SCO Asked O'Gara To Smear Groklaw 96
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the par-for-the-course dept.
from the par-for-the-course dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "PJ of Groklaw has found some really interesting documents coming out of the never-ending SCO trial. Specifically, in SCO v. Novell, SCO doesn't want the jury to find out about the email Blake Stowell (then a PR guy for SCO) sent to Maureen O'Gara that asked her to 'send a jab PJ's way.' For those who don't remember that far back in the SCO saga, the 'jab' was when O'Gara wrote an inaccurate, rambling and irrelevant 'exposé' on PJ which got O'Gara fired for violating journalistic ethics after angry readers complained to the publisher — an act which caused Ms. O'Gara to tell SCO, 'I want war pay.' For those wondering how they can keep going after that final judgment against SCO over a year ago, it's hard to do the saga justice without glossing over everything, but the short version is that SCO ran to bankruptcy after they were mostly dead, but before becoming completely dead. That automatically stopped all the cases against SCO due to standard bankruptcy court rules, then SCO effectively re-litigated a bunch of issues via bankruptcy court rules. Currently, they're accusing Novell of 'slander of title' over copyrights that two different courts have ruled SCO does not own, and we're waiting to see if a jury will reach the same conclusion. They're also trying to use the company's lawsuits as assets and to sell them to various SCO insiders so that the legal wranglings can continue even if nothing is left of SCO. From the very start, SCO has always been the type to fight dirty."
Fighting dirty is one thing (Score:4, Interesting)
But the SCO fiasco is an outright fraud. This has to be one of the most blatant abuses of our legal system I can remember. Why didn't the SEC anal probe McBride and put an end to this charade? You'd think that was part of their job. There were certainly enough complaints filed.
Pathetic this joke of a company is still alive.
Re:SCO needs to more than die. (Score:3, Interesting)
Read some of the back articles on Groklaw. While it hasn't been 100% successfully proven that SCO's financiers were Microsoft, they look like the most likely suspect.
Re:Fighting dirty is one thing (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:When the Republicans talk tort reform... (Score:5, Interesting)
It was never about linux. IBM was just a convenient brick wall to drive the company into to get an excuse to funnel the money out of SCO.
Re:SCO needs to more than die. (Score:5, Interesting)
whomever is behind (financing) this crap
Look at the timeline. We know who financed it.
August 18 2002, Michael Davidson finishes his code comparison for SCO. It's summed up with "we had found absolutely nothing, i.e., no evidence of any copyright infringement whatsoever,"
August 28 2002, McBride said Linux does not infringe SCO's copyrights, and that they would not ever make such a claim.
March 2003, McBride says the case is solely about IBM not living up to "contract violations"
April 2003, Microsoft pays SCO $16M for "unix licenses" that it doesn't need.
May 2003, McBride claims that Linux infringes it's copyright, and contains "millions" of lines of SCO code.
August 2003, Microsoft arranges for Baystar to invest $50M in SCO
Re:Can PJ take legal action against Maureen O'Gara (Score:5, Interesting)
Not fired at all (Score:5, Interesting)
(emphasis mine) Each individual comment might be justifiable, but with that much repetition she's clearly trying quite hard to cast the Drizzle crew in a bad light. Why? Take a look at this gem too.
Uh, yeah. You mean the Google that created BigTable, and the Facebook that created Cassandra? How could someone write a story that's partly about Cassandra and still predict that Cassandra's creator would "stick with" MySQL? What would motivate such behavior? It's hard to avoid the conclusion that O'Gara will gladly smear whoever someone asks her to smear. The only question in my mind is: who asked this time? Serial plagiarist [aralbalkan.com] and SEO shop Sys-Con is clearly complicit too, and the idea that they would ever fire anyone for ethical reasons is just laughable.
Re:Can PJ take legal action against Maureen O'Gara (Score:3, Interesting)
She won't, for one very good reason -- the safety of her friends and family.
IANAL, but wouldn't PJ need to reveal her name on the court papers that initiated the suit against O'Gara? Even were that not the case, O'Gara's lawyers would stop at nothing to force her to reveal her identity (demanding the right to question her on the witness stand would probably be easiest, but I'm sure there are other tricks they'd try if that didn't work.) Given the level of ethics demonstrated by O'Gara, McBride, and others involved in this case I think that would lead to serious danger for PJ.
What is slightly disconcerning (Score:3, Interesting)
Is that this case is now before a jury that knows absolutely nothing about SCO's past history (as is with any jury trial I guess). In the pretrial hearings SCO was asking that any juror that had a college degree be disqualified. What I think we are going to see here is a plaintiff that will tell a sob story about those mean Novell and IBM corporations that ruined their businesses and lives. How their stock price was driven down into the ground until they were delisted, how they lost all their customer base, how they lost their good name in the market, how they had to start eating ramen and mac everyday, etc. etc.
The point being is that anyone who has observed this case from the beginning (and who is not paid by Microsoft or SCO) has mostly all come to the same conclusion: That SCO are corporate raiders looking to cash in on the success of Linux. Everyone, including some inside SCO have also come to the conclusion that no parts of Linux infringe upon anyone's proprietary code or was misappropriated.
This trial is three weeks long. It disturbs me that those who have not had a chance to be privy to SCO's dishonesty and malice could possibly side with them.
Re:SCO needs to more than die. (Score:3, Interesting)
If you want to be really pedantic, 'whom' is a dative (indirect object, object of a preposition (ablative in Romance languages), and instrumental (separate case form for sweorda in many Anglo-Saxon texts)) form from the Anglo-Saxon 'hwaem'. The accusative (direct object) form was be 'hwone' which became 'who,' not 'whom'.
So it's 'To whom did you speak?' and 'Who did you hit?' and 'Who hit you?'
Or, you could shut the hell up and just accept that Modern English is already, and is still becoming, more and more of an analytic language rather than a synthetic one and that word endings really don't matter nearly as much syntax.