Caldera vs. Microsoft Court Documents To Be Shredded 350
Geste writes "As now being reported in this brief story and on my local (Seattle) NPR affiliate, 3 million court documents from Caldera's unfair competition suit against Microsoft are to be shredded in Utah. The timing relative to Microsoft's recent licensing of SCO Unix IP is undoubtedly a complete coincidence.
"
So ? (Score:1, Interesting)
Come on! In order for any of us to build an interresting conspiracy theory from that, we need a lot more 'meat' than this puny pepperoni sandwich. Perhaps some other interresting links on the Caldera vs. Microsoft case or any other news involving these 2 mofos. Thanks
( The author is anonymous and thinks this story by CmdrTaco is a waste of space. )
Settlement money (Score:5, Interesting)
Note that, right after the settlement, Novell proceeded to ask us 17% of the money because they still owned DR-DOS and Lineo only had a license to exploit it, or something silly like that, and even threatened to sue. I don't know if they went through with it, I got laid off before that. The attorney firm got a whole shitload of that money too.
Anyhow, my comments about this are
- Ray Noorda bought DR-DOS to sue M$ and won, good for him. Fat lot of good it did to us at Lineo though.
- Microsoft lost pocket change and watched the Linux and Novell vultures fight over it
- The execs getting holidays while the employees who worked at proving the MS-DOS 7 / Win95 ties and getting Win95 running under DR-DOS 7.03 (essentially winning the court case) stayed at work.
Very nice. Very nice indeed. They can shred everything, it just isn't worth remembering
What is the coincidence? (Score:4, Interesting)
IT'S ANOTHER FRICKIN DUPLICATE NEWS ITEM FROM OCTOBER OF LAST YEAR! [slashdot.org]
Here's something (Score:5, Interesting)
SCO quits German Linux group after it sought proof of Unix claims
SCO says "nein" to German group seeking more information
" The SCO Group Inc. has resigned its membership in a German Linux association after the group asked the company to provide more information about its recent claims that some of its Unix code has illegally made its way into Linux.
SCO today said it resigned from LIVE Linux-Verband eV, a Dusseldorf-based association that promotes the interests of Linux users and software developers in Germany, after the group notified the company in a recent letter that it might revoke the membership of SCO's German subsidiary, SCO Group GmbH.
"We sent in a letter of resignation," Hans Bayer, country manager and managing director at SCO Group GmbH, said today in a statement.
In the group's letter to SCO, LIVE requested that SCO Group GmbH prove claims that developers and users of the open-source Linux operating system are violating the company's intellectual property rights, the association said in a statement yesterday.
Last week, SCO warned commercial Linux users they may be liable for intellectual property violations that it alleges exist in the Linux source code (see story). The company also said it will suspend its Linux sales until the matter is resolved.
In March, SCO filed a $1 billion lawsuit against IBM for allegedly misusing Unix code, including misappropriation of trade secrets and breach of contract obligations, to bolster its Linux efforts (see story).
The German Linux association said in its statement that its members were particularly annoyed by letters that SCO sent to users warning them that they could be liable for intellectual property violations.
The German group was to decide at its June 5 meeting whether to keep SCO as a member.n ux/story/0,10801,81403,00.html [computerworld.com]
"
http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/os/li
Top 10 crimes committed by Americans in Tijuana [xnewswire.com]
Re:What is the coincidence? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Settlement money (Bigger than that) (Score:2, Interesting)
Also, he estimates that SCO/Caldera International doesn't have a whole lot of money for their lawsuit against IBM. In other words, IBM could just bleed them dry by dragging the court case out. Unless SCO has received a large "donation" from Microsoft's licensing of Unix.
Re:Who's doing the shredding? (Score:3, Interesting)
Ironic. (Score:-1, Interesting)
Until now, that is. While helping my 16-year-old son (also an avid Slashdot reader) do research for a term paper on technology and journalism, I stumbled across some information that made me change my views about Slashdot completely. In a nutshell: Slashdot, and more accurately, its parent company VA Software, has deep and mutually influential ties to the Microsoft Corporation. In fact, Slashdot's own editors are paid (albeit indirectly) out of the coffers of Microsoft.
Yes. It's hard to believe. At first I couldn't believe it. But a few simple Google searches and 45 minutes' research on Lexis-Nexis (as well as a couple of phone calls to a friend of mine at the SEC) revealed the following:
At first I was more amused than shocked; I mean, the technology industry is notoriously incestuous and its leaders, even those who are in competition, often sit on the same boards and are members of the same organizations. So what if a few board members of Slashdot's parent company are also directors of a company funded by Microsoft? Well, it gets more interesting.
As it turns out, in May of 1999, VA Software submitted to the SEC Form 5506-D, Application for Direct Non-Ownership Subsidization. [sec.gov] This is the form that a corporation will submit to the SEC when it wants to directly fund a subsidiary from its own parent corporation. (It's basically a tax shelter for companies with a lot of subsidiaries) The application was approved in July 1999. The applicant name? OSDN. In other words, Form 5506-D basically eliminated the middleman between OSDN and Murberry-Slocomb. Following the money, I now saw that OSDN was being funded directly from an infusion of captal that Murberry-Slocomb has received from Microsoft!
Weird. I know. But what does this all mean? Honestly I have no idea. I'm not the custodian of any privileged information. A look at VA Software's web site and a Google search is all anyone needs to find the same information that I found. Are Slashdot's staff being paid through Microsoft? I sincerely hope not. But the facts are there and it sure looks like it. More importantly, what does this mean for the future of Slashdot? Can any grain of objectivity or journalistic ethics be preserved? What happens when the company you are bashing, nay, the very company that you preach the loudest against, Microsoft, is the same company that signs your paycheck? Could there be a deeper link still? Who knows. As far as I'm concerned, I'll never look at Slashdot the same way, ever again.
Re:Why... (Score:3, Interesting)
SCO lifting code from Linux? (Score:3, Interesting)
If someone have a copy of the SCO source code maybe make a Torrent file, so we can start analysing if they indeed stole something. A few nuggets will go a long way to quash the FUD from SCO. Anyone know where old SCO bug reports can be gooten?
Quote:
6. Possible License Violations Within The Kernel Source
Elsewhere, Christoph Hellwig replied to the original post as well, saying:
As somone who walked for SCO (or rather Caldera how it was called at that time) I can tell you this is utter crap. There were very people actually doing Linux kernel work then (and when the German office was closed down all those left the company) and we really had better things to do then trying to retrofit UnixWare code into the linux kenrel. Especially given that the kernel internals are so different that you'd need a big glue layer to actually make it work and you can guess how that would be ripped apart in a usual lkml review :)
It might be more interesting to look for stolen Linux code in Unixware, I'd suggest with the support for a very well known Linux fileystem in the Linux compat addon product for UnixWare..
Jim Nance said, "Wouldnt it be halirous if whatever code SCO is talking about when they say there is Unix code in Linux turns out to be code some SCO employee ripped out of some GPL program and stuck it into Unixware. That is actually far more likely than what they alledge."
Re:Where's the Dupe? --- Right here! (Score:1, Interesting)
OSI's rebuttal to SCO's claim (Score:3, Interesting)
...says that there may be some useful information in the sealed documents in the court battle between Caledera/SCO and Microsoft.
It's interesting that this airs today.
Re:Toilet paper... (Score:2, Interesting)
Before you get out of sorts... (Score:2, Interesting)
Andrew is a shill. (Score:5, Interesting)
I've often had to publicly defend Microsoft against what I felt were acts of scapegoating from whining competitors (including Novell, Borland, Lotus, and Wordperfect), complaints which remind me of the way some Americans like to blame Japan for what are ultimately our own domestic problems.
Funny how the US Government later decided that M$ did indeed engage is such practices. Andy and DDJ should be ashamed of that article.
Let's see how the US government saw things [usdoj.gov]. The jucky bits about DRDOS have been dug up by others. Have a look at M$ email for yourself [kickassgear.com]. It was orchestrated from the start to crush an admitedly superior technology, included abouse of Microsoft's own custormers and malicious PR. Anyone who says differently has been proven a fool.
The destruction of court records is evil because it burries evidence of wrongdoing by a convicted monopolist that has yet to be punished and is proceeding as if nothing at all had happened. These letters may be published elsewhere, but they need to be preserved in context if an objective history is to be written. There's no telling what goodies the Caldera folks dug up before they became M$'s next shill. Evidence of Microsoft's concerted effort to eliminate free software is going to be lost.
So are they in it together? (Score:4, Interesting)
- SCO attacks Linux.
- Microsoft supports SCO by paying them a lot of money for their patents, at the same time validating SCO's lawsuit.
- SCO destroys evidence that Microsoft is a monopolist.