The Register vs Groklaw: Who Gets It Right?

microbee writes "Over the past weeks Groklaw has been running a series of articles on new discoveries about SCO and Project Monterey. Surprisingly (to me, as I love both sites), The Register published another article to counter the argument of Groklaw's serials, claiming "it's difficult to envisage Groklaw's conjecture swaying a court case, but it provides SCO with valuable public relations ammunition."" There's also a rebuttal on groklaw as well.

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Actually, they have been mostly smart

[WindBourne]

When this all started, SCO was worth .5 / share. In addition, they had no money in the company. Then they meet with MS and Sun. Suddenly, they had money in the bank from MS, Sun, and a few other investors, a law suit was announced, and their share price was driven to +20. In addition, the Norda's owned a huge chunk of it and simply gave it away to dump the contriversy (sadly, not before the lose of their daughter). While I have no respect for the people involved, and certainly for their lack of morals or ethics, it has made lots of money for them. In fact, other than the Norda's, the biggest loser out of all this was probably MS/Sun, as it appears that Linux is only getting lots of press, and a number of legal questions are disappearing at a quick rate.

Summary / PJ's response

[jhdevos]

Strange the link to PJ's response [groklaw.net] was not linked to in the original artikle.

Summary: the Register saw a flaw in some groklaw articles (about the 'stopgap' claims), wrongly interpreted some other comments (proof that SCO knew about Monterey on Power) in that context, and wrote a very long article about it. PJ's response, unfortunately, only goes into those last claims, not the critique on the stopgap claims, which are justified, IMHO.

Anyway, storm is a glass of water.

Jan

Re:The article was more M$ trolling

[Anonymous Coward]

the author of the article doesn't exist

Where id PJ say that?

I quote below the second paragraph of the groklaw article:
Andrew Orlowski is a fine journalist, whose skills I have long admired. However, in this case, he didn't understand why legally the evidence Groklaw found of Project Monterey being intended from the beginning to be used on POWER matters. It matters because SCO's proposed 3rd amended complaint apparently is claiming that IBM had no right to use the Project Monterey product on POWER and only did so after Project Monterey was killed.

The only way to the truth is via open discussion

[btarval]

The only way to discover the truth of the situation is via presenting all of the facts in an open forum. That's how our Court system works. Alas, it's not how the Register works (much as I generally like reading the Registers' articles).

So, thanks for the article, guys. As others have pointed out, P.J. has already put up a response, with her usual discussion forum there.

Being open about things requires getting at the truth. And I think people generally agree that the real truth, presented in Court, will make Linux stronger, not weaker.

I also note this falsehood in the Register article:
"SCO made friendly with Linux as best it could,"

Pure, utter bull. SCO was never, ever a nice company. They pulled EVERY dirty trick in the book that they could. This case is, in fact, the SECOND time they have partnered with Microsoft to bring down a UNIX competitor via the Courts. The first time was a legal threat to a small company called Microport, when Microport publically announced Xenix binary compatibility in stock AT&T UNIX.

Microport, by the way, was the company which provided Richard Stallman's foks with a complete development system for free, just so that he could put gcc on the 386.

Also, there was a quote from Doug Michaels (head of SCO at the time) stating in an interview that SCO would "steal everything it could" from Linux. Michaels later retracted that statement; but it was clear that his original words were what SCO had on its mind.

So noo, SCO never, ever made friendly with Linux. It was always trying to stab Linux in the back at every opportunity it could. To state otherwise is an outright lie, and is to the Registers' general discredit.

Re:My money is on The Register

[hhghghghh]

If Groklaw seems biassed in the SCO-IBM case, that is because the facts support IBM's view of the case. This is not entirely true. Groklaw is biased in a way, but not to the extent of misreporting facts, rather they do sympathize with IBM. So if a fact is posted that's not in favor of IBM (and this does happen) they're reported as "a problem for IBM's case, how should this be solved?" whereas if a problematic fact arises that hurts SCOX, it's quickly pointed out that this is the latest in a long string of facts exposing their lies and misrepresentations. While the latter is also factually true, the emphasis is on pointing this out. Of course, some of the comments go either way in being totally biased for or against. Of course, groklaw being biased at least in its attitude is not a bad thing in itself. In fact, if it wasn't, it would be a lot less interesting to read. Rather like The Register itself.

Re:PJ's Rebuttal

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it difficult to believe that Linux played any role in the *original* strategy behind Monterey -- it was positioned as an attack on the Unix market leader at the time, Sun Solaris, and to a lesser extent, "WinTel".

What you see is IBM and OldSCO and Caldera rationalizing Monterey after it had become clear that Linux was taking over but before Monterey had officially been put into the coffin. Keep in mind at this point, everyone knew a contract lawsuit was coming, so no doubt public statements were spun accordingly.

Re:Groklaw got it right

[kfg]

Is this not done in the effort to be even righter? Did not Newton himself point out evidence that his theory could not explain and thus that it was incomplete, and have not others made extenstions to the theory that have it very much "righter"? Is not one of the possible advantages of Free Software that it can easily be examined and changed to make it better?

Isn't this how we want things to work?

I don't hang out at Groklaw much, but in the few hours I've spent there I get the impression that PJ is very open to corrections, even soliciting them, and takes them to heart.

This is the side I'm likely to bet on. Nobody ever gets everything right, but the people who cling to their wrongs remain wrong, the people who admit their wrongs correct them and become "righter."

And then get critized for admiting they were wrong and retracting/correcting. On the other hand if you "correct" your view to a wrong one to gain popularity you are often cheered as a hero, and elected President. Is a puzzlement.

Henry Clay said, "I'd rather be right than President." I'll got with that, and PJ, not because she's infallible, but because she clearly, and publicly, knows that she isn't.

KFG

Does the word "law" appear in www.theregister.com?

[technoCon]

Let's see: The Register, a general tech info site located in another country. Versus: Groklaw, a legally focused site located in the US and run by PJ, a legal expert (not a lawyer, but any lawyer would do well to hire her to clerk).

And they disagree on a point of US law?

On the face of it, I'm inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to Ms. Jones.

Re:PJ's Rebuttal

[saur2004]

I seem to remember that a couple months ago there was speculation that slashdot was going to be the target of an astroturf campain. From what I have been reading in my opinion, it isnt speculation any more.

Re:PJ's Rebuttal

[Phong]

I was under the impression the most damning charges it makes are about the assertion that Project Monteray was worked on by an SCO fully aware that it was part of a migration to "Linux"

I also noticed that PJ didn't rebut that portion of the article. I think that the difference between the two may be in which SCO they're talking about. It appears that The Santa Cruz Operation (oldSCO) didn't know at the start that Project Monterey would be a stepping stone to Linux, but that Caldera (now The SCO Group, or newSCO) did know this when they purchased the SVR4 rights from oldSCO. If true, newSCO can't complain (successfully) about IBM abandoning Project Monterey for Linux if they knew at the time of their purchase what was going to happen (especially since they seemed to be actively supporting it at the time).

Loaded question encountered on job interview

[kriston]

I was on a job interview a couple of years ago in which the job was to develop software that currently ran on Solaris and part of the job would be to port that software to Linux. One of the questions asked, rather off-handedly, was what I thought of the then-emerging SCO litigation. I have used SCO products as well as Linux for as long as they've been around, and also have much detailed exposure to AIX and Solaris. I mentioned that I believed if SCO owned the technology of AT&T System V Unix such technology was their property and some of it is subject to patent protection as well as intellectual property protection. IBM appeared at the time to have released this technology directly into the public domain without regard to prior ownership and much of that code ended up in major Linux distributions' kernel and toolchains. I described how I read that the biggest reason that the BSD4.4-lite2 and subsequent NetBSD/FreeBSD distributions came about was because of intellectual property that had to be removed from BSD Unix (at the same time the BSD Unix project was ending). It appeared that the same thing was happening to Linux, except that today we have SCO suing IBM (instead of AT&T suing UCB).

I will never know how much that contributed to their opinion of me.

Re:PJ's Rebuttal

[mstone]

Because the company currently suing IBM, which calls itself "The SCO Group", used to be named "Caldera."

The company that used to be named "SCO" is now doing business under the name "Transmeta."

Caldera (aka: newSCO) bought the IP rights to the work done in Monterey from oldSCO (now Transmeta), and those rights are at the core of the present lawsuit.

So.. by showing that Caldera (now newSCO) knew Monterey was heading to POWER back before the Monterey project ended, PJ has produced evidence which directly contradicts the claims newSCO (then Caldera) has made in its third amended complaint.. namely that newSCO (then Caldera) thought:

• .. that Monterey only gave IBM permission to build code for the Itanium platform
• .. that by porting the code to POWER, IBM went beyond the rights it was granted by the Monterey contract
• .. that newSCO (formerly Caldera) had the right to address that violation by revoking IBM's right to use or distribute the code
• .. that anything IBM did with the code after that revocation was illegal
• .. that IBM's illegal actions caused newSCO (formerly Caldera) financial injury
• .. and that IBM owes newSCO (formerly Caldera) a whole bunch of money.

Interestingly enough, the company formely known as "Caldera" didn't change its name to "The SCO Group" until after it filed its lawsuit against IBM. Questions like the one you just asked show just how much confusion that bit of misdirection has caused.