SCO Gives up on Linux Website 178
Richard Mathias writes "Following on from the posting a month ago, where SCO said it was going to launch a new website to counteract Groklaw and give its side of things - well, now the company looks like it's given up on the whole plan. It was originally supposed to be at Prosco.net, then SCOinfo.com, but both have holding pages and a spokeswoman has said it may never happen at all because of "legal and management concerns"." Update: 11/03 01:10 GMT by T : editingwhiz writes "Despite earlier published reports, SCO Group is indeed still planning to post a lawsuit-information Web site under a new name, SCOinfo.com, company spokesman Blake Stowell told IT Manager's Journal today. So SCO is not throwing in the proverbial towel after all. But does it really make any difference? (IT Manager's Journal is part of OSTG.)"
Looks to me... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Looks to me... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Looks to me... (Score:2)
Just goes to show... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Just goes to show... (Score:5, Funny)
At least someone has a semblance of reality over there or somehow escaped their twisted alternate universe....
Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry, but I have to say it.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wow! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Informative)
A more skeptical take is that a zombie is a living person who has never died, but is under the influence of powerful drugs
While zombies do not usually appear in lawbooks and few laws exist to regulate them, in some places, such as Haiti, they are considered a public nuisance.
Re:Wow! (Score:2)
Zombies don't shamble around anymore - They RUN!!!
Re:Wow! (Score:3, Funny)
Oh, sorry! Yesterday I got a dirty DHCP IP address, and all day long there was a continuous stream of Gnutella clones knocking on my port 6346 and asking for part of that movie. I could turn away some of them with a "HTTP/1.1 404" response, but the P2P net kept sending more of them to look for the last piece of that movie. Eventually I gave them a 302 Moved response and told them that the Location was themselves, but I'm not sure if their pro
Re:Wow! (Score:3, Funny)
I'm not sure any of those tactics will protect against SCO/Darl Zombies, however.. coming soon on Fox: "When Darls Attack".
Re:Wow! (Score:2)
Maybe they are hoping someone will vote for them
Re:Wow! (Score:3, Funny)
Though, I can't see why they wanted to create a website anyhow. Who would be the target audience?
Heck, the lawyers probably own most of the equity in the company by now anyhow. They're probably less interested in an actual business plan that McBride is.
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
Problem is, they can't afford the $699.00 linux binary license for the server :-)
Perhaps occasional lying is better than constant? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a feeling that they knew they would have very few supporters on that site. They would probably spend more time astroturfing and fighting off the "bad" posts than they would "spreading the truth".
They have enough lies coming out in press releases do they really want to have a site that lies constantly? Wouldn't that just be more fodder for those on the pro-Linux side?
Re:Perhaps occasional lying is better than constan (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a feeling that they knew they would have very few supporters on that site
IIRC, SCO weren't going to permit posting. My suspicion is that SCO realised that it'd be deadly dull with no posting. (It's a tribute to Groklaw volunteers that Groklaw manage to make a very dry topic quite interesting - without volunteers I doubt SCO could have given "watching paint dry" a run for its money).
Re:Perhaps occasional lying is better than constan (Score:4, Interesting)
Groklaw: Provides legal docs; presents a point of view which does not get media coverage; and, allows people to discuss the issues.
They already have a repository for legal docs somewhere on their main site. Their highly publicized press releases are partisan to their viewpoint. They are not really interested in posts from people in the "community" because there is no community; they are more unilaterally despised than any other computer company today, perhaps in the last ten years.
QED, a website would have been a redundant waste of the precious little money they have left.
No posts (Score:5, Insightful)
The more likely explaination was that, in the absense of such posts, the only thing their site could have would be either court documents a la Groklaw (which would do them no good), or statements from SCO, which would find their way into the courts, and as such would have to be true or they would expose SCO to (more) problems in court. When SCO legal informed them of this, SCO probably realised that there was no benefit in doing this.
Re:No posts (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. SCO's various adversaries have already been having a blast showing their various judges the inconsistencies between what SCO has claimed in different courts. In Red Hat's case, in fact, the whole point of the litigation is the lies that SCO's management had been spreading in public statements. I suspect that "legal and management concerns" is shorthand for "legal was concerned that management was full of idiots".
Re:No posts (Score:3, Funny)
And legal isn't?
I think you're giving them entirely too much credit. I think Darl probably just couldn't figure out how to get FrontPage to put the site up for him, and finally gave up.
Re:No posts (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me answer that with a question. How much money have the lawyers pocketed?
Cut the grass (Score:2)
After that Linux insurance scam she ran with her employer, OSRM, I don't know how anyone trusts her or her site.
Nice turf, Darl!
gotta be a budget thing. (Score:4, Insightful)
How many sites can they afford to astroturf and DoS? There's Slashdot, Kuroshin, Google, Grocklaw itself. All of those efforts cost money but have failed to one extent or another. I doubt they have the money to keep it up.
No one was going to read their goofey fanboy site anyway. It's hard to make a community out of brand loyalty to a product no one is buying. You can fool some all the time and everyone some of the time but you can't fool all the people all the time, not even the press.
no morals thing. (Score:2)
Astroturf is a form of DoS. It disrupts a real community by wasting it's resources and diluting their actual conversations. There's a thin line between that and other stuff, such as crap flooding, harassment, and offensive posts. People who do one have the morals to do both. Catching them is not my job, but sooner or later one of the bigger sources of garbage here is going to be proved to be some
Re:no morals thing. (Score:2)
Re:Perhaps occasional lying is better than constan (Score:2, Insightful)
Firstly, I must object to your subject, "Perhaps occasional lying is better than constant?". It assumes that the managers of the company under discussion, SCO, are deliberately spreading falsehoods. This is not an objective fact. You risk sounding like a zealot by using such strong language in this regard.
Also, if SCO is already, as you claim, partaking in regular 'lying' by means of press releases, what is the principal difference between this behavior and set
Re:Perhaps occasional lying is better than constan (Score:5, Insightful)
They would probably spend more time astroturfing and fighting off the "bad" posts than they would "spreading the truth".
Well, they said in their initial announcement that they wouldn't allow comments, so that wouldn't have been a problem.
do they really want to have a site that lies constantly? Wouldn't that just be more fodder for those on the pro-Linux side?
This, I think, is the crux of the matter. Assuming they ever really planned to do this (it may have just been a PR stunt designed to help their stock out for a short while), I think they probably realized they had a problem when they started trying to decide exactly what to put up, and where they were going to get it from.
Some of their options were:
I think (still assuming they ever intended to do this) that they started trying to figure out what they could put up that would be legally safe (no libel, etc.), helpful to their image and not make them look like a poor Groklaw imitation, and they came up empty.
Oh, two other potential problems with pulling the material from Groklaw just occurred to me: First it might open them up to charges of copyright infringement. Although the court documents are public domain, any formatting is copyrighted. PJ licenses everything under a creative commons license that does not permit commercial use, so using Groklaw's stuff could land them in yet another court case. Second, it would definitely open them up to more criticism; they're accusing others of "stealing" their IP and talking a great deal about the sanctity of IP and the importance of honoring it, so it would look really bad for them to be accused of "stealing" from Groklaw.
Oh, one more problem: It's a bad idea to speak in public about ongoing court cases. Thanks to SCO's regular violation of this bit of wisdom, Red Hat, Novell and IBM have been able to construct their recent filings with large doses of SCO words, mixed with a bit of explanatory text. SCO has said so much to screw themselves that the attorneys on the other side were probably more excited about this new source of material than anyone. I'm sure the lawyers told Darl and co. yet again that they should really keep their mouths shut. SCO obviously isn't inclined to listen to such advice, but maybe they caved this time, based on all of the other problems.
Re:Perhaps occasional lying is better than constan (Score:5, Insightful)
The lawyers must have finally beat some sense into the management at SCO. What would this gain them? Nothing. What would it do? provide more material for Slashdot to bash SCO over the head with. More material for IBMs lawyers to bash SCO over the head with. And more bills for SCO to pay to have there lawyers review everything they post to make sure it didn't do more harm than good.
What probably happened is they showed some of the first information that they wanted to post to the lawyers. And after the lawyers edited it all was left was the SCO logo and pictures of the SCO Christmas party.
Re:Perhaps occasional lying is better than constan (Score:2)
I think this confirms that they were unsuccessful in recruiting Ari Fleischer. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Perhaps occasional lying is better than constan (Score:2)
Re:Perhaps occasional lying is better than constan (Score:2)
slashdotted? (Score:5, Funny)
First time I ever saw a site slashdotted before it went live...
Re:slashdotted? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:slashdotted? (Score:2)
I do understand that the instant you have to explain a joke to someone, it becomes a lot less funny, but I have to do it ...
At this point, it seems that AndroidCat (229562) [slashdot.org] is, indeed, missing its parent's joke. However ...
the encouragement to slashdot the hell out of prosco is entertaining in its own right. If I laughed any louder, my coworkers would have complained! AndroidCat's subtle encouragement to
They Had Nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
So in summary, They Had Nothing.
Brandon Petersen
Get Firefox! [spreadfirefox.com]
Not that I'd bother to read it. (Score:2)
For current information about SCO's suit against IBM, please visit www.sco.com/ibmlawsuit, and about SCO's suit against Novell, please visit www.sco.com/novell."
They have one really nice server [netcraft.com]. Why would they need another? It's not like they have anything new to say.
When the truth comes out... (Score:2, Interesting)
"legal and management concerns" (Score:5, Insightful)
Speaking of SCO... (Score:5, Interesting)
For those who haven't checked lately, SCOX has been trading at around 3.0 [yahoo.com] lately.
I thought that speaking of SCO... (Score:3, Funny)
Oh, damn, I said "SCO". Doh, I said "SCO" again! GD, There I go again. "SCO" right there in print.
Auughhh! Crap. I just can't keep from saying "SCO".
SCO. SCO. SCO. SCO. SCO.
Sorry for that folks. The author has comitted suicide for saying "SCO". Oooops, sorry for saying "SCO". Ahhhh, sorry for saying "SCO again". Oh, no. There I go saying "SCO". Forgive me...
Reminds me of credits in Monty Python... (Score:2)
Those responsible have been sacked.
We apologise again for the fault in the subtitles.
Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.
The directors of the firm hired to continue the credits after the other people had been sacked, wish it to be known that they have just been sacked.
Just replace "subtitles" with "SCO Lawsuit."
Re:I thought that speaking of SCO... (Score:2)
For $3 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:For $3 (Score:2)
Re:For $3 (Score:2)
Re:Speaking of SCO... (Score:2)
Bye bye SCO we hardly knew ye.
Stupid is as stupid does. (Score:2)
Dumber things have happened. Why mess around with plot when you can go to the conclusion? Pump followed by dump.
The DLoP (Distributed Lack of Purchasing) attack continues.
The real questions are, "who's buying that garbage" and "what do they think are they are buying?" After the largest investors expressed their misgivings and tried to get out, you would wonder who'd be dumb enough to buy SCOX.
Re:Speaking of SCO... (Score:2)
Re:Speaking of SCO... (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, and whatever portion of the fall in RHAT stock that has been caused by false information and threats in the press and directly to current and potential RHAT customers (such as the demands for "licensing fees" for SCOX IP fron Linux users) becomes an issue for the courts. I believe that RHAT has already filed under the Lanham act with the courts for trebled damages. The courts will sort that out later, b
Sco lawsuit is media driven not truth driven (Score:5, Insightful)
Once Groklaw started to show people the facts of the case through legal filings and great research, SCO started coming undone, because we know they are Caldera, they contributed to Linux, released Unix code, helped IBM with project Monterrey and didn't object at the time to PPC AIX, indeed advertised the fact! We see their lies in their own words where they repeatedly contradict themselves.
Re:Sco lawsuit is media driven not truth driven (Score:1)
Re:Sco lawsuit is media driven not truth driven (Score:2)
1) their words would be used against them by IBM in a court of law
2) printing court filings would also show that SCO are loosing badly....
Legal concerns? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Legal concerns? (Score:2)
Now, if they put up material that had been sealed by the court, that would be a different matter entirely. That's worse than foolhardy, it's suicidal. Same if they violate a gag order.
let me get this out of the way.. (Score:2, Informative)
SCO be a happy place to work (Score:5, Funny)
Re:SCO be a happy place to work (Score:2)
To make interesting, there's probably a version of Steve Balmer jumping around yelling, "Lawyers! Lawyers! Lawyers!"
I think it would be awesome, pure entertainment 24/7. Hell, you get paid, too.
Re:SCO be a happy place to work (Score:2)
Clever monkeys (Score:5, Interesting)
This way they can continue to make snide remarks about groklaw beeing owned by IBM without backing their claims.
I think Nelson Muntz said it best (Score:1, Funny)
Keeping a low profile (Score:5, Interesting)
SCO doesn't have much on it's side. The more they encourage effort on the part of their adversaries, the more they have to lose. Perhaps they believed that in this overly intellectual property-conscious land, they would get sympathy, but if so, that was a miscalculation.
SCO quiet? (Score:2)
SCO clearly has no sense.
they believed that in this overly intellectual property-conscious land, they would get sympathy, but if so, that was a miscalculation.
Microsoft paid them to steal other people's work and try to make free softare look like a legal pain. The attempt was recognized for what it was and the actors for who they are. They are liars and theives and few people have sympathy for that.
To prevent karma whoring. . . . . . (Score:5, Informative)
Having second thoughts thanks to 'legal concerns'.
By Robert McMillan, IDG News Service
The SCO Group is reconsidering its plans to launch an alternative to the Groklaw.net website that was due to go live yesterday.
Nearly one month after promising to launch the site that would provide information on SCO's various legal disputes, the company is having second thoughts on the project, said Janielle Fernandes, a spokeswoman for the software vendor. "It's still up for debate whether the website will ever go up," she said.
Fernandes cited "legal and management concerns about the content of the website" as precipitating the review but declined to comment on specifics.
After having its every legal move dissected on the Groklaw.net website for more than a year, SCO executives decided to launch a website of their own, devoted to giving their side of the argument. It should have gone live on 1 November - yesterday.
SCO originally said the site would use the domain name Prosco.net. That name has now been dropped in favor of SCOinfo.com, although both now resolve to a blank screen with the message: "SCO is anticipating that it will use this site as the future home for all information relating to SCO's pending lawsuits and related issues. For current information about SCO's suit against IBM, please visit www.sco.com/ibmlawsuit, and about SCO's suit against Novell, please visit www.sco.com/novell."
"The name was changed to support the purpose of the website," she said. "The purpose is to provide factual information regarding SCO's litigation, thus the name SCOinfo.com." Whether and when SCOinfo.com will ever contain this information is still up for debate within the company, Fernandes said.
SCO is presently involved in a number of legal disputes with IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Autozone and DaimlerChrysler - all stemming from its insistence that it owns the copyright on part of the open source Linux kernel.
Started shortly after the 2003 launch of SCO's multi-billion dollar lawsuit against IBM, Groklaw began as a Web log for Linux enthusiast Pamela Jones, a paralegal working for a law firm at the time. It has evolved into an open-source project itself, where legal filings are meticulously dissected by an army of volunteers.
The site will be up... (Score:3, Funny)
I'm sure the site will be up just as soon as they present some actual evidence of how IBM done them wrong...
Management Concerns.... (Score:5, Funny)
At SCO ? I mean how likely is that ? These are people who think that attacking IBM is a good company move. This means either two things
1) The site was actually a good idea
2) SCO management have gone past insantiy and out the otherside, potentially a large number of times.
I doubt its 1, so it must be 2, which is fantastic as all we need to do is wire them up to a magnet and coil and that constant rotation from sanity to madness will enable us to create cheap, non-polluting energy. The only by product of this generation would be an increase in Slashdot posts around the madness peak, but hopefully we can pull that energy in as well.
Other potential energy sources included the quantum state of Iraqi WMDs, but unfortunately their state has now resolved itself.
Re:Management Concerns.... (Score:3, Interesting)
I doubt they'd win the case, but their share prices may go up long enough to sell out.
Re:Management Concerns.... (Score:3, Interesting)
If SCO "publishes" misleading information on their web site, and people make investments based on that information, seems they could be in for another round of lawsuits aimed at them.
IANAL..
The end is near for SCOX (Score:1, Informative)
bye bye SCOX [yahoo.com]
Re:The end is near for SCOX (Score:2)
The real reason? (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe they looked at their own argument and realized it even looked stupid to them.
SCO Fail It! (Score:4, Funny)
Due to this we have pulled our site to prevent further theft and will be taking legal action to defend our interlectual property.
Examples of stolen code include:
- used on many lines in may pages.
- used on many lines in may pages.
- used on other pages and I guess we should have used XHTML too
On consultation with out lawyers they said this case whad a good chance of being profitable, although they didn't say who for
read as... (Score:5, Funny)
Read "legal and management concerns" as "We're tired of DDoS attacks and getting rooted by people who know more about *nix than we do."
he he
I guess that means S. C. O. stands for.... (Score:1)
sco sues slashdot (Score:1)
duh!! (Score:1)
They found prior art (Score:5, Funny)
How about.. (Score:2, Funny)
``legal and mamagement concerns'' REALLY means: (Score:5, Funny)
``Legal concerns'' probably means their lawyers told them: ``If you do this, we won't be able to maintain the fiction that you have a case.''
``Management concerns'' probably means that management didn't think it would pump the stock up enough to make up for the lawyers jumping ship.
Re:``legal and mamagement concerns'' REALLY means: (Score:2)
Did the lawyers have a say? (Score:3, Insightful)
By the way, I am not a lawyer, and taking this as legal advice without asking a real lawyer is like drinking poision to see what it tastes like.
Re:Did the lawyers have a say? (Score:4, Funny)
Yes folks, always get a real lawyer to drink poision for you.
Re:Did the lawyers have a say? (Score:2)
Preferably a whole team of lawyers, more data points that way. I understand some have built up (legal) immunities.
Pronunciation (Score:5, Insightful)
www.darlmcbride.com is functional (Score:5, Informative)
Stop by and take a look....unfortunately I couldn't locate a place to leave "Comments" and "Feedback" to their FUD.
What about the Indians? (Score:5, Interesting)
While we have all joined each other in loud, hearty guffaws at the rate at which SCO as a company has driven itself to hell without aid of handbasket, I must take a moment for an aside.
According to the SCO website, they are still attempting to deliver a UNIXWare(R) product. This means that they *must* still have technically savvy folks working for them. Slaving over a hot pentium all day to cook us up some UNIXWare(R) goodness. How do they find the strength to get up in the morning and make the drive to work? For that matter, how does Darl McBride? The writing has been on the wall for quite a while now. How many of them are just hanging in, hoping for a long enough tenure with the company to get *something* out of all their hard work?
This only causes to reenforce in my mind an earlier (albeit drunken) revelation I had about the truths of the online community that is /. I am sorely tempted to register a holding company, some Corporation designed to hold stock. I know there are legal Corp Classes that are allowed to do such things. Get everyone on every online forum I can find to be shareholders of the Holding Company and use all share money to outright purchase SCO and end this once and for all.
I mean, they do have *some* validity to the claim that they own UNIX(R) Source. I'm not quite sure how much they truly own lock/stock. But what happens when their bubble *does* bust? We all know it's coming, we all know it's going to happen. Think that which is the UNIX(R) Source will suddenly become automagically opened?
Most likely Microsoft or some other non open friendly giant will swoop in at the last minute and purchase up what remains of the UNIX(R) Source so that it will forever remain in a corporate collective somewhere. If it is Microsoft, they would probably begin the litigation anew. After they ran patents for everything and anything that looked like it might clear the US Patent Office in favor of the new owners.
Re:What about the Indians? (Score:2)
Although I'd love to see Microsoft and IBM battle it out. It'd be like Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla. We'd have to evacuate Tokyo, of course, but the movie sales alone would make it profitable.
Re:What about the Indians? (Score:3, Interesting)
SCO press releases (Score:4, Interesting)
it may never happen at all because of legal (Score:5, Funny)
Makes sense. I expect the lawyers and management pointed out that SCO would certainly never say anything about someone else that was not 100% true, and a program of wild accusations would be unseemly for a respected member of the community.
Ooooh... I see now. (Score:2)
The problem with the English language is that it doesn't have a word for ambiguous.
Not too surprising for me. (Score:5, Interesting)
-----------------
We are putting a site together that will go live on November 1 and have a link on the site called "Just for Fun."
We would like to link to your site to give people access to "Steve the Linux Super Villian." It's absolutely hilarious and we would love to profile that on this section of the site, just to show people that we have a sense of humor.
May we have your permission to link to your site from our site?
-----------------
To which I replied:
ABSOLUTELY, WITHOUT A DOUBT, NO.
Obviously they didn't notice my Penguin Blood Ninja FiaSCO animation.
I'm not too surprised by today's news!
SCO had to shut up. IBM was quoting them. (Score:4, Interesting)
Over on the stock front, SCOX is at $2.93 today, continuing the long, slow slide of the last year. [yahoo.com] Since July, the price decline has been almost a straight line on a linear scale. The market cap seems to be tracking how much cash SCO has left, which means the market is valuing SCO's UNIX rights at zero.
Has anybody read the article? (Score:3, Insightful)
So much speculation and comments on so little substance. Indeed, you need a different headline on this story.
scoinfo.com == NOinfo.com (Score:2)
Heh, funny. (Score:3, Interesting)
You mean other than not owning Linux and having no case, right? Cause that didn't stop SCO before...
They already got a site, yo (Score:2)
SCO Refraining from Lying to Us? What's up? (Score:2)
Hypothesis 1: Someone in legal said that someone could potentially be held personally accountable for any slander on the site, they couldn't find anyone in the company stupid enough to step into the line of fire.
Hypothesis 2: Someone in legal realized that a site with enough "spin" to make it useful would have to print quite a lot of outright lies, putting up a nice big target for a SEC "Shareholder Fraud" investigation.
Of course, IANAL so I don't know feasib
In other news... (Score:2)