Biff, and The SCOundrels

Message ID: 190514
Posted By: karl_w_lewis
Posted On: 2004-10-09 07:29:00
Subject: Biff, and The SCOundrels

(It's early Saturday, where I am. Not a business day, so I will waste a little bandwidth on more idle speculation.)

Biff's sensational headline: "PJ says Amendment 2 is forged!" is very interesting to me.

PJ, of course, says no such thing. She asks a question or two about the provenance of the document in question. This is not an unreasonable line of questioning. Certainly it had occurred to me to wonder where that came from and why only one party had a copy.

The importasnt part about Biff's argument is just this: there is an attempt to discredit PJ for just having asked the question. I think this demonstrates more than just fallacious thinking, I think it represents desperation. Really, once yourself needing to put words in your opponent's mouth, you've already acknowledged that you have lost the argument.

The SCOundrels now argue that the Judge should grant them ownership of the copyrights, but that was precisely the suit they *failed* to file. They filed a slander of title suit, and everyone agrees they have to lose that one. And all their on-topic arguments about that issue only serve to make it quite clear that the contract is not clear, so any confusion is clearly not a result of malice.

The entire issue with Novell has been handled, from the start, so poorly that I can not begin to fathom what the SCOundrels had in mind. They failed to mention to the bag-holders that Novell was sending them nasty letters telling them to back off; that they lacked the rights they were claiming. They told the press the issue was resolved, all the while still arguing with Novell through the mail. Then, instead of asking a Federal Judge to resolve the issue, and enforce what they described as a bullet-proof contract, they filed with a state court to rule that Novell had no right to even argue the point. (And the sum total of the SCOundrels' own arguments demonstrate, quite convincingly, that there is far too much legitimate confusion regarding the contracts to make a claim of malice stick.) And now, they seem to want the Judge to rule that they *do* own the copyrights, but without ever having brought such a motion or such a suit before the court.

KWL

It is said that you should not ascribe to evil what can be explained by mere stupidity, but in the SCOundrels' behavior we see something that can only be adequately explained by citing *both* evil *and* stupidity.

Message ID: 190521
Posted By: flimbag
Posted On: 2004-10-09 11:01:00
Subject: Meta-question: about SCO shills

> The importasnt part about Biff's argument
> is just this: there is an attempt to
> discredit PJ for just having asked the
> question. I think this demonstrates more
> than just fallacious thinking, I think it
> represents desperation.

This highlights something that I've been wondering about for some time now, and that is, did SCO ever have any intelligent yet critical and even-handed supporters? People who, for whatever reason, wanted to see SCO win, but who didn't rely on exaggeration, hyperbole and downright lies when being involved in the discussion?

I sometimes wonder whether or not they think it's necessary to do this, because they can point to some of us on the Linux side doing similar things -- implying, for example, that SCO executives are engaged in criminal acts, perjury, etc. (They may well be doing these things, but I've yet to see any strong evidence for their having done so -- though some are clearly liars and dissemblers, and I believe that the company and its executives lack any ethics or morals.)

Despite the fact that most of us who are opposed to SCO are clearly partisan, many still have a degree of even-handedness and sense of fairness that forces them to acknowledge those occasions when there appear to be weaknesses in the IBM/Linux case, yet I see no sign at all that this ever happens among SCO's supporters.

Was there once intelligent life among the pro-SCO posters on this board, but they all dropped away when the contradictions became too great to handle without significant cognitive dissonance?

Sometimes I think that BIFF or Ledite are about to break down, show us their human side, and admit to real doubts about SCO's evidence.
I think Ledite came close when he thought SCO's price was about to fall through the floor a few weeks ago.

The fact that they never do is, I suppose, the strongest argument that they really are paided shills or astroturfers, but it's quite possible to become embedded into holding an untenable position, simply because of your dislike for your opponents.

Message ID: 190524
Posted By: karl_w_lewis
Posted On: 2004-10-09 12:03:00
Subject: Re: Meta-question: about SCO shills

>> This highlights something that I've been wondering about for some time now, and that is, did SCO ever have any intelligent yet critical and even-handed supporters? People who, for whatever reason, wanted to see SCO win, but who didn't rely on exaggeration, hyperbole and downright lies when being involved in the discussion?<<

From the beginning of my [too intense] scrutiny of this case I have never seen a SCO "supporter" who was not ignoring a good deal of contrary evidence. Oddly enough, some members of the press, early on, almost exhibited the behavior you describe. I don't think that they supported the SCOundrels, but I think they were perfectly willing to believe that the SCO Group had a case.

In the beginning, (it seemed to me), Darl made many, many public statements that were at least plausable. You know, lots of us are not actually kernel devlopers, so if Darl said the process is out of control, well, *I* certainly lacked the expertise to gainsay him. I think many people felt that it might be true.

Over time, all that has fallen away. If you've been following this case at all, you can no longer claim innocence of understanding the kernel development process, it has had a thorough airing. Every patch, every contribution, everything that lives in the Linux kernel got there through the lkml, (the Linux Kernel Mailing List). The CVS repository, (or repositories), are all publicly accessable.

Now the SCOundrels are reduced to claiming IBM violated some agreement or another with the Santa Cruz Operation wrt AIX, and not Linux, at all. And, you know, I'd be willing to accept that, as the truth... except... the SCOundrels ain't the Santa Cruz Operation, and we've all read the contract. And we remember, (I'm not saying that everyone is as bitter about this as I am, but we do all still *remember*), that the first complaint, the second complaint, and *all* the press releases were about Linux.

>> [...] some of us on the Linux side doing similar things -- implying, for example, that SCO executives are engaged in criminal acts, perjury, etc. (They may well be doing these things, but I've yet to see any strong evidence for their having done so <<

The SCOundrels submitted into the court record a copy of IBM's contract with AT&T, wherein the SCOundrels inserted "(AIX)" into the contract terms after each instance of "the SOFTWARE PRODUCTS" in order to make it clear to the court that the contract required IBM to keep AIX confidential. And yet the original contract, and the people who wrote it have made clear that that was not what the contract meant. If that doesn't count as perjury then I haven't a clue what does. (IANAL, so I am being sincere, I may have no idea, but that is what I *thought* perjury meant.)

All in all, I am forced to conclude, absent more evidence turning up, this whole fiaSCO was just an attempt to extort money from IBM. And that the SCOundrels miscalculated every single aspect of this from the word "go."

(Sorry, I've been rambling.) All that is a long way of saying, no, there are no SCO "supporters" whose support is not joined at the hip with the idea of the "Linux Lottery."

KWL

It is at times like this that I find my lack of faith in an afterlife is a disadvantage; I can not even hope that the SCOundrels spend any portion of such an afterlife in torment for their [petty] crimes.

Message ID: 190547
Posted By: cat_herder_5263
Posted On: 2004-10-09 16:00:00
Subject: Re: Meta-question: about SCO shills

----------------8< Quote >8----------------
At the beginning I was, if not exactly cheering for Caldera, at least neutral and given to seeing their side of the story. The tale as told early on (IBM released licensed and legally protected UNIX code verbatim) was plausible, and if it were true, Caldera deserved just compensation and IBM deserved a spanking.
----------------8< Quote> 8----------------

I had been involved for about 10 years with several vertical market apps where the majority of number of installations were on Santa Cruz Operations OpenServer.

I had held SCOC stock from back when Santa Cruz looked like a viable company. I was interested in the fact that Santa Cruz bought UnixWare from Novell and also thought Monterey would be a good thing for Santa Cruz. For whatever reason (and I have lots of hearsay speculation) Monterey fizzled, Caldera bought the Unix business from SCO and made noises like they were really serious about beefing up Linux with their newly acquired Unix technology. I had used Caldera Linux a couple of times because it was the only distribution I could get running on some difficult machines and actually liked Caldera better than Red Hat.

At first, I was neutral with respect to the lawsuit. The original reports I saw about the suit mentioned a contract dispute. This was prior to Darl mouthing off to the press.

I thought the Unix business would give them some good cash flow and some breathing room to grow their business model for Linux.

My first thought about the suit was that Caldera had found some technicality in the Monterey contract and they thought they could get some quick bucks from IBM.

But then I saw one of the trade rags web sites quote Darl that IBM had copied MILLIONS of lines of UNIX code into Linux. Right then I knew it was a complete prevarication.

I came to this board after I reached that conclusion, so I never was a SCO Group supporter.

=^^=

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