SCO, IBM battle heats up

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re: How so?

>SCO filed a public lawsuit...

All lawsuits are a matter of public record. I'm not sure what point you may be attempting to make with this wording. Sometimes the results of the lawsuit are sealed, but I'm pretty sure we won't be seeing that in this case.

>relatively independent folk, such as David Boies...

David Boies is their lawyer. By definition he is not independent, he is commited to their position in an adversarial process against IBM. He would be of no use to them if he were independent, or even relatively independent.

>have viewed the evidence and deemed it significant.

Whether he has deemed the evidence as significant or not his firm has already made $10 million as a result of the $50 million investment by Baystar. That in itself should be sufficient to guarantee that he has a stake in the outcome of this case. As to the evidence, what might you be referring to? IBM, as was indicated in this article is still trying after all these months to get SCO to present some evidence. SCO's response to this has been to say, we asked you for the evidence of your wrongdoing and you have yet to provide it to us, what can we possibly show you and why are you subpoenaing the folks we did show thing to which we claimed was evidence of your misdeeds?

>There is no opportunity for any insider information or falsification of financial data here, I think.

This point is very well taken. There is no information for insiders to take advantage of, only unsubstantiated allegations. There is no falsification of financial data either. There is gross misrepresentation of the potential for earnings growth in the future based on their plan to license something that they have relinquished financial (but not copyright or intellectual property) control over due to the way they chose to license the source code that they do in fact own. If they are having post-facto remorse about that it is sad, but it is not a legal issue. They have created a large run up in their stock value and obtained substantial investment in their company by misrepresenting what they own, what they have control over and what IBM's action have been. That is fraud, plain and simple. They have engaged in unfair trade proctices by offering compensation to companies that stop using Linux and move to ANY OTHER Proprietary operating system. I fail to see how any of this makes a case for them having been sronged in any way by IBM or why you would think that it supports your premise.

>So what kind of justification would there be for punishing SCO for taking their legitimate shot at IBM?

We will have to wait and see when and if they do take an actually legitimate shot at IBM. Up to this point this remains a theoretical argument that any close examination would show to be extermely likely to manifest itself in the future. SCO has made hay by taking advantage of the fact that unless you are very knowledgeable about the lineage of their SysV source code, the internals of SysV Unix and Linux, i.e. they are sufficiantly different that moving code from one system to the other is pretty much pointless and would require more work than simply writing it from scratch, and their ability to show people code that they don't own, such as the Berkeley Packet Filter code which was not theirs but was written by an independent programmer for a Missouri School District, that they used as an example of how IBM had transferred SysV code over to Linux. But they can't provide any of that "evidence" to IBM or the court even though they have showed it to Deutche Bank, Laura Didio of the Yankee group, the attendees of their trade show and a number of journalists under a non-disclosure and Baystar.

I realize at this point that I am no longer responding to your post and have begun ranting. I apologize for that but my point is that what appears to be a firm opinion by you doesn't seem to have much to support it but faith in a group of hucksters who specialize in dog and pony show exploitation. And many and wise are those whom they have duped with their antics. You are not alone in that. You must simply do as Dorothy did and look behind the curtain to see that the great and might Oz is just a tired old man with a few tricks up his sleeve who is taking advntage of those who don't have reason to suspect him.

Posted by: Still Lynn   Posted on: 11/14/03 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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