third world here! Sounds great. Where do I sign up to get wages lowered, health benefits removed, and longer work days under poor working conditions?

Re:Wow

It's interesting to be marked a Troll and a Flamebaiter for mentioning ideas that are considered fundamental in the academic discipline that studies the subject. It's a little like being modded down for mentioning that most English majors think Shakespeare was a pretty important dramatist.

Oh Please. Nobody has proven that outsourcing will create more jobs.......let alone *skilled* jobs, let alone a sufficent number of *skilled* jobs.

This ain't an academic proof (Slashdot isn't a great place for such proofs), but consider computers. In the beginning, the manufacturing, assembly, and sales of computers were almost entirely in the U.S. As the industry became larger, companies found that they could outsource the manufacturing jobs to Southeast Asia, ship the parts (or assembled computers) to the U.S., and still make a larger profit over those who made them in the U.S. Soon enough, the vast majority of computer parts were manufactured in Southeast Asia, spelling doom for anyone in the computer industry in the U.S. Only the upper managers of IBM (and the stockholders, of course) were making any money.

Or, maybe not. While moving computer manufacturing to Southeast Asia was bad for the worker trying to make a living constructing computers, it was pretty good for anyone that used a computer in their job. As they became cheaper, businesses could buy more, until you got to the point where it was common to have every employee with a computer. Whole industries were created around maintaining an office of computers (which employed huge numbers of people), and some of the largest fortunes of the modern age were made from selling computers, software, and services.

Computers got cheap enough that many American families bought them for the home. Enough people had computers (hooked up to the Internet) that businesses scrambled to find ways to make money off of these people. For a while, you could actually get a job creating web pages and web sites, just so that companies could reach consumers in new ways (either directly or through advertising).

I'd argue that outsourcing those computer manufacturing jobs to Asia directly resulted in cheaper computers and their widespread ownership, and that creates millions of jobs, many more than the hundreds to thousands that Cray ever employed in Wisconsin and Minnesota. It also made it possible for a few folks to collaborate on a free Unix clone for the (newly cheap) PC. There are people arguing that that little development will mean the end of anyone making money in software, but anyone who has worked with FreeBSD or Linux knows that there is still plenty of work to be done.

So, can I say that sending x-rays to India has created new skilled jobs? Well, I can't give their names and numbers, but there is someone who closed the deal on the dedicated bandwidth between U.S. and India, someone else who maintains the equipment that makes it cheap enough to send those images, someone in the U.S. whose job it is to interface with his Indian counterparts to negotiate rates and solve issues, etc. etc. There are companies that pay a few dollars less per employee for health care costs, and perhaps a couple of people that don't get laid off because of it. There is an emergency room doctor that can see an additional patient per hour. And on, and on, and on. And, yep, there is an x-ray technician, bitter and out of a job.

I'm sorry for you if you have been outsourced. I'm angry if the government has failed to pay benefits because the laws haven't caught up to the fact that service industry jobs are now being targeted. But I'm pretty tired of paying more for food because the government is trying to protect farmers and for paying more taxes because the government just can't close a military base that employs half a town. And, as much as it hurts, I'm tired of paying more for software because some folks thought four years of school would be enough to employ them for life.

Also Remember

Also be advised that SCO's mission as Msft's attack dog has nothing to do with who owns what code - that's just a smokescreen to create confusion and disuade people from using Linux. The last thing they want is to have the issue settled - the more they can create an atmosphere of legal uncertainty surrounding GNU/Linux and force people into the arms of the 'safe haven', Windows.

Remember, it's not "You're using Linux, you owe us money", it's "Some people say Linux is illegal, some people say it's OK. Gee, I don't know who to believe so I'd better play it safe and get Winders."

Re:Wow

it's not really surprising. if you follow what SCO has actually been doing *in the courts*, you find that they haven't really attacked linux at all, but rather contracts with business partners. but whenever they speak to the press, they always claim that it's "suing linux." Even their two recent "linux user" lawsuits are not about linux, but about SCO Unix licensing contracts. That's why Google wasn't a target, they have never been a SCO customer or licensee.

there's no real reason for them to always spin every action as "bringing pain to linux and linux users." They could have proceeded with all their lawsuits (and any "stock value boosting tactics") without all the public rhetoric that is actually damaging one of their own operations.

it was only a matter of time before a link was made public, this whole campaign seems to have been intentionally twisted in a way that previous Halloween documents indicated Microsoft should proceed (attack the IP, attack the GPL).

Re:Wow

It is possible that SCO's plan is to convince people that Microsoft is funding them, without it being true. Even this memo may be a fake for that purpose.

Investors are not stupid. They know that if SCO "wins" and gets rid of Linux then SCO gets nothing. So they must think that SCO is somehow making income in another way. The only plausable way is to assumme somebody is giving them a lot of money secretly.

So many of SCO's proclamations so anti-Linux, without serving any possible purpose for advancing their case, that it has convinced everybody here that Microsoft is paying them. It is not impossible that this is a scam to make investors believe the same thing.

Only problem is that Microsoft could refute this in a press release. So it would seem that perhaps they fooled Microsoft into coughing up some money such as that license, enough that Microsoft cannot refute their involvement without lying a bit.

Re:Wow

Sure it makes sense. It also makes sense that if you have a car I like, I should just take it, right?

If they want they want to maintain the greatest market share, maybe they should compete in the market, not in the courts. I suppose you like getting screwed, though, Fishbu.

Re:Wow

I never said I liked MS but they're not the one's suing everyone. SCO is.

The point here is that if not for the money from Microsoft, SCO wouldn't be able to sue anyone. Besides, why did you think Microsoft gave SCO the money? Just to be nice?

Re:Wow

If that's the case, why go through a third party anonymously.

Re:Wow

I haven't looked at Microsoft's SFU since it's been called by that name, but their product 'Interix' which preceeded it (a purchase from Softway Systems) even came bundled with the GNU C Compiler.

Yes, that's right. Microsoft shipped a product with GCC in it. I purchased a copy at a previous employer. It's superior to Cygwin in many regards, as it's an entire new POSIX subsystem, not a kludge that rides on top of Win32, which is what Cygwin amounts to.

Re:Wow

Well after thinking about it, isn't Services for Unix (which is now free of charge) falling upon SCO's IP licensing program? If that's the case, could the 86M$ be licensing fee SCO charged Microsoft?

There is a very interesting document around on this subject. Basically, if this was UNIX licensing money then SCO has to pass it on to Novell, who subsequently give SCO their 5% collection fee. It appears in SCO's financial filings as a sort of loan, IIRC

Re:Wow

The point here is that if not for the money from Microsoft, SCO wouldn't be able to sue anyone

Of course they would. They're getting money from Sun Microsystems as well, remember?

Personally, I can't work out what the "Halloween" email is about - whether it's talking about licensing deals, about straight out loans, about cooperative licensing deals (eg. Microsoft comes up with a solutions package, and passes customers for some of the back-end systems over to SCO), or what. It may even have been faked. There's only one shifty possibility here, but everyone jumps at it.

Disclosure: I worked for Microsoft for 9 months in 1998

Re:Wow

Sure it's not honorable, but it's something any large business would do.

Look, stop saying things like that, people. You're giving away the MBA secret that big business is not honourable.

OK, it's not really a secret, just a taboo topic unless you're the so-called left-loonie fringe trying to change it. The amazing thing is, so many accept this kind of underlying failure of democracy and free markets without so much as a shrug! So is MS a success story or a travesty to you?

don't agree

Ethics are very important in busyness. Let's talk about Enron etc. In the long run it is a good policy to be honorable. You can be aggresive and honorable. It is not dificult. And, I want to make business I want an honorable partner. Otherwise I won't be able to sleep. Not becouse morals dilemas but becouse he can damage my interest from the simple capitalistic point of view

Re:AHEM! (Was:Wow)

Many of us who either have or are obtaining the MBA do NOT seek power or money as an end. (Granted, some do, and those idiots have tarnished the reputation of the rest of us.) Rather, more than a few of us are interested in growing our careers in other ways than the technical track, and to learn more non-technical skills along the way. (Like, oh, the kind that keep the software engineers in a firm employed.)

Do you not see the contradiction in your own statement? Why are you seeking to advance your career? You could be one of the rare exceptions (and I really hope you are) who wants to get into the managerial track to increase their sphere of influence and make a bigger difference than they can from the tech positions, but, unfortunatly, everyone I have ever known outside of an academic setting and most of those in an academic setting who aspire to "climb the ladder" are out for prestige, which is just a different metric for the same BS power and money type of succes that most slashdotters view as evil and corrupting.

Every good manager (meening morally good and effective, not just effective) who I have known was a pleasure to work with, respected by his workers, hated by his superiours, and above all else, reluctantly in the position they were in (meaning that they were managing because they felt nobody else could do the job justice).

Any more blanket generalities?

Because of how businesses act. We don't assume anything we simply look around us and see that people with MBA have a very different moral outlook then we do.

How many businesses do you have an intimate working knowledge of? SCO maybe? Only ones in the news? You have to realize, this is self selecting - you don't hear about all the companies who do nothing wrong, and treat both their customers and shareholders well, and compete fairly with their competitors.

Does having an MBA make you evil? Maybe not. Maybe people who are already evil are attracted to the MBA degree and position. Who knows.

If you work at a large institution you know who the MBAs are. You know how they talk and act. No assumptions are required.

That's a mindless overgeneralization. How many MBA's do you actually personally know? The fact that this is tolerated and actually modded insightful is stunning. Substitute any other group of people and people would condemn statements like that.

And no, I'm not an MBA.

Re:Any more blanket generalities?

The fact that this is tolerated and actually modded insightful is stunning. Substitute any other group of people and people would condemn statements like that.

You mean like lawyers, politicians, salespeople, telemarketers, and spammers?

Re:Wow

Everyday a man goes home and doesn't murder his entire family.

We never hear about that guy, do we?

Re:Wow

It's because many shashdotters think that having a CS degree means that they know everything and because if that, they cease to learn.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed going through the CS program but I learned about how business and accounting works from my business classes (currently taking them so that I can run my own businesses). I think that many geeks fear business and accounting related classes as much as a non-geek fearing computer related classes.

Re:Wow

Amazing how you and many others assume that most MBA's are idiots and just out for money and will do anything illegal to get there.

As far as I can tell, that's like saying that the people on Slashdot are dorky. Sure, there are plenty of exceptions, but it's true often enough that it's not an unreasonable stereotype.

I know a number of people with MBAs, both personally and professionally. Many of them are smart and honorable. But a substantial minority of the ones I have met, especially the ones fresh out of business school, are arrogant pricks with a gloss of book-learning and an desperate desire to cover up their ignorance with a lot of glib waffle.

This is a lot like the stereotypical fresh-out-of-college cowboy coder. Except that cowboy coders mainly cause trouble for themselves, whereas an MBA can wreak havoc on a much larger scale. Also, in my experience, hubristic cowboy coders are mainly annoying on geeky topics, whereas the annoying fresh-minted MBAs think they know everything about everything.

I don't entirely blame the MBAs, either; some top-tier MBA programs seem to actively train people to be arrogant and glib, presumably because clear thought and honest self-appraisal are mainly handicaps when playing the primate dominance games that upper managers seem to spend most of their time on.

Re:Wow

Why do most slashdotters assume that just b/c you have an MBA you must be some evil hell bent individual? Because we've actually met and worked with MBAs long enough to get to really know them, and have found few that don't fit this stereotype? Like the guy that sat on his ass for a year drawing a six figure salary because "you don't have a product for me to sell yet." Or the ex-IBM manager that thought forcing all the Unix programmers out and replacing them with kids fresh out of school at lower wages was the best way to get a product out the door, because after all people are just replacable pieces like machine tools, right? Or the guy who spent all his time hitting on the cute programmer 20 years his junior in the cubicle next to mine (yes, he was married). Or the guy whose idea of making a requirements document was to look at every competitors product, then insist that we implement the union of all our competitor's features... this same guy took code where somebody had busted his ass to meet his spec in the shortest time possible, and when it was given to him said "we've changed our mind, do it this way instead..." Three times in a row. For the same feature. Yep, we've got a low opinion of MBAs 'cause we've actually known some of them... which is not to say that their all bad.

Re:Wow

Hey, who called MBA's evil? I just said semi-mockingly that they have a secret, or at least get exposed to a taboo: that enhancing shareholder value is the foundation of any ethics at a publicly-held company. Or haven't you got to that stage of synthesizing your studies yet?

I myself have worked for a variety of ethically-conscious corporations: but they've been either private or not-for-profit corporations, so that gave me some perspective on the range of dilemmas. The publicly held companies I've worked for realized shareholder value at the expense of good global citizenship, virtual individuals [without the full range of responsibility of a meat individual, and pathological liars to boot] run by some really nice people, who act like assholes when making business decisions.

You'll see. It's easier to convince yourself that you're not being an asshole if you don't consider the full impact of your decisions and actions.

Re:Wow

Big business should be honourable. And that honour should be enforced by Samauari Code. Also, corporate takeovers should involve sword battles between the upper management of two companies. With decaptiations. And be televised. It might not be better business but it'd be a lot more interesting...

Re:Wow

"Businesses other than Microsoft..."

Most businesses other than Microsoft ARE NOT MONOPOLISTS!

If I could get one thing through the thick skulls of the "Microsoft is a business" shills here on slashdot, it would be that standard business practices are often illegal for monopolists.

And as for MS not suing anyone, au contraire. MS hired SCO to hire lawyers to sue people. Perhaps you feel there's a moral distinction between a hitman and the mob boss who tells a lieutenant to dispatch the hitman, but I don't.

Re:Wow

Just take note that M$ has a lot of "Partners" it can twist arms on to cause this money to appear to be from somewhere else. This behavior is an Empire that is collapsing!

For the "Free Trade" and "Capitalist" arguments out there. This isn't either. It is pure and simple Investment FRAUD. Investors are not getting paid, and the money is being spent to acquire power. This also brings up another falacy of the "Free Trade" and"Capitalist" arguments. Bluntly the super rich will spend any money they have to keep or acquire POWER. Money is not their object. You cannot entice them by better earnings or a freer richer world to make money in. They want CONTROL!

By the way I am a capitalist! I believe in the principal that investors should get paid for their investment. The problem with the American Economy right now is that Investors are not getting paid and it is hurting everything! Until we break the CONTROL Freaks in the board rooms of America of their control, nothing is going to get better for the Capitalists!

Sorry for the previous post but this is the Standard Operational Procedure(SOP) for MOST American Businesses at this time.

Re:Wow

From a business standpoint it makes sense.

From a business standpoint the Mafia makes sense.

Coming this summer !!!

... to a cinema near you:

Bruce Willis as 'Eric S. Raymond' in ...

"Legal Weapon IV"

rated NC17 for strong language and gore.

Re:Coming this summer !!!

As long as it's not for nudity and sexual situations...

Re:Wow

Yea, but this is blatant dishonesty and essentially cheating. I just read an article that says that ethical corporations do better in the long run, and this isn't a simple karma question. Be good to people and they'll be good to you. They're not just "customers" or "consumers," but people. This stuff is real, it's not a game. There aren't just rules, there are laws and morals and values. If you're an asshole now, as a person or a corporation, it will come back to get you one way or another. Microsoft and SCO may be getting what they want now, but they'll be hurting for this later.

Re:Wow

The question you have to ask yourself is, do the executives of ethical companies do better in the long run?

The reason many unethical businesses fail is that they are fleeced by unethical executives.

Corporations aren't people except legally, and they don't actually have cares or desires- only the people who control them do.

Re:Wow

The reason many unethical businesses fail is that they are fleeced by unethical executives.

Concur.

The mindset of this sort of individual will be to bleed whatever is most conveniently at hand to bleed. Including the corporate body in which they are imbedded.

Eventually this sort of behavior will get its comeuppance, but an awful lot of blood winds up on the floor before it happens. Unfortunately.

Controlling this kind of thing is what's driven political change since the days of bearskins and flint axes. Needless to say, NOBODY has come up with an effective solution to the problem in all that time. Expect no magic bullets any time soon. Or ever.

Re:Wow

Cross-posting from my groklaw coment about Autozone yesterday:

Details of SCO claim against AutoZone Authored by: inode_buddha on Wednesday, March 03 2004 @ 10:32 PM EST Right... I would *love* to see them try "All your algorithm are belong to us". Regarding the merit of the actual cases vs public opinion, I would like to remind SCO that your words both in and out of court are and will be compared to your actions. Questions of good faith vs bad faith, and corporate ethics are fair game when one acts and speaks publicly. As an individual I take pains to ensure that my actions and words correspond in such a way that my integrity is difficult to question; people are often shocked to discover that I was telling the truth. As a fictitious person in the form of a corporation, companies including SCO should do likewise. IMHO this is a poor reflection on our society, that truthfulness is not automatically given nor assumed. I take at face value and I give at face value. I expect all my relationships, both business and personal to be likewise, else those relationships are terminated with extreme prejudice. To apply that concept to computing and legal disputes, I've never met a computer that you can BS. It will have bugs and give errors if you try it. Groklaw exists in order to debug the legal system If anyone wants to accuse groklaw of shady dealings or duplicity at any time, please refer them to this post and quote me on it. --- "Truly, if Te is strong in one, all one needs to do is sit on one's ass, and the corpse of one's enemy shall be carried past shortly." (seen on USENET)

Newsome broke this last night about midnight EST on #groklaw, about the new Halloween doc and I had serious doubts whether it should be posted at all until it was verified.

If life were fair

If you're an asshole now, as a person or a corporation, it will come back to get you one way or another.

"I used to think that life was unfair. Then I thought, wouldn't it be much worse, if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe." (Marcus on B5)

So, go Microsoft! Your unethical practises are making me feel warm inside.

Re:Wow

No, they don't have to belive the case is truly valid. That's simply the element of risk that is involved here. Just like firms spend money on research projects that don't work out, MS is risking what is for them a paltry sum for a chance at hindering the growth of Linux.

Why not buy SCO then?

That figure doesn't seem right. Why would you give SCO 86M? Right now their Market cap is only like 170M or so, according to Yahoo Finance. If you had 86M you could just BUY a majority share in them.

Well I'm guessing it's pretty obvious. Windows doesn't want to be seen as an active participant in this lawsuit, but it's fairly apparent that they're trying to influence the court's decision. This is probably legal but highly unethical. Also, whose pocket is this 86M coming out of? The shareholders, probably.

The whole thing stinks, but I'm not completely sure this is correct information. 86M is a lot of money to be giving (and not investing) in a company. Maybe the reason they aren't investing is that they know SCO's lawsuit isn't sound?

Re:Why not buy SCO then?

Well, from MS's viewpoint, I think any money spent on killing Linux is an investment, just indirectly.

Re:Why not buy SCO then?

Well, if you buy the stock, SCO doesn't get the money, the stockholders do. SCO needs the money to fund its lawsuit.

The real point though, is that MS doesn't want to own them. If MS or an MS owned subsidiary was claiming rights to IP in Linux, everyone would be screaming "Monopoly, Monopoly, Anti-Trust!". Personally, I'll doubt the veracity of this memo until it is turned up in court by a subpoena, but the reason these rumours persist is that funding this under the table would be an ideal position for MS. They get to chill the Linux market without looking like the bad guys.

BTW, Baystar got a 17.5% ownership stake in SCO for its $50M investment so they actually did buy a part of the company, not give the money away.

Re:Why not buy SCO then?

Microsoft doesn't care about any profits SCO makes from its lawsuit. They probably think, as we do, that those profits are insignificant to none.

What they do care about is spreading FUD. I was bored the other day and read Optimize, one of the free magazines Ziff-Davis sends me on a regular basis. I almost lost my lunch when I read a lengthly article about the legal hazards associated with open source. It was written in a way that would make any Linux-using corporation fear for its life! It was so filled with distortions and half-truths that I threw it in the trash bin where it belonged, and ignored all the solicitations asking me to continue my subscription for free.

I don't want that garbage in my company - but we should be aware that it's there, it's floating around, and it wouldn't have even a mirage of plausibility without this lawsuit.

The longer this lawsuit lingers, the more time they have to spread the FUD and use it to their advantage. So it's greatly in their interest to fund SCO.

That's Microsoft's real game.

D

Re:Why not buy SCO then?

I'm curious as to if all you did was throw away the magazine. I'm not trying to be rude, but perhaps next time you should send a well-written letter to the editor(s) of the magazine as well as the parent company expressing what caused such digust and duress in their product. While it is doubtful that a single message put across will make much change enough will, hopefully, at least convey that many intelligent and quite possibly fairly economically stable no longer want to purchase their publication.

Re:Why not buy SCO then?

What would be the point in that?

Assume that MS is competant (a reasonable assumption, since we're dealing with legal and corporate matters). They want this suit to hurt Linux's reputation. They know it will lose. They know the only way it will make money for them is when worried users purchase Windows licences. They konw SCO will never make back anything, and that SCO may wind up severely in debt after countersuits (Redhat for slander, IBM for patent violation...). Finally, they know that the FUD will be less effective if they are identified with it.

In short, owning SCO would bring them no money, increase their risk, and decrease their effectiveness. All they would get in return is control. They seem to have that thoroughly enough now.

Of course, they run the risk that IBM will hostily take over SCO and shut the suit down in an instant. Since this would give more public evidence for "SCO's claims", MS would be perfectly happy.

Re:Why not buy SCO then?

Assume that MS is competant (a reasonable assumption, since we're dealing with legal and corporate matters).

It goes without saying that Microsoft is competent. They would not be in the position they are today without some degree of business acumen. The reason folks in this environment don't honor Microsoft for their core competency is because we tend to honor technology above business. And when technology is sacrificed for the sake of business, we tend to take a dim view.

They want this suit to hurt Linux's reputation.

This is a really important observation: ruining Linux's reputation has strategic importance. Microsoft has long had a strategy embodied by the phrase "cutting off their air supply." This is usually done by impacting the revenue to a product. Most competing technologies are based on a product offering that must generate a certain level of revenue (either directly or indirectly) or it is no longer justifies its continued support and development. Once support for an IT product is removed from the market, the market will eventually move to whatever competitors remain. Therefore, if one can impact the revenue stream for a product enough, one can kill a competing technology. And then reap the benefits of being the last product standing.

Linux offers a challenge to this strategy. Individual companies leverage Linux for their own profit. However, impacting the revenue of one company will simply remove a single business entity while leaving the technology itself (Linux) intact... and likely still being supported and developed by other entities. One can not bury Linux by attacking a single company's Linux-based revenue stream.

On even more simple terms, Linux is not based on hard currency. But it does run on its own currency; reputation.

Linux is enjoying an increased level of support from hardware and software developers due to its increasing popularity / reputation. Along with that comes an increased level of adoption as various entities from single users to enterprise environments deploy Linux. Which increases the demand for hardware and software offerings. And also increases the available resources to further develop of the platform. This increased demand and resources feed back to Linux's reputation. It becomes a nice regenerative loop.

It should be pretty obvious that the "cutting off their air supply" strategy is still applicable, it just has to be modified to attack a different form of currency. Instead of impacting revenue or hard currency, Microsoft will have to impact the reputation of the competing technology. It must harm Linux's reputation. Which, in turn, reduces or erodes Linux's adoption and resources.

Re:Why not buy SCO then?

The whole thing stinks, but I'm not completely sure this is correct information. 86M is a lot of money to be giving (and not investing) in a company.

How you got modded up to 5 is amazing. Let me clue you in. Microsoft has about $50B in cash on hand right now. Yes: Fifty billion dollars. Knock 6 zeros off each number. If Microsoft had $50,000, they've given SCO $86, or about 1/500th. For all the harm they've done to Linux, is likely *is* an investment, and it's cost them essentially nothing.

I'd been guessing all along that Darl and company were acting so recklessly in public (they're obviously not trying to win these lawsuits or they'd be quiet) because that was part of the deal.

Re:Why not buy SCO then?

Sorry, but have you been following this story since it first broke - years ago, when ESR was given the original Halloween Documents? Do you realise what MS feel is at stake here, and how far they are willing to go?

This is a no compromise situation. If $86 million is a lot of money to you in this situation, then how do you feel about $5 BILLION? For that is what MS expended on Internet Explorer, not to make it best of breed, but just to make it good enough, so that with all their other shady dealings, they could drive Netscape out of the market. And they never even once considered selling IE. Those $5 billion were a drop in the ocean to them.

Get a grip!

Re:Wow

I'm not sure if you're kidding or not, but assuming you're not: ESR has posted a variety of leaked memos from Microsoft and similar over the last few years, starting with the original Halloween Memo about five years ago, all of which have turned out to be genuine.

Whether ESR is a zealot or not doesn't really have any bearing on this issue. If you're going to rely upon paragons of open-mindedness to leak critical information all of the time, you'll have a long time to wait, because those without opinions rarely have reasons to get involved.

Re:Wow

ESR has a long history of releasing internal memos from Microsoft (and others) that are verified to be genuine. Heck, this is his tenth "Halloween" memo with no hoaxes yet.

It might be time for you to rethink who the zealot is. Just because you don't like ESR's politics doesn't mean that he isn't an excellent source of information.

Re:Wow

Microsoft themselves confirmed the authenticity of at least the first halloween memo.

Re:My God

It's got to be consipiracy theory BS. Patenting IPX? give me a break. Also it says that SCOs main earner will be MS... seems unlikely given their track to date... So far MS seem to be getting very poor value for money, no evidence that the SCO campaign is in any way helping MS or even that it will.

I call BS on the whole article.

Looks like a duck.

I see myself as a sceptic, but on the other hand...

>Patenting IPX? give me a break.

Would you categorize this as more or less preposterous compared to the statements "There are millions of literal lines of System V copied into linux" and "We own the UNIX operating system"?

Hold Up... SCO Contributed IPX code to Linux

Check the kernel source.

[ipx]$ pwd
/usr/src/linux-2.4/net/ipx
[ipx]$ grep -i caldera *
af_ipx.c: * Portions Copyright (c) 1995 Caldera, Inc. <[e-mail]>
af_ipx.c: * Neither Greg Page nor Caldera, Inc. admit liability nor provide
af_ipx.c: KERN_INFO "IPX Portions Copyright (c) 1995 Caldera, Inc.\n" \
af_spx.c: * Jim Freeman <[e-mail]>

Dumb, but not completely off the playing field.

-Hope

Re:HAH!

Yes, and if, in fact, this e-mail is real, then it will be real interesting to see what happens to SCO's revenue stream. I'm sure that MS doesn't like to be played the fool, and that about what these guys are saying here. I mean, christ...

but there are other ways to get money from them, their partners,investment bank referrals, etc..

and

This Microsoft deal is the Ante to the poker game...We should get this done and go after several $2-3 Million deals from the expense side of their company.

...sure makes it seems like they think MS is an easy, endless source of money. Well, let's just wait and see what'll happen.

Also, ~$100 mil isn't chump change, shouldn't there be some sort of public record of MS explaining this transaction, or can you "creatively account" for it?

I am a gud speller

It's funny how the typos and bad grammar in the email lends credence to it. Looks like something I'd get from an exec at work! Well, minus the shady dealing with Microsoft, anyway. :P

Re:I am a gud speller

Hmmm... I have to agree. I can't recall (or find) an email that I have received from an exec, save for the tech exec I used to work for, that did not have spelling errors.

The tech exec knew where the spell checker was and he used it.

Re:This is a forgery.

So we're supposed to trust one anonymous source (you) over another anonymous source?

Re:This is a forgery.

I work inside SCO. Mike Anderer hasn't had anything to do with the company since June 2003. This is a clear and simple forgery. I lend it no credence. I'd suggest ignoring it.

Yeess, Darl. When you wave your hands like that I realize these are not the droids I'm looking for.

Re:This is a forgery.

According to the Register article [theregister.co.uk], Mike Anderer is from S2 Strategic Consulting.

Re:This is a forgery.

According to the SCO 10-K [finsys.com] to which ESR linked, Anderer signed an agreement between SCO and S2 Strategic Consulting (his company) on August 4, 2003. Assuming the parent poster believes what he wrote, Anderer probably left SCO in June to continue performing the same functions as an independent contractor.

Re:This is a forgery.

I work inside SCO. Mike Anderer hasn't had anything to do with the company since June 2003.

You may be right, he might not have anything to do with SCO since June 2003...but since he's a consultant that brought MS into the SCO deal, which was BEFORE June 2003...he really doesn't have to have anything to do with SCO...this memo is mainly about his fees he would garner from the deal.

So sorry, spread your FUD somewhere else.

He's as good as fired.

The document below was emailed to me by an anonymous whistleblower inside SCO. He tells me the typos and syntax bobbles were in the original.

Wave bye-bye to the nice whistleblower. I bet the 'typos and syntax bobbles' are part of a document tracking system. SCO will know who released this.

Re:He's as good as fired.

Wave bye-bye to the nice whistleblower. I bet the 'typos and syntax bobbles' are part of a document tracking system. SCO will know who released this.

Yeah, that'd be real smart. Then they have a hostile witness that's willing to testify that he/she got fired for distributing a document that SCO failed to provide to IBM or Red Hat or Novell for discovery.

Or, I suppose, they can fire the person, provide a copy to the various lawyers, possibly get an nice friendly SEC visit, and generally piss off everyone that might have been involved in pushing money at them.

The only thing they can safely do is deny the whole thing... Eric's lost enough credibility lately that it might actually fly. Heck, I wouldn't be too surprised if it's just someone trolling him... It's really about time.

c.

Can't... type... reply...

Can't... type... reply... too... much... outrage... head... exploding...

How can they get away with this?

Assuming this is an accurate and actual letter, how is it that a company can continue to do business in this manner? This company is not in the softwrae business anymore - it's in the lawsuit business. After all the happenings with Enron and WorldCom, how is it that this company, which has no real business plan (that's evident even outside the letter) attract customers or money?

We should attach a motor to Adam Smith's grave. I'm guessing we're at about 100K RPM and climbing.

legislating stupidity

My favorite Jesse Venture quote, or one of them: "You can't legislate stupidity".

He was talking about people riding snowmobiles on thin ice, ignoring warnings from the weatherman, and then dying from falling into freezing water.

But in this case, it would have to be the stupidity of the people who involve themselves in these meaningless pursuits of trying to immerse themselves in power.

It seems to me, anyway, that these guys corresponding are fascinated with power, not with anything else. Just power. Probably because they don't think they have enough money in their bank accounts.

Hopefully, they are in a minority - well, at least - this is not the way to be successful, and participating in this type of nonsense will only bring you and your family great misery - in the long run. Despite how successful these folks are in their own minds, their plan is just doomed to fail anyway - leak or no leak. Which means one thing... they are wasting their time, hence they are stupid. If they really cared about power and prestige and wealth, they wouldn't be wasting their time attacking Linux, which is innocent.

Beep, beep....COULTER DETECTOR ACTIVATED!

Boom!
"You (other readers) do know that it is the *current* administration that actually lifted a finger to prosicute and jail the folks at Enron and WorldCom, yes?"

OK....I'll bite.

So you mean the same administration that met with Lay, et al. to formulate "energy policy"? What you see as righteous prosecution I see as CYA once the public outcry against corporate banditry got too loud.

The contention that DOJ or the Bush are acting out of altruism is ludicrous. This is an echo of Ambrose's statments about Nixon: he let everyone else take the hit until there was no one else left. Skilling, the WorldCom guy getting jammed this week, they are all sacrificial lambs for the Cons. They were useful allies as long as the smoke and mirrors stock bubble was cruising. Now they are liabilities.

DOJ has ended up looking like doofuses because Elliot Spitzer is doing an Elliot Ness impersonation. Spitzer is burning Wall Streeters in NY while the DOJ is hassling hospitals for abortion records. Ashcroft hasn't exactly pursued a full court press on the MSFT antitrust stuff, either.

Lifting a finger? Balls. They're cutting accomplices loose.

Making the World Safe for Democracy

Ashcroft hasn't exactly pursued a full court press on the MSFT antitrust stuff, either.

Remember, we are talking about a man who is sexually intimidated [bbc.co.uk] by cement. He's probably been busy with the thousands of other statues that need clothing.

Wow, here's another once out of touch

So you think secret meetings with what turned to be criminals to decide who Bush would pick for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission was a good idea? You think its ok that only one company (consisting of criminals btw)had exclusive access to Cheney when he drafted a new energy policy while others were shut out?

You know what? Your right. There was no conflict of interest and the fact that Enron was Bush's number one supporter and closest ally since he was governor only serves to clear Bush's name. Its obvious the administration was the clean one here and was just collaborating so closely so they could get more evidence on Enron. Yea, that's the ticket. They were going to turn their evidence to the DOJ but we just didn't give them enough time...

I'll never understand how someone can become so brainwashed that they can no longer distinguish right from wrong. I feel sorry for you.

Re:Beep, beep....COULTER DETECTOR ACTIVATED!

The problem isn't that he met with big industry people. The problem is that he met ONLY with big industry people and shut every other voice out. If you weren't big business, you had no say whatsoever in energy policy. So if you had concerns with pollution controls, etc, you were shut out.

Then they kept all records of this meeting secret, so no one else can even see what they talked about, even though court after court has said that the documents MUST be public under the Freedom of Information act (it's going before the Supreme Court...if you've missed the articles about Cheney taking a supreme court justice out for a nice long weekend trip right before his court case comes before that justice, you should really read something besides the conservative media.)

Paging the DoJ...

If this turns out to be genuine (and I'm sure ESR would have gone to great lengths to validate the document before going public), I can't think of better grounds for another anti-trust case. It's already on the Register [theregister.co.uk] too, and Groklaw can't be far behind. Let's draw attention to this smoking gun, shall we?

Re:Paging the DoJ...

Don't hold your breath. Remember that the current DoJ is the one that administered the slap on the wrist for the convicted monopolist's most recent infractions. Even if Kerry wins, I'm sure his administration can be bought, as well.

Re:Uh, this DOJ is pretty effective.

What are you talking about? The DOJ and their attorneys beat Microsoft seven ways from Sunday in court. They even satisfied the most pro-business court in the land that the company was an abusive monopolist. Had Jackson kept his damn mouth shut, all would have been fine, but he didn't, and so the penalty was vacated and a new hearing ordered.

The case was assigned to a new judge, one with virtually zero antitrust experience, and she ordered settlement talks. During that time, the Administration changed over and the DOJ went from hardcore, aggressive demands for breakup to the loving kiss with tongue and extra saliva that Judge KK ultimately accepted.

"Stinking cesspool" ? Bull. The case was a slam-dunk and the new Administration threw in the towel on Microsoft when the ref's count had reached nine and three-quarters.

Re:Uh, this DOJ is pretty effective.

Soon after Bush took office the DOJ took splitting MS off the table. After that everything went to hell.

Re:Uh, this DOJ is pretty effective.

The Appellate Court's comments on Jackson were that he knew what he was doing. I thought then and think now that they were hittin' the pipe to say that he did a good job but they were going to vacate his order for relief to avoid the always-trite "appearance of impropriety". Either he did a good job, end of story, or he didn't and they should have punted the whole shootin' match.

I was out of work for much of the trial and had the opportunity to read the hundreds of pages of Jackson's findings. He demonstrated a clear awareness of Microsoft's misdeeds and what would be an appropriate level of sanction to restore competition to the marketplace. Only the most ardent Microsoft cheerleader could claim that the KK-approved settlement has done jack to restore a marketplace twisted out of recognition by the company.

Re:Paging the DoJ...

When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things bought and sold are the legislators.

-- P.J. O'Rourke

Re:Paging the DoJ...

What does John Kerry thinks of anti-trust investigations against american corporations on times of economic downturns?

He's for them. And against them. Oh, and he served in Vietnam.

Re:Paging the DoJ...

I'm sure ESR would have gone to great lengths to validate the document before going public

Don't be so sure. According to ESR's statement: I cannot certify its authenticity, but I presume that IBM's, Red Hat's, Novell's, AutoZone's, and Daimler-Chryler's lawyers can subpoena the original.

So take it with a grain of salt. I'm sure ESR thinks it's authentic, but until someone can confirm its authenticity, don't believe it. In the end, it's better to be skeptical of surprising evidence than to instantly accept false claims.

Re:Paging the DoJ...

Oh, I'm skeptical alright, a few spelling mistakes yes, but this looks like it was written by a high school kid, not some MBA. I know educational standards are slipping, but *this* far?

I'm not skeptical at all based on the general sloppiness of this memo.

First, I've known plenty in management (and technical people, as well) whose spelling and grammar are horrendous. On top of that, few of them take the time to proofread their stuff.

Second, if this were some top notch guy, would he have to resort to this kind of sleazy behavior to make a decent living? No, he'd instead be a productive member of society.

Re:Paging the DoJ...

Let's draw attention to this smoking gun, shall we?

Great idea! I can't wait until the The Smoking Gun [thesmokinggun.com] gets a hold of Darl's mugshots. They did such a great job with the Enron [thesmokinggun.com] guy...

Re:Paging the DoJ...

and I'm sure ESR would have gone to great lengths to validate the document before going public

Wait, are you being sarcastic? I can't tell.

And if you're not, exactly how would ESR go about doing that, hmm? If he knows the identity of whoever leaked it, he would have to reveal that in court. As far as I know, the source is anonymous. Is it possible to go to the investors and get the numbers on how much was contributed? Is that knowledge even public yet?

It makes good sense for Microsoft

For $86 million Microsoft has created an enourmous amount of chaos. There is little doubt they will make their $86M back on additional because of the FUD the SCO crap has caused.

That doesn't make it any less sneaky, underhanded and evil though.

Re:It makes good sense for Microsoft

I will concede that there has been some upheaval and surprise in the business world due to this lawsuit, but I don't call it "enormous chaos." Despite the FUD and the lawsuits and the dupe of the media, Linux is still being enhanced and improved. And most importantly, it's still being adopted.

Now, if SCO were to win, THAT would be chaos indeed.

Re:It makes good sense for Microsoft

Despite the FUD and the lawsuits and the dupe of the media, Linux is still being enhanced and improved. And most importantly, it's still being adopted.

Not only that, but the memo is 5 months old and as far as I can tell SCO hasn't gotten any more significant money from Microsoft (maybe, just maybe EV1 was somehow tied into MS "you pay SCO a licensing fee, we'll discout your W2K server licenses by the same amount" but that's a bit too much tin-foil-hat thinking). This is telling me MS probably knows their cash to SCO isn't getting the kind of 'returns' it was looking for and has cut off the supply.

The lawsuits kind of point in this direction as well. SCO had gone a year "threatning" to sue, without actually doing it. If their threats actually worked MS would probably still be funneling cash to them one way or another and there would be no need to spend any money actually suing someone. Assuming the e-mail is real it looks like the gravy train stopped and now they actually have to find money on their own.

Re:It makes good sense for Microsoft

Now, if SCO were to win, THAT would be chaos indeed.

True. And $100 million is pocket change for Microsoft so it's a good bet for them. Give SCO some money to create uncertainty about Microsoft's competition and they reap the initial benefit of that uncertainty. And, if SCO happens to win .... well, let's just say it's an easy bet to make for Microsoft to make. Even though it's a long shot it doesn't really hurt MS and it has the potential to be a great windfall in their favor.

They have trouble attacking free software in the business world, so why not lash out at them from the courts? The only problem is that it seems to be backfiring. I read a post yesterday that pointed out that with more and more exposure of Fortune 500 companies using linux everyone else is starting to realize linux is not just a plaything. Linux is actually gaining momentum from the attacks.

It may not...

...now that the cat's out of the bag. The FTC should be informed, IBM and Novell should demand memos, etc. Microsoft may end up wishing they'd never done this.

I wonder if anything will be done based on this leaked memo - I mean legally can anything be done?

Welcome to the real world folks.

Although this does smack of "unfair" business practices it is a look at how *some* business alliances are formed.

Now, if you are going to condemn it in this case you also need to condemn it when one of "the big guys" comes to the rescue of something that *you* like.

Also, if you assume that IBM, etc. had no idea that this was going on then that would be a bad assumption. They might not of known the details, but they *probably* knew something was up.

Re:Welcome to the real world folks.

Is it really 'unfair'? One company says they have a valid and legal way to take out the competition... why not fork over some cash to help them out?

Honestly, if Red Hat says they have proof that MS was using copyright code from one of its properitary dlls, and IBM gave them a boatload of cash to help out, would it be 'unfair'?

Always reverse the situation before you guys go foaming at the mouth!

Anti-trust fear is real also...

The question is - where is this money coming from? What department at Microsoft authorized it, and do the shareholders/gov't know?

Squashing the competition is one thing, doing it in secret is another. This was clearly done this way to avoid more scrutiny by the DOJ. THAT'S what the problem here is.

If Microsoft wants to support SCO, they should just be honest about their intentions. If this memo is true, however, it's going to look fishy to anyone with half a brain at the FTC/DOJ.

Because it's illegal?

Read up on Maintenance and Champerty. These are legal torts involving funding lawsuits, especially frivilous lawsuits.

I don't happen to believe that the email is genuine, emails are too easy to forge, but no one should be so sanguine about this being in any way appropriate.

Re:Because it's illegal?

I can not concede that SCO has a case aginst IBM. Not for a moment.

You are falling into an intellectual trap by using the term "Intellectual Property". You are failing to think clearly.

There are four kinds of "Intellectual Property": Patent, trademark, copyright and trade secret. Each kind has its particular rules.

SCO has no patents pertinant to this case. Novell didn't transfer any patents to them.

SCO has no trade secrets. They've dropped the trade secret components.

SCO has no trademarks. Unix and Unixware are trademarks of the Open Group. SCO hasn't made trademark claims.

SCO's only remaining copyright claim against IBM is contributing to distribute AIX after SCO "terminated" their irrevocable linense. Even though SCO can't terminate IBM's license and even though Novell who, acting within their rights in the asset transfer, told SCO to waive any purported violations.

SCO has got nothing left. Their contract claims are not IP claims. Their "derivative works must be kept secret" contract claim will fail. The technologies they are claiming violate their "IP" do not meet Copyright Law's definition of derivative works. AT&T publically said that code licensees add to Unix belongs to them and that estopps SCO from claiming otherwise today. SCO has no rights to the JFS, NUMA and SMP technologies IBM donated to Linux. None.

SCO literally has no case. Every legal theory they've put forth is fundamentally flawed.

Their other suits seems just as flawed, but they haven't yet been analysed in detail as the IBM and Novell cases have. Autozone seems to be a straightforward copyright case except that SCO admitted that there was no SysV code in Linux before Judge Wells. Oops! No more case there.

They are also attempting to assert patent-like use rights on copyright whioch does not reserve "use" to the rightsholder as an exclusive right. Oops! No more case.

Daimler-Chrysler seems to be a complaint that DC hasn't responded to their Unix letter. Gee. I'd hate to be a former SCO customer. Apparently you can never get out of their stupid annual reporting requirement.

Re:Welcome to the real world folks.

Although this does smack of "unfair" business practices it is a look at how *some* business alliances are formed.

Now, if you are going to condemn it in this case you also need to condemn it when one of "the big guys" comes to the rescue of something that *you* like.

Well said!

This is business for good or bad, it all depends on what side of the line you are on in the situation at at hand

Re:Welcome to the real world folks.

I'd say spending the best part of $100m on what is basically a smear campagin, by a company already convicted of, and facing additional convictions for, anti-competetive business practices goes above and beyond "unfair". Just because this is the way that things are done in some sectors of the business world does not mean it should be excused at all. Give them an inch and all that...

But you do have a valid point about the "them and us" aspect. If someone condemns Microsoft for this, then by rights they should also condemn IBM if they were to, say invest $100m in an anti-MS smear campaign. Not that that would ever happen - IBM still has a policy of never smearing a competitor as far as I am aware... ;)

Re:Welcome to the real world folks.

> IBM still has a policy of never smearing a competitor as far as I am aware... ;)

lol, you make them sound so fluffy

IBM's founder spent time in prison for his string arm dealings in the cash register business (smashing up stuff, dumping, threatening).

He was awarded Nazi Germany's highest honour for a foriegner for leasing Holleriths and programmers to the Third Riech (they didn't run 10million+ slave workers with pencil & paper).

The story [ibmandtheholocaust.com] is an interesting read. Especially with regard to personal data & the unseen hand.

I wonder what a happened in this lawsuit [wired.com].

Re:Welcome to the real world folks.

IBM's founder spent time in prison for his string arm dealings in the cash register business

Thirty NCR executives were found guilty in that decision, which was subsequently overturned. See this Fortune article [fortune.com] for an overview. As far as I can tell, T.J. Watson never served a day.

Oh, and while T.J. arguably founded the modern IBM, the company had existed for years before T.J. got there as the "Computer Tabulating Recording Company". CTR was itself a derivative of Herman Hollerith's Tabulating Machine Company, founded in 1896.

Re:Welcome to the real world folks.

Now, if you are going to condemn it in this case you also need to condemn it when one of "the big guys" comes to the rescue of something that *you* like.

I don't even understand why you would think this. What we have here (regardless of the truth of the memo) is a classic case of a monpolist using its cash, market power and the legal system to maitain control of the market in order to continue its monopolistic practices. I can damned well condem this and be happy when a different company (say IBM) spends money to try to back a new product that threatens them, not because I think an IBM monopoly would be better but because I want no monopoly at all. That's consistent.

Re:Right...

It's also convienent that the whole letter just keeps reiterating how much money they have gotten from MS. I think after the second time it would be understood.

I realize most people are going to disagree, but of all the memos leaked before this does not look real. I could care less about the spelling, but the point of the e-mail is just sad ESPECIALLY if we are considering someone leaked the memo must have been a recipient. That's not exactly a business wide e-mail. No one that high up would go try to shoot themselves in the foot at this point.

Re:Right...

if we are considering someone leaked the memo must have been a recipient.

Not necessarily. I'm not sure that this memo is legit either, but SMTP isn't exactly known for being secure. There are any number of people who could have been capturing packets in case anything interesting showed up... not to mention any sysadmins with direct access to the queue on the mailserver.

Does this really matter?

While this might have an effect in the court of public opinion, and I certainly think that it should (big bad Microsoft, trying to kill off its competitors using SCO as a weapon), I don't see its bearing in the legal arena. Regardless of whether or not Microsoft is bankrolling this lawsuit to stiffle competition from Linux, SCO either owns or doesn't own the code that they are trying to claim as theirs. If they own it, they'll win their lawsuits, regardless of who is paying for them.

Smoking gun? Well, maybe, if you're looking at a Microsoft violation of their anti-trust agreement, but it really has not bearing on the court cases.

"Rich"

...is probably Richard Emerson [microsoft.com].

Accounting error

They have so much money that no one noticed the cheque for $8.6m was actually for $86m due to a missing decimal place.

The person responsible has been promoted to strategy and vision director.

Everything old is new again.

It's not like this is the first time one corporation has funded blatantly false muckraking efforts against another. It's just Robber Barons, Part II. They'll all have their little squabbles and the money will pass from hand to hand, and in the end the only people who win aren't the consumers, or even the corporate bigwigs - it's the lawyers. Same as it ever was.

Typos

Looks like the MSWord spell checker was turned on when composing the mail ;)

Re:An order of magnitude?

Round 7.8 to 8.

It's an order of magnitude since humanity's natural number base is octal.

No, it's not 10. Look at your hand -- the thumb is there for carry-bits when adding.

(Old PDP10 joke from before my time.)

Makes Sense

For 86 Million USD, I'd act like a total jackass, too. Not many people wouldn't. I don't know SCO's legal history before this whole thing started. It might be because they never did anything this assinine. 86 million USD would more than justify why they are doing it, esp. if they were on the verge of dying.

Anyone got another 86 Million USD to make them shut up?

Not an open source

I find it amusing that the people one /., the same people who believe that one should be able to go to the source and verify the code on voting machines, seem to believe what ESR is telling them about MS and SCO w/o having access to his source.
Does anyone else see the irony in this?

Re:Not an open source

Just imagine a "If this is true then;" in front of every post. That's what the rest of us do.

This could have been big! -Final version

If the discovery process yields the original email, Microsoft is fucked.

ESR wasn't very smart. He shouldn't have published this YET.

Give IT to IBM lawyers so they know what to look for and when they are fairly certain that they have it among their discovery material, THEN publish it.

SCO's going to be shredding and I hear their email server *just* crashed and its hard drives are going to have to be replaced. All of the archive tapes have suddenly gone bad too.

This *could* have been the bomb but ESR probably blew it by speaking a little too soon.

Mods: Please mod the previous comment down and let this one replace it.

Actually, that could be good.

It's called spoliation of the evidence (no, that's not a a typo, that's how it's spelled). If IBM/Novell/etc can show that the evidence was destroyed, then the jury is allowed to consider that the evidence was probably damaging to SCO/MS.

Instead, they'll release enough of the emails to claim that they released them all (kind of like in a certain anti-trust action a few years ago). That way, nobody can prove anything based on the email or that SCO destroyed any email.

I think ESR probably did the right thing, because this is much more useful in the court of public opinion than in a court of law -- even if it could be proved. As the Register article points out, MS could have legitimate (from a business standpoint) reasons for investing in SCO that would be perfectly legal. But they can't do anything about how bad it looks, so they had a reason to hide it even if it were legit. So dragging it out where everyone can see it is the best course of action.

Too good to be true

I don't think these guys are _quite_ dumb enough to admit to this stuff in email. Much less on company email that is all under subpoena in the IBM litigation.

I smell a setup.

Clearly you work for smarter people than I'm used

First off, I'm not addressing the authenticity of this specific e-mail, just the idea that such dealings would be sent by e-mail.

They are.

It's a common communication form, and I've had people where I work now think that by deleting an e-mail from their inbox, they erase if from exitance.

One of the shadiest people I met in my entire life was having problems with his computer, so the (then) network admin emptied the trash on the desktop and in Outlook as part of his cleanup. Said sales jackass was standing over his shoulder demanding an explanation of everything he was doing, and refused to believe that three years of e-mail were still readily available after he hit the "DEL" key.

"I deleted them, they're gone."

After much explanation, including my input, he finally said "It doesn't matter if only geeks can get at them."

Total idiot.

And then there was the day he found out about the backups we were doing of the mail server, and the fact that the "deleted items" were kept in our archives for 30 days.

He was not a happy man.

BTW: This is the same guy who was later fired when one of his business partners called up threatening to show up with a baseball bat and take out kneecaps.

I'm not saying the MS execs are anywhere near that level, I'm just saying that just because YOU and I wouldn't put something that incriminating into a system that could be tracked and recovered, doesn't mean other people would.

Besides, they probably never suspected the document would be leaked.

Re:Too good to be true

I smell a setup.

I was thinking the same thing. They admit way too much in that mail
Imagine the FBI finding this in 1963:

From: Lee Harvey Oswald

To:Marina Oswald
Subject: Shooting Kennedy

Hi Honey,
I'll be shooting President Kennedy tommorrow morning then I'll take in a movie. Don't bother with dinner.

Love,
Lee.

So what happens now?

OK, so it seems to a non-lawyer that they've been caught red handed.

My question then, is what happens now? Is it possible to use this as evidence in a lawsuit? Is it possible to get it confirmed by subpoenia-ing (?) the original, and if so how quick?

What exact crime has been committed here, if any, and what are the possible punishments, again if Microsoft are actually doing anything illegal.

It might be admissable....

I distinctly remember being very surprised by some information I got in my Michigan law class.

The examples were "based on real cases."

A thief broke into a home and found a meth lab, and reported it to the police.

Another thief robbed a home, and later found what turned out to be murder evidence among his stollen goods. He reported it to the police.

In both cases, the evidence obtained by the thief was admitted into the trial.

I know this holds true in Michigan, and at the time the book stated that this was true in "Most US states." No clue about Federal court.

It was even mentioned that sometimes cops will make a deal with a known burglar to break in and retrieve evidence for them. So long as it never becomes known that the thief was asked or told to do this by the cops, then all is well. If it comes out that an officer of the law encouraged the activity, then the evidence will not be admissible. (The law course didn't tell us what would happen to a cop who encouraged such activity)

Microsoft's strategy could backfire

It's pretty logic that Microsoft is behind all that. Otherwise the anti-Linux FUD spread by SCO just doesn't make any sense.

However, Microsoft's efforts could backfire badly:

If people actually start to think (I said "if" okay?) and realize that it's proprietary software that got people into legal trouble:

• IBM was sued because of their agreements around project Monterey and their licensing of proprietary SCO IP.
• Autozone was sued because they used the proprietary SCO Unix and SCO claims that they continued to use it after their contract expired.
• The suit against DaimlerChrysler is similar, they dumped SCO and SCO claims they continue using it

If any of those firms would have used 100% open source software from the start neither would have been sued.

Isn't the whole SCO-mess the biggest pro-OSS argument imaginable?

If you look at SCO: First you buy software from a seemingly honest Unix-vendor, a couple of years later their management changes and you get sued for it! SCO proves how dangerous proprietary sofware can become.

Re:Microsoft's strategy could backfire

Not necessarily. I agree with you that this strategy could backfire, but only if people make the distinction between truth and fiction. Keep in mind that SCO's position is that Linux, an OSS, is in fact proprietary work. If there is a general acceptance of this nonsense, then OSS could be in for a tough ride. But if people could see that Linux is IN FACT open-source and that SCO's claim is false and baseless, then OSS stands to gain. The distinction is not so much between open-source and proprietary software, but between what SCO is claiming and what is actually reality.

Wrong math

There are several things wrong here. First, it was already known that Baystar invested in SCO to the tune of around $55m. The memo says Microsoft brought in $86m INCLUDING baystar, so other monies from Microsoft or Microsoft related referrals would only be $31m. And we know microsoft bought a SCO license, which was a good bit of that.

The Wizard of SCOz

Darl McBride: What do you want, peon?
Linus Torvalds: Show me the disputed code!
McBride: You must pay me $699 if you want to see the code!
Torvalds: Yeah, right. Wait a second....

*He spots Bill Gates off to the side behind a curtain, controlling the giant flaming head of McBride*

Torvalds: Isn't that... I knew it!
McBride: Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!!!
Torvalds: The game's up, Billy Boy!

Re:The Wizard of SCOz

And at the end, Linus wakes up and is surrounded by Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Richard Stallman.

Linus: Uncle Ken, Uncle Ken, there's no place like /home!

Who does this?

"Well I've thoroughly enjoyed this clandestined discussion. I feel so devious and evil. But for my own records, could you write down everything we've just said (especially all the bad stuff we're doing) and distribute it to all the company employees? Make sure all the new guys get it too, especially the one in cubicle 4-B that doesn't like his job. Oh, and if this gets out it could ruin our public image, so try to keep it a secret, thank you." Microsoft VIP

Re:Who does this?

The message wasn't sent to all SCO employees. It was probably printed out (after all, don't all PHBs print their email to read it?), then tossed in a wastebasket rather than shredded like it should have been. And the typos are all obvious likely typos, so either the person who wrote it is an expert on the kinds of errors typists make (say a professional English teacher or editor) or it's real.

Re:Who does this?

At my former job (got laid off), I used to print all of my documents on the laser near the accounting/legal group. My explanation was that "it's the only printer that has legal-size paper in it." Good stuff for engineering spreadsheets, schematics, and code listings.

Of course, there were ample opportunities to "accidentally" read someone else's prints that had gotten mixed-in with mine. Hyu-mons are predictably lazy - you can learn a great deal if your timing is right. It also helps if you use the adjacent copier (i.e. large flat surface) to sort out the prints. "Oops, accidentally hit the copy button ... again ..."

The memo looks bogus

I can believe that Microsoft gave $100 million to SCO. I think both Microsoft and SCO should burn in hell.

But I don't buy the memo. There are just too many "carefully placed" typos. It looks like someone engineered typos to make it LOOK authentic, but something about it's just a bit too intentional and obvious looking.

Re:The memo looks bogus

I agree. Why would one executive tell other something to the effect of

"keep in mind, MS is giving us X million dollars, and blah blah".

Too contrived, too conveniently incrimminating.

The document is a troll?

Either the author of the leaked document in question was in extreme haste, or he has lackluster grammar skills. The document is full of errors like: "The will help us a lot", "componients", "shoudl", "wjich", and so on. That isn't exactly the kind of document you send out when you are trying to convince people to do something shady. You'd think the author would at least had the initiative to spell check the thing before sending it out. Perhaps it should be taken with a grain of salt, and by that, I mean deer salt licks [saltlicks.co.uk].

Re:The document is a troll?

Have you ever actually gotten a message from higher-ups? Or sales people, or lawyers??

That message reads about like all of them.

You're thinking too geeky. "I'm doing something subversive. Make it clean, neat, nice... blah blah." These people don't think like that. It's just another day at the fast paced office.

So Bill Gates is the Mole?

This is getting about as stupid as nightly television.

SCO Roundup

There's been a whole host of developments in the ongoing SCO [thescogroup.com] saga over the past couple of days. SCO have now filed law suits against Autozone [autozone.com] and DaimlerChrysler [daimlerchrysler.com] on the same day as announcing growing operating losses [santacruzsentinel.com]. Despite securing a deal to license their IP with ev1servers [ev1servers.net], SCOsource only generated an income of $20,000 for the quarter. Today it has been revealed [infoworld.com] that Computer Associates [ca.com], Questar Corp. [questar.com] and manufacturer Leggett & Platt [leggett.com] Inc have all joined the ranks of SCO source licensees. Over at the Nasdaq the publicity stunts are beginning to wane thin with investors who sent SCO shares plummeting [yahoo.com] by almost 14% yesterday. In the courtroom [groklaw.net], SCO was yesterday given 45 days to identify all specific lines of code they allege IBM put into Linux from AIX or Dynix; identify and provide with specificity all lines of code in Linux that it claims rights to.

I'll hold my horses

There's nothing indicating that this is real. "An anonymous whistleblower"? What does that mean? He got it from [e-mail] from a public library IP?
I'd like to see the headers of the email. If the email originates from SCO then I believe it's authentic (judging from Received: lines rather than the From: field). If it's from a dial-up or public IP, I'm pretty sure it's fake. Of course, there's another posibility. OSI know who the whistleblower is, but they claim they don't so they can't be forced to reveal his identity in court. After all, they're the good guys.

Um... heh, how about some GPG for you?

You would think that people would start using gpg/pgp for their internal emails now. There are other solutions, but this is one case where youj _don't_ want the keys in escrow. You want them changed, regularly.

At least, that's the way I see it from SCOs perspective.

MAKE MONEY FAST

Want $86 million dollars fast? Well, we now know not one, but TWO ways to make it!

1) Make an unjustified attack on Linux
2) Make an unjustified attack on Iraq

--Stephen

rather easy to tell

if this is a fake or not. Just read SCOX filing with the SEC. They have to provides those details. It's the law.

Sinister or not? You decide.

I wouldn't be surprised if one of M$'s upcoming strategies is this:

1) Create shell company A that creates Linux code
2) Have a few spies pretend to develop open source applications for Linux, and have them slip in a ton of code from company A, without licensing it.
3) Wait a few years until this code is widely adopted into Linux
4) Sue like SCO is doing

Microsoft will drop them

Why? Because SCO did not use Word to type that email, if they did, they would have the nipped the spelling errors...

They know no shame

I'd be ashamed to send an email that was that poorly written to a business associate at any level. And I'd have less regard for anyone who wood. :-)

interesting

First off:

1) There is no real tangible evidence that it is a real memo, and not just shock press with no backing

BUT

2) If it is true, it would be intresting to see if there is a correlation between those sued companies like crysler if they have recently cut big ties to MS in favour of linux.

My 2 cents

It's too much like bad television

Before the hour is up, when all seems hopeless, the lead detective finds the criminal made "one fatal mistake" - like leaving an email around that specifies his evil plans to the detail.

Life is not like a television show. Chances are excellent this email is bogus.

I should check the spelling mistakes... maybe when you place all wrongly spelled letters together they form a phrase like "Hahaha I fooled you all - Billyboy".

It all makes sense now

$86 million is the sort of money Microsoft finds when they pull up their couch cushions. I suspect that they don't expect SCO to succeed at all - they just want to give the appearance that open source software is highly vulnerable to attack by random morons. If you are a PHB deciding between Linux (the new kid on the block as far as you are concerned) and Windows (I have that on my laptop! And it's shiny!) this kicks Linux down a notch. Most PHBs don't care about whose IP goes where as long as it doesn't make them vulnerable.

If Windows is found to contain someone else's unlicensed code, the rightful code owners are not going to sue end users, period. MS would either sue them into the ground or settle with them out of court to get them to shut up. The analogous thing can't happen with Linux because no one entity controls it from a legal standpoint. So, score Windows 1, Linux 0.

Like everyone else with at least one functioning neuron, I think SCO will lose. But the damage to Linux credibility has been done. Even when this is resolved, there is always the class of PHBs who will think back to this whole mess and how it could have cost them money. These feelings won't last forever or necessarily outweigh the benefits of Linux, but for Microsoft, it has been well worth the money.

Search Results on MSN

I wonder what search criteria XFree86million would return from msn.com? A message indicating i have entered a search term that is likely to return unethical content?

not to be on the wrong side here, but...

...do we know for certain that this isn't a faked letter? I mean, do we have any form of independent corroboration? Otherwise this is just heresay and speculation.

On the other hand, if we get some other proof (or evidence) then MS is about to get a little pissed at SCO for their antics. Perhaps that's a good thing as a previous poster indicated, without MS's $86M influx SCO would be bankrupt.

YHBT. YHL. HAND.

Honest to god people, look at it. Have you ever seen such painfully careful mis-spellongs? It reeks. It's a joke gone wrong. SCO will find and sue the crap out the basement dwelling prankster that wrote it, and good luck to them.

You. Have. Been. Trolled.

That's NOT what it says...

It says:

"I realize the last negotiations are not as much fun, but Microsoft will
have brough in $86 million for us including Baystar."

Having been involved, personally, with the finances of a few startups, I can assure you that there are a myriad of legitimate (as in 'morally acceptable') reasons why that quote could exist in that memo.

Now, of course, M$ may be dirty; however, I prefer that we take the high road and I'd like to hear Microsoft's explanation.

I'm skeptical of this e-mail.

The grammar and spelling of this e-mail resemble that of a 16-year old with a 'D' average. This Mike Anderer is apparently a highly paid consultant, and one would assume that he has a college, if not at the least, a good secondary education. He should possess good communication skills and be able to write effectively. Those skills would be an essential part of his job.

To temper my above statement, I do not expect quick e-mail notes to have much spit-and-polish, but spell checkers are a standard feature. Just push the little icon and accept the corrections.

Frankly, I find it hard to put a lot into this, but I would like to be proven wrong. If this is authentic, then you can read a lot into why SCO is doing the stupid things they are attempting.

Would you put this guy on your payroll?

This isn't proof.

I see a lot of people taking this memo as complete and total fact. Be careful with quick assumptions from an anonymous source.

It's quite probable someone did this to FUD SCO and MS. Just saying.. Use a little sense before spouting rhetoric.

Mike Anderer?

Found this doing a little Googling.

Wonder if this is "the" Mike Anderer?

"It's hard to find a large corporation interested in it. Anybody with any scars in this business doesn't want to be the first to do anything," commented Mike Anderer (emphasis mine), vice president of systems integration at Ikon Office Solutions, a large international integrator. "Right now it's kind of a manufacturing and standards war. In a year or two it might be a viable product."

Was found in this story:

http://news.com.com/2100-1001_3-200420.html

If it is "the" Mike Anderer from the e-mail, funny that Mike would have been part of Ikon, which I believe is the company Darl McBride worked at, sometime before SCO, which he sued and won some settlement for.

IBM's lesson

Back in my youth, IBM had a permanent law suit going against the Feds on anti-trust charges. This is where the Nazgul learned their chops. IBM is no stranger to perpetual legal cold war. However, I don't think Microsoft is.

If this funding of SCO's (IMO spurious) case is actionable, then IBM is an ideal belligerant. I believe IBM, et al. will not only win the SCO case, but win their counter-suits. Damages could easily bancrupt SCO, and after those funds are expended I'd like to see if Microsoft could chip in the difference. Or be compelled to do so by a court.

If it is not, perhaps the creative juices of the Open Source community could be redirected toward devising a class-action law suit against a Redmond Washington corporation who has knowingly distributed a complex of products which is easily compromised via computer virus. If Big Tobacco could be shaken down a decade ago, why not Microsoft? We don't *have* to wait for the DOJ do we?

Multi-faceted not Monolithic

"We should get what we can from them ad then work the other and larger areas of the company and groups where they have real budget and need for our help."

I suppose others saw this, but it never really occurred to me that SCO was receiving money from multiple sources at Microsoft. It changes my view from a large monolithic entity where one or two people call the shots, to a multi-faceted group of mini-bosses give portions of their budgets to "fight the evil communist Linux".

How to utterly discredit evidence

Have Eric S Raymond publish for you.

I'd like to believe it, and maybe it is plausible, but the man is a raving lunatic at the best of times. May as well have stuck it in Fortean Times.

Motley Fool's take on this is brilliant...

Motley Fool - an cool investment column - has this [fool.com] to say about the wisdom of SCOs antics. I especially like the part about the return on investment of $20,000 being what an enterprising kid mowing lawns could make in a summer. This for an investment of $3.4 million in the first quarter.

SCOX has been shedding a lot lately too - $6 since January.

Re:ESR better watch out

It was reported. The $50M from Baystar Capital was reported in a 10Q, as was the money from Microsoft for Unix licensing. What wasn't reported was that Baystar Capital was an MS referral; but that's not required to report. So I'm not sure what you're getting at here.

Not that I'm saying the memo is real; I have no idea. I'm just considering your point.

Shocking

Shocking. Positively shocking! To imagine that Microsoft would hire a front company to attack a competitor with FUD and legal tricks.

When did they get so lazy they had to hire out?

To put it bluntly: SO F'ING WHAT?!?

Is this surprising to anyone, that Microsoft might be playing dirty pool?

We all realize this is a company that is not above using underhanded tactics to deal with the competition. And anyone with Microsoft stock loves them for it frankly!

This is neither surprising nor is it especially evil in the end, unless you consider the corporate world evil in general anyway, which might be a very fair statement!, but I digress...

Microsoft has a very tough battle to compete with Linux on merit (some would say it's an impossible battle for them, but that's another argument). They're never going to stop the Slashdot community from using Linux, but where they might have something to say is in keeping corporations way from it, and frankly this is where they stand to lose the most anyway.

So, how do you fight what has been correctly stated many times is a community and a philosophy rather than a concrete corporate competitor? You can't. But what you CAN do is try and keep any of the big players in the business world from hitching their wagon to Linux and upping the ante because, let's face it, many corporations will not use Linux if it doesn't come from someone like IBM. The fact that it's free and great for the bottom line won't make them go download the ISOs and install it everywhere because they NEED to have someone like HP to back them up.

So, Microsoft finds a puppet in SCO who can go attack IBM, HP, whoever else they view as the threats in this game, and maybe in the process get big businesses to back off the Linux train because they are worried about the whole SCO mess, whether for good reason or not.

It's a game of perception, nothing more. They aren't going to keep me from using Linux to power my home server, but big deal, I'm not their major source of income. The big businesses are. If propping up SCO helps them keep some of those companies away from Linux, Microsoft wins. And they maintain plausible deniability the whole time by claiming they are paying "licensing fees" to SCO for certain "Unix services licenses". This memo can be interpreted other ways, it's not as clear-cut as it's being made out to be (note that I am NOT diagreeing with the interpretation, just pointing out it's not so clear-cut as to be beyond reporach)

So, people are trying to make a big thing of this memo when it's just par for the course, nothing surprising at all. It doesn't even point to some massive, evil conspiracy really. It points to a company known for low tactics staying with the status quo to fight a formidable enemy to their profit margins. Businesses are SUPPOSED to make money, Microsoft is exceptionally good at it PRECISELY because they take every threat seriously and attack it with Machiavellian fervor.

Hate them for being so good at it if you want, but don't be surprised when the Zebra doesn't change it's stripes.

Is this really a secret ?

Does anyone here actually think that SCO are not receiving funding from Microsoft for the court cases? Whether or not this alleged leaked memo is a fake. I personally am in no doubt as to where they are getting the funding from and it certainly isnt linux IP licences.

The only thing this "Alleged Leaked Memo" could possibly be useful, is that, if Microsoft were to declare it as a fake and use it to cover up the fact that they really are helping smudge the open source community by assist SCO. It might well be a double bluff.

Nick ...

Heh.

If someone wanted to give me $86 million dollars, i'd sue my freaking grandmother if I had to.

It is is true...

If this memo is true, then there would be some serious implicications that would include jail time for both sides -- the impliciations reek of anti-competive behavior, violations of the Microsoft settlement (no suprise here), collusion, rackateering, and extortion. If it was just a licensing fee, then SCO would have to prove that the money was indeed a licensing fee and not just called a licensing fee, otherwise the execs could be facing federal time. Further, the value of the IP would have to be proved to be worth $86 million. If other vendors paid $5 or $10, or whatever, and Microsoft knew about the Linux asualt and then agreed to pay $86 million, that could constitute fraud and collusion. Depending on what M$ knew of the Linux campaign and what the money would be used for, that could mean rackateering and anti-competive practices.

If I were a Microsoft exec, I would adimately deny the charges. But the problem is that both grammer and basic spelling are missing from the memo. In particular parts, I had to wonder whether the writer even speaks English as his first language (words were consistantly mispelled through out the memo, for example, brought was spelled "brough"). But we don't know how the memo was presented and who actually typed up the memo -- was it done in house by Eric or was it actually typed by Mike. If I had come across something like this, then I would have cleaned it up.

Also it may be a complete fabrication. I had a discussion with a friend about fabricating an set of government documents stating that the CIA and the FBI considered the SCO suit a threat to Homeland Defense. We talked about the idea of placing a classification on the paper with "Top Secret" and the like with a note to "deny any allegations of an investigation." Did we do it? No, because we did not care to contract a liability that could land us in jail. But that is not to say that some other guy decided that he would do something like the memo. So it goes with out saying that although we are happy to see the memo, we need to be cautious until it can be deteremined whether the memo is legite or not.

SEC/Audit Disclosure Requirement

Funding to SCO by MS could be made in one of two ways: 1) Through contracts for services; or 2) Capital investment. Either way it appears to me that SCO and perhaps MS would have a problem, if in fact this email is verified

If payment is through services agreements, there is a GAAP (Generally accepted accounting principle) requirement for disclosure that you are reliant on a third party where that third party is supplying a substantive proportion of your revenues. Even if several different parties provided revenues to SCO, if the executives at SCO knew it was solely due to MS and where therefor reliant on MS, disclosure would be required.

If the source of funding was through capital invesment in SCO, there would be a required disclosure in the Company's 10K or 10Q MD&A, since it would appear they are dependant upon this source of funding to carry on with their business. The amount of funding is not insignificant and certainly material.

Furthermore, a hidden MS investment of this signficance, without disclosure, would have manipulated the market price. This would hold MS and SCO open to SEC related lawsuits

If this turns out to be true, lawyers and the SEC are going to have a field day at SCO and MS's expense

This is a fake

Please remember that SCO has been battling the Linux community as well, not just IBM. Has it occured to anyone that SCO could have willfully released this fake through a proxy to get your panties in a wad?

What purpose would it serve? Well, for one thing, it might sidetrack IBM's lawyers a bit if they try to suponea it. It might give SCO some leverage in court. The corporate world might view it as a M$ endorsement of the suit, thus keeping SCO's stock afloat for just a few more weeks (remember they just announced a disasterous quarter). Finally, it gets the /. crowd spinning about something relatively benign and fuels their paranoia. They MIGHT get another DDOS attack out of it, which Darl will use as a mia culpa in his next speech about how evil the linux community is and how SCO needs to stop it.

Keep this in mind when reading this memo, and it starts to smell more like a fake sent out just to tweak us.

Googlebomb "Microsoft Shill"

I hereby propose that we Googlebomb the phrase "Microsoft Shill" to point to www.thescogroup.com.

EOL

Not so bright move if true...

If this turns out to be true its a pretty backlashing move of Microsoft. Microsoft had almost got rid of the bad taste of the antitrust case and now this. If anything it hordes the open source crowd togheter and opens a unified front, Anything But Microsoft. I presume MS is really involved in some stage cause frankly, what kind of license to unix did they need costing 10 mil? They hadnt any chance of buying a second license since that would have been to obvious. A third party like Baystar funding MS makes perfekt sence.

The halloween docs have all proven themselves on the spot from start and the indices all points towards MS. Why else would this suit have been such a big publicity stunt against linux wich have been a third party in all cases so far that SCO has been starting?

It just reekes of MS "business practices".

New flash - slashdot readers overreact!

Two points. Is this real, and is the dollar figure correct?

If it's real, consider the source. The e-mail was not widely distributed so did someone raid an inbox for this? Was it printed out and left on the printer? In either case, the source must be close to the principals. Why hasn't more information been forthcoming from this source? Certainly this source would have been able to pick up things like, oh, what the infringing code was, who SCO is planning on suing...

Let's say the e-mail is authentic. Consider the $86M figure. From the memo:

Microsoft will have brough in $86 million for us including Baystar.

The poster (and many many of those leaving comments) seem to assume MS gave SCO $86M. If you read the memo, clearly that's not the case. It says MS has brought in that money, including Baystar. From the commentary, we know that Baystar provided at least $50M. MS just referred SCO to Baystar.

Take a look at Baystar's site [baystarcapital.com]. They invest in many companies, not all tech related. If you read the Baystar news section, you'll see this article [baystarcapital.com] that shows Baystar is not letting SCO have free rein and is interested in protecting its investment.

Bottom line: MS is not funnelling money to SCO via Baystar. MS introduced them but Baystar made the decision to fund, based on the best interest of its investors. Of course, the way Raymond spins it is, "If not for Microsoft, SCO would be at least $15 million in debt today." No, if not for Baystar. Sure, MS introduced them but you may as well say, "If not for the mothers of Baystar's founders giving birth to those founders..." A lot of things came together for SCO to secure the funding.

It's a lot less ominous than the excitable posters here seem to think, or certainly Raymond:

There you have it. A hundred million funnelled from Microsoft to SCO

Nonsense.

Gaining momentum...

I note that ZDnet now has an article [zdnet.co.uk] on this. And Design Technica [designtechnica.com] and ENN [www.enn.ie] have picked up (copied) the Register article.

I think we should be shouting this from rooftops. Microsoft secretly funnelled a whole lot of extra money to SCO, through intermediaries. It's a big deal, especially for a convicted monopolist.

Is the actual memo available?

Is the actual memo, without ESR's blitherings and typos, available in its original form? That would be valuable.

MS used Financing arm to take over Corel too

ESR notes that it appears Microsoft's Corporate Development and Strategy is behind this idea of shadowy financing of Linux' enemies. Perhaps the Feds should start earning their salaries and investigating this arm of MS as only last year that same unit quite obviously engineered the takeover of Corel by a venture capital firm financed by Paul Allen and operated by ex-Microsoft/ex-McKinsey consultancy executives.

This is how it worked:

1) October '2000

MS invests $135M (~20% non-voting stake) in Corel, within months
Corel hires McKinsey to "validate" their new pro-MS strategy
which puts Corel on a .NET-centric starvation course

2) Fall '2002
MS decides it is time to take Corel down (and into friendly
ownership); finds venture capital firm Vector which is
financed by Paul Allen and operated by longtime ex-MS and
ex-McKinsey executives.

3) Jan/Feb '2003
MS sells non-voting stake secrectly and far below market value
to Vector; after "ownership change" the stake becomes voting
and allows Vector to dictate terms to Corel management who for
some reason (inside deal) do everything to appease Vector in
the hostile takeover.
In February Robert Uhlaner moves from McKinsey (Corel's
"consultants") to MS to work on "increasing strategic alignment
between the Microsoft's finance and business groups". By August
'2003 Corel was firmly in MS-friendly private hands.

Just like in the SCO case, MS was using their Financing arm to do anti-competitive business transactions. Manipulating enemies through innocent-looking cash movements and investments while supplying cash, information and most importantly *connections* to henchmen willing to do the dirty deeds (Vector, Baystar...). IIRC there was indeed a MS connection to BayStar as well. Paul Allen as an investor?

Microsoft won't stop this sort of anti-competitive clandestine operations until authorities have thoroughly investigated what is going on within their shadowy Corporate Development and Strategy (incl. Rich Emerson and Robert Uhlaner) unit and how favors and sensitive business information gets passed around within the infamous Microsoft Old Boys' Alumni network.

Ecomist calls SCO a "pariah"

The latest issue of the Economist [economist.com] (registration required for some articles, but not this one) has a news item on the SCO lawsuits that calls SCO "a pariah firm in the software industry" [economist.com]. I found this interesting, as past coverage by the Economist had been relatively sympathetic to them.

Confirmed!

From the web page [opensource.org]: "Post-Postscript: According to Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of CNET, SCO confirmed today (04 March) that this memo is legitimate."

Email Mike - tell him what you think...

Michael Anderer [mailto]

My mail to him:

Well, Mike -

I bet you feel like a total prat, having your sloppy spelling and indiscreet observations splashed all over the Web all of a sudden.

I sure hope that the impression given by your email won't adversely impact on your obviously worthwhile IP harvesting activities - hell, if I had an idea and needed finance, I'd come beating down your door asking for the help of such a painstakingly accurate and diligent person as yourself.

Don't let Blake Stowell's dismissal of your memo put you off - your obvious merits will shine through, despite the impression given by your memo.

Keep a good head, and always carry a lightbulb,
Brian.

Re:How much would it cost?

Is there a unit for self respect? If so, SCO has spent 86 million dollars and about three times that in Respectrons and is failing miserably.

Re:How much would it cost?

It does not 'beg the question [wsu.edu]'.

Please mod down!

Please!

The site is not slashdotted. The text you copied is annotated with ESRs remarks in green. But the green tags were lost when you copied the text into this reply. So your text is complete gibberish! The original mail and ESRs comments are mixed up.

Please mod down!