Microsoft Shown Involved with Baystar and SCO 269
baryon351 writes "Back a few years ago, when SCO looked like it was hemorrhaging cash, a surprise investment came out of the blue from venture capitalists Baystar. They invested $20 million in SCO and aided their anti-Linux cause, enabling McBride & co. to continue with (now shown incorrect) claims of line-by-line code copying of SCO IP in Linux. Now one of IBM's submissions to the court reveals Microsoft was behind it after all. Baystar's manager says about Microsoft's Richard Emerson: 'Mr. Emerson and I discussed a variety of investment structures wherein Microsoft would backstop, or guarantee in some way, Baystar's investment ... Microsoft assured me that it would in some way guarantee BayStar's investment in SCO.' Despite the denials about their involvement, Microsoft helped SCO continue this charade — and on top of that halted all contact with Baystar after the investment, reneging on their guarantee."
Re:Surprise (Score:2, Insightful)
Suspicions Confirmed (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember MS butt-boys flaming me for suggesting MS was financing this a long time ago.
Surpise? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to admit to being curious why any company would get involved in a business deal with Microsoft. I can understand being their customer, but willingly partnering with a company that stabs partners in the back on a regular basis just seems crazy. "Yes, just step over those corpses on the way into the conference room -- pay no attention to the ghost of Stacker rattling those noisey chains, I assure you this is a win-win situation!"
Re:Surpise? (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, it's simple. Because they are the 800-pound gorilla. If you try to compete with them they will crush you immediately, but partnering with them can be very lucrative-- right up to the time when they decide that the niche you occupy is now "strategic" to them, and they bend you over and shove a pinecone up your ass.
Re:Suspicions Confirmed (Score:3, Insightful)
In the words of Nelson Muntz... (Score:5, Insightful)
Prince iples (Score:5, Insightful)
There's nothing feel good about it - this is business and unless a government steps in and regulates the industry, well, it's all about the benjamins.
Re:It's a shame ... (Score:3, Insightful)
A: That someone isn't Microsoft, with all their lawyers.
B: You don't do it in documents which are very likely to end up being used as evidence in a court of law.
Re:Suspicions Confirmed (Score:1, Insightful)
It is hard to gain reading comprehension when you're blinded by ideology.
I suspected Microsoft too. I just didn't bleat it from the rafters.
Re:Surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Well of course they are. Fear is the motivation for being a bully.
KFG
Re:Surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
You are thinking about two different models of corporate survival.
I find it easier to think of these things in terms of biological and evolutionary survival techniques.
One option in surviving as a corporate body in the economic ecosystem is to do the Darwinian thing by evolving to become the most efficient and effective at what your niche is. An example of this is the shark. One of the finest hunting species known. Similarly the wild cats.
Another alternative is various molds. They emit a gas which is highly toxic to all other forms of competing mold, thereby carving out a space within which there can be no competition because of the toxic nature of the air. Another exeptional example is Caulerpa taxifolia which is a seaweed growing across the mediterranean seafloor at the expense of all other life. The animals cannot eat is for it too is toxic.
As a corporation, one much protect it's ecosystem space or territory to remove competition. One method is to continually adapt in a highy evolutionary manner, trying to address all the environmental conditions that arise by responding to the liabilities and assets that present themselves. The other methodology is the lock down the environment through aggressive tactics to kill the opposition rather then out-hunt it by means of USPTO litigation, copyright litigation, litagation in general, and supporting litigation of others where it is advantageous. And then there's marketing. How many studies are there showing Windows is superiour to everything else? The price of Coke/Pepsi products is >50% marketing expenses.
It has not been proven (yet) (Score:2, Insightful)
I am not a layer but I recon that a sly outfit like SCO could use statements like this as possibly influincing a jury and give grounds for a possible appeal against a verdict that goes against them.
I know that in UK Law making statements in any media like this could put you in contempt of court. The TV, Radio and Press are very careful not to make statement presuming the possible guilt of a person or company before a verdict has been reached.
Re:Suspicions Confirmed (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean the article doesn't say that Microsoft funded anything. At almost the same time as the Baystar deal, Microsoft and Sun both paid SCO large amounts, totalling something like $20-30 million between them, apparently for Unix licenses of some kind. Sun obviously needed a Unix license to put out Solaris. What Microsoft did with whatever it paid SCO $millions for, seems a tad unclear.
(further to that, SCO's court filings in Utah relating to what these two amounts were for directly contradicted their own filings to the SEC, and now Novell has filed a motion for partial summary judgement claiming that 95% of this money is owed to them under the Asset Purchase Agreement that sold the Unix business to the Santa Cruz Operation. SCO only has about $10 million in cash and cash equivalents so if they win, it's game over for SCO).
Re:Advantages of the SCO lawsuit (Score:3, Insightful)
There was never any real doubt about the legal strength of the GPL. It's always been on much firmer ground than a lot of software licenses out there, because it's not a EULA. It's simply a contract that's offered to people, and if they decline the contract, they don't get the extra rights the contract offered them. EULAs are vulnerable to challenges on the ground that they're contracts of adhesion [wikipedia.org], which are held to a higher legal standard in order to be enforceable.
It's interesting to compare Linux with BSD, though. Basically the reason Linux is an order of magnitude more popular than BSD on the desktop is that BSD suffered a similar legal assault when it was in its infancy. Linux was a grownup by the time SCO tried to steal its lunch money, so it was able to withstand the assault.
One good thing to come out of all of this is that we have two free Un*x clones these days, BSD and Linux, and both of them are known to be very solid legally. Monoculture is bad, and it's a very good thing for the open-source movement that we have friendly competition going between these two systems. The SCO lawsuit's significance isn't that it cleared up any uncertainty about the GPL, because there never was any; it's that it cleared up any uncertainty about the IP status of Linux, and resulted, e.g., in more careful legal auditing of submitted code.
You almost fell for it... (Score:4, Insightful)
B.
Re:Surpise? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hunter S Thompson once described a politician running for the president to a moose during mating season. Normally moose are wily creatures. If you go hunting for them they are hard to spot, they are supremely aware of their environment, they can hear and smell you coming from miles away. Once a moose is in mating season though all that flies out the window. The second they hear or smell anything that even resembles a female moose they will charge towards her like... well a crazed moose!. They will crash throught the bush making all kinds of noise, they will leave chunks of their flesh on trees that they broke on the way. They just don't care, just want that female!.
Just as a politician becomes like a crazed moose when running for the presidency a CEO becomes like a crazed mooose when somebody waves money in their face. Once they see that money mind blanks of all other thoughts. Their memory, ethics, morals, bodily functions, wife, children, the planet, shareholders, employees, everything else gets driven out and is replaced with the smell of that money.
When MS waves money in front of a CEO the CEO stops thinking. He completely disregards the dozens of times MS has backstabbed it's partners and thinks to himself "it won't happen to me, those other CEOs were stupid, I am smart and handsome and I deserve this".
I don't want to sound negative, it's only human (and mooose) nature. We would all probably act the same way if somebody waved enough money in our faces. Soon all thoughts of right, wrong, morality, history, and diligence would be replaced by the mansion in the hamptons or that DB9 we have been salivating about.
And, being MS, they'll get away with this. (Score:2, Insightful)
The paranoia of being on top. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, yeah. I mean, they're standing atop the marketshare hill -- they have to be scared of everyone. There's no place to go but down; it's not a question of winning anymore, it's a question of hanging on to the top spot for as long as they can. History has shown that such situations don't last forever, but they're going to try and play it for all it's worth. (As anyone in their situation would.) To survive, Microsoft has to constantly be looking for the new competitor that's going to unseat them.
IBM, Kodak, Standard Oil, U.S. Steel -- all of these companies were once the untouchable masters of their respective domains, but all fell from grace eventually. Microsoft knows that it too shall fail eventually, but it's going to prolong it as best it can, and that means they have to be paranoid of everyone and everything that could possibly, at any point in the future, harm their position.
So after this... (Score:5, Insightful)
C'mon guys, you crucified Sony for less.
Re:Surprise (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Surprise (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, they do. Corporations sometimes split parts of their business functions into new corporations to "focus on their core competencies" or something like that. Monopolies can also be split by courts. Then there's the model where a number of people working in a corporation leave to find a new one - the existence of the new corporation is a direct result of these people working together in the old corporation, so I'd say that the old corporation has an effect on what the new corporation will be like.
And, of course, the only reason why evolution requires reproduction is that living beings have a hard time of changing their phenotype once their genotype has been deployed; for a corporation it is relatively easy, since it does not really exist except in the imagination of people and is thus not bound by laws of physics.
It still makes me wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
1. The model capitalism was based on was #1 not #2. The ideal (19th century-style) capitalism idea is basically that of a market of commodities: all products are interchangeable, and a perfectly informed market decides which one offers the best bang/buck.
It's not just an ideological point of view. The role capitalism was supposed to serve was that of, well, basically the ultimate optimizer. Think, sort of, genetic algorithms. If the market needs X at all, there'll be tens or hundreds of competing entities trying to offer the best X at the best price possible. Each will make their own X1 variation at the best price they can manage, and the market will decide on the variant which fits the demand the best.
That was the strength of the western block over, say, the Soviet Union. That in the time the USSR planners decided always too late on what to produce and how much and in what way, the capitalist market could try a hundred ways and let the market choose the best one. That unless deciding "ok, we'll produce Volgas" which may be right or wrong, you can let a hundred people try a hundred different things, and end up with the Ford T1 model which was better and cheaper for most people.
Letting a corporation compete on how "toxic" they can be instead of competing on raw product merits is subverting that whole idea. It's, in fact, no better than the Soviet system. There too how "toxic" and subversive one could be (e.g., having high placed friends in the Party, or _being_ a party official who can send the opponents to Siberia) was most often what decided which model got produced and what got scrapped. We already know how well that went.
2. I wonder and worry about MS. (Or their managers, before someone accuses me of anthropomorphising... human managers.) Their whole history and practices shows that they're just not playing the same game we expect everyone else to play. And which, again, is the whole foundation of capitalism. Again and again, they seem more interested in just killing as many opponents as they can, as opposed to offering a better product or whatever.
Let me explain that better: it seems not even being toxic for survival reasons, but just being toxic for the hell of killing someone. Regardless of whether it's even a survival advantage or not. MS will even gladly take a huge loss (e.g., their XBox strategy) just to try to put someone else out of business. It's stuff that isn't even a survival advantage (making a loss never is), but just the sheer fun of killing someone just because they can.
Basically it's like watching a football game, where one of the players isn't even as much interested in playing the same game or even winning the game, as such, but just in kneecapping as many opponents as he can. Even winning (or losing) is merely a side-effect of killing or crippling everyone in the other team, rather than the goal and purpose of the exercise.
3. And I seriously worry about -- and am disgusted of -- the current US government's bending over to that kind of behaviour. Yes, that being toxic instead of competitive is an option for MS, is pretty obvious. But why tolerate such an entity? Not only it's condoning a major subversion of the very idea of capitalism, but... for _what_? MS is actually contributing very little to the US economy.
Microsoft is employing a grand total of 71,553 employees in 102 countries and regions as of July 2006 [wikipedia.org]. Total. Most of them actually support and sales/marketting and management people, and probably more than half off-shore anyway. Even at the scale of IT jobs, it's a spit in the bucket. Out of _millions_ of IT jobs, even after the exodus to India, we're talking maybe half a percent. At the scale of the economy, a helluva lot less.
So, while, yes, a government's priority should be keeping unemployment in check, MS is a spit in the bucket in that aspect. The effect of MS upon unemployment in the US is negligi
Re:March 2004:A plea for relief from Microsoft (Score:2, Insightful)
"An open letter to antitrust, competition, consumer and trade practice monitoring agency officials worldwide."
"The role of trade practice and antitrust legislation is to provide the consumer with protection from abusive business practices and monopolies. In one of the most serous cases of monopolization in the information technology industry, the agencies charged with protecting the competitive process and the consumer have utterly failed to stem the offending corporation's anti-competitive practices."
Translation: Microsoft is a Corporate Citizen of the US empire. It has legally bought and installed judges, congressman and lawyers to insure its rights. These rights supercede any rights of any individual Private Citizen. Those rights not afforded to Microsoft can be and will be purchased in a court of law.
"The Microsoft corporation has been under continuous investigation by antitrust policing agencies since 1989. Despite this scrutiny, the Microsoft corporation, using covert and overt anti-competitive business tactics, has maintained an unabated campaign against alternatives to Microsoft Windows operating system platforms and Microsoft applications."
Translation: These are normal business practices. You have no case.
-Hackus
problems with being a lawyer (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe that is why I am a software engineer, I am used to the truth.
Re:There's Evidence, and then there's Clear Eviden (Score:2, Insightful)
At the risk of being modded off-topic, let me answer this. Ken Lay did not have anything to loose by committing perjury. He was already in deep shit. If he did not commit perjury, he will have to plead guilty to the charges laid - which amounts to the same. I don't think these two are similar.
Re:Surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Surpise? (Score:2, Insightful)
Or, that by helping out with SCO's FUD, Microsoft would hold onto its advantages. By keeping Linux developers on the defensive, it bought time for Microsoft to keep on doing things the Microsoft way -- way late, way too little, but still way profitable. The upside of it is, it wouldn't be Microsoft spreading the FUD, it would be SCO, which would take a bit of heat off Microsoft. And if SCO could somehow, some way, actually win, even better, as it would force Linux distributions to actually compete in Microsoft's back yard, where they own the ball, the bat, the back yard, and the referees, as well as having options on all the star players.
FWIW, I'm beginning to think that Microsoft purposely let some of its code escape the ranch in order to scream, somewhere down the line, 'All your code are belongs to us. You stole it fourth, fifth, or sixth hand by using that evil Linux code'. Considering that the code haddn't escaped into the wild for decades, it's the only thing that makes sense to me.
Re:Surprise (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
misdirection fud gets modded up Informative (Score:4, Insightful)
"It's not at all impossible that someone star-strucked
"Mr. Emerson and I discussed a variety of investment structures wherein Microsoft would 'backstop,' or guarantee in some way, BayStar's investment.... Microsoft assured me that it would in some way guarantee BayStar's investment in SCO."
That's an agreement between Larry Goldfarb, managing general partner at BayStar and Richard Emerson, senior VP of corporate development at Microsoft and not some bogus irresponsible star-strucked handwaverer.
Re:Suspicions Confirmed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:misdirection fud gets modded up Informative (Score:3, Insightful)