Groklaw's PJ Says SCO's Demise Greatly Exaggerated

blackbearnh writes "Last week, the net was all abuzz with speculation that SCO was finally gone and done for. With the final judgment in SCO v. Novell in, and SCO millions of dollars in the hole to Novell, it seemed like the fat lady had finally sung. But like most things in the legal system, it isn't nearly that simple. O'Reilly Media sought out Groklaw's Pamela Jones, and got a rundown of what's still alive, and why a final end to the madness may be many years away. 'Summing up, it looks bleak for SCO at the moment, but let's enter the alternate realm of SCO's best-case scenario in its dreams: in that realm, SCO wins on appeal, which one of SCO's lawyers indicated might take a year and a half or five years, and the case is sent back to Utah for trial by jury, which is what SCO wanted (as opposed to trial by judge, which is what it got), then everything listed above (except for the IPO class action) comes alive again, presumably, depending on what the appellate court decides. Then SCO is in position once again to go after Linux end users, as well as IBM, et al.'"

Please

Make it stop. Please. I beg of you.

Re:Please

Too late, SCO's been off the market for a while. Just before they went under, I bought 10 shares at 0.50/share, then paid the $15 to get a physical certificate so I could frame it and put it in my bathroom, along with the rest of the toilet paper. Which is why you can find my name in various court documents in the SCO Bankruptcy, since I registered as a creditor. I'm getting bumped off, though, because they challenged and I don't have the time and energy to do all the hoops to stay on the list.

Re:Please

...frame it and put it in my bathroom, along with the rest of the toilet paper.

I don't think that's how you're supposed to use toilet paper.

Re:Please

I agree. They can only keep this going with money. They don't have any, so it's not going to be five more years of crapola.

SCO is dead.

SCO have become what was suggested to them, a company that only does legal action. The employees and directors are getting paid well during this time.

Other companies who like the idea of Linux in a quagmire have provided money for 'licences', and will continue to do so.

Re:Please

According to multiple folks I consulted, I'm still a creditor, I'm just the VERY last in line to get anything. Which, practically speaking, means I'd never get anything anyway. But it was an easy way to get copies of all the bankruptcy proceedings, since they had to send me a copy of everything.

Re:

According to multiple folks I consulted, I'm still a creditor, I'm just the VERY last in line to get anything.

Were these folks lawyers?

I believe that shareholders are entitled to documents resulting from the bankruptcy proceedings -- you did not have to file as a creditor to get them. As I suggested above, I don't think SCO owed or owes you any money, so I suspect (but IANAL) you are not a creditor. If the company or its assets are eventually sold, you may be entitled to some money, but as you noted ab

Re:Please

Oh yes, they were lawyers, albeit providing advice pro bono. One is even a bankruptcy attorney, who gave me explicit advice how I could have stayed in the game had I wanted to make the effort.

Re:

If I read him right, he IS a creditor. He paid $15 for the stock certificate, but they tanked and didn't send him one. So he is entitled to his $15 back.

By Uncle bought two CD Burners for $500/piece (should give you the time frame on this) and the company tanked before shipping the drives. The whole thing wound through the bankruptcy process to get him some money back. They couldn't just ship the drives, because the "assets" of the company had to be sold and the creditors paid in order. So they took hi

In other words...

In other words, SCO is a zombie. It can't be killed by normal litigation. Argh, kill it with fire! Do it now!

Re:

A bullet through the head should kill it. I saw it on TV once, I think it was a documentary.

OT but I don't care

WTF is up with the userpage! It was bad I get slapped with the dumbass firehose-with-Idle's-stylesheet, but now I don't even have a tab for my comments.

If I want Firehose, I'll go to to Firehose. (I don't, and wont)

If I want Idle, I'll go to Idle. (I don't, and wont)

If I want my userpage to be a clean, simple and informative interface, I'll click on my username in the upper right. Oh wait, I can't!

If you want to dick around with the userpage, fine. Just give me a checkbox that says "opt out of this crapfest" like you did with the index and comments.

Re:OT but I don't care

holy crap I was about to post the exact same thing. The style sheet is the least of it. I still haven't even figured out how to tell if anyone's posted a reply to any of my comments. Now you have to click every comment... and reading my entire comment on my user page is just useless. I already know what I said, I'm looking for the replies. This is supposed to be a "discussion" not "oooh, shiny, look at all the cool crap I wrote. I must be awesome. So awesome that every time I go to my user page I want to read what I wrote over and over."

When idle got jacked it didn't bother me because I almost never go there... but user pages? really?

Re:OT but I don't care

I'm glad someone other than me has noticed it as well. I clicked on my use page to see if anyone had posted replies to any of my comments the other day and thought at first that I had clicked on the firehose or worse, Idle. I did something I've never done before for the simple fact I didn't know what else to do, and posted a journal entry asking what the fuck happened to the user page.

Please, do what you will with Idle/Firehose, no one really reads those anyway, but leave the user page alone, it's genuinely useful... or at least it was till you fucked with it.

Re:OT but I don't care

Bookmark: http://yro.slashdot.org/~jcsorocks/comments [slashdot.org]

1. I don't need another bookmark. That's more clutter. I already had a perfectly good clickable link to my comment section built right into the page. It was called "the goddamn design".
2. Even if I did bookmark, it still has lost functionality. The layout is crammed. It's jammed up with Idle-layout crap. And it doesn't report the same information it used to.
3. Even if I overlooked all that, the link you provided isn't to my comments, so it wouldn't work.

Re:OT but I don't care

To add to this the comments page is no longer rendering correctly on iPhone Safari firmwire 2.2. The overlays on the right block the comment scores.

Re:OT but I don't care

The comment scores are all goofy now anyway. They all appear to be one less than the actual score when you're reading the comments in the discussion thread.

Re:OT but I don't care

It's broken on Konqueror and OS X/Safari and Firefox. We didn't want you to feel left out.

Re:OT but I don't care

Same here. I happened to like the old userpage, now all I've got is this pseudo-idle mess with the actual posts crammed into a little corner. I didn't ask for idle, I didn't ask for the firehose, I asked for a user page!

I think this is a sign that Slashdot has well and truly fallen for Incessant Redesign Disease, where they just have to change the design of everything every now and then to 'keep it fresh'. Nevermind if no one complained about the old design, or if you can't actually think of any way to improve on the old design, you've got to keep it fresh!

Note to the Slashdot staff: You know all those +5 modded rants about Vista? You're doing the SAME FUCKING THING. If the site design needs changing, we'll let you know.

Re:OT but I don't care

Reading between the lines, it's pretty obvious that the /. crew have lost control of the site except on editorial matters. This post [slashdot.org] ought to convince you, if nothing else will. Note in particular the time interval in which those employees posted.

Re:OT but I don't care

I just hope they can save it, unlike the last website I frequented that this happened to. thespark.com was originally run by some college kids with a sense of humor and some tech skills. It was awesome for years. Then some corporate overlords flashed lots of money at them and like any sane young group of people, they sold. Then it started going downhill. Then the original people got tired of it going downhill and quit. Then it went downhill really, really fast.

Just noticed something else...

HOLY FUCK! As if the new user page weren't bad enough, it mixes the classic green color scheme with whatever the theme is for the current subdomain, if you happen to be on one. You thought http://slashdot.org/~CleverNickName [slashdot.org] looked bad? Check out http://yro.slashdot.org/~CleverNickName [slashdot.org] or http://games.slashdot.org/~CleverNickName [slashdot.org] or http://it.slashdot.org/~CleverNickName [slashdot.org]!!!!!

Orange links on green? My eyes! Ze googles, zey do nossing!

The One

I sure hope this SCO doesnt start killing all the other fantasy dimension SCO's and absorbing their power...

Boggled

After years of hearing about their BS tactics, trying to sue all sorts of businesses, I don't even know what they do anymore. I'm partly joking, but you rarely hear anything about them beyond court cases. Usually, you hear about a company doing something dumb/stupid for a while, then you hear about some product they are releasing or something new they are doing; you know, like companies that provide a service or a product. Not with SCO. I just don't understand how any company like that could ever expect new customers or continued contracts with any dignity. I know they shot themselves in the foot so many times, but most companies I've seen do this in the past are at least worked on something substantial while lawsuits continue. end rant

Bologna.

PJ, the arch-censor of Groklaw, desperately needs you to believe this

To believe that it's possible, or to believe that it's probable?

It seems like if she was looking for job security she would be arguing that it's probable. Instead she's arguing that it's possible. And we all know what possible means. I have a lottery ticket in my pocket. It's possible I've won. Sure as hell wouldn't call it probable though.

And FWIW, Groklaw does far more than merely keep an eye on SCO. Just the other day there was a good article about the Bilski ruling over on Groklaw. The Groklaw front page also has items about the cyberbullying case, and Harvard having a youtube channel.

If there's one thing PJ has probably learned from following the SCO story from the beginning is that you don't put all your eggs in a single basket.

Re:

I always thought that in America, a jury was a jury of peers, by which I presume they mean peer to the defendant

I suspect this language is really a hangover from English law, where a peer of the realm (ie. someone with a seat in the House of Lords) was entitled to be tried by other peers of the realm, whilst commoners (ie, the rest of the population) were only entitled to be tried by other commoners. I have no idea if this right still exists for peers of the realm.