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Newsgroups: alt.os.linux.caldera
Subject: Choice of forum for discussion of SCO Group f/k/a 
Caldera International
From: Al Petrofsky <a...@petrofsky.org>
Date: 11 Mar 2010 21:42:16 -0800
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I've been failing to get around to writing an explanation for my
sudden switch last month from <http://investorvillage.com> to
<news:alt.os.linux.caldera> for my public posts about the financial
and litigatory exploits of the SCO Group, Inc., f/k/a Caldera
International, Inc..

I just sent the response below to an email I received from an Investor
Villager, and it occurs to me that it should suffice just fine as my
apologia.

-al

   > We miss you over at IV. Please come back, if only to tell us why you
   > left! Thanks.

   Please feel free to join me at alt.os.linux.caldera!  Also, like I
   said in my last InvestorVillage post, feel free to repost any of my
   a.o.l.c messages (in their entirety) to IV.

   I'll probably get around to posting an explanation sometime, but it's
   basically no different from what I wrote in Yahoo SCOX message 391740
   back in 2006:

      Subject: Re: No direction home
      Author: al_petrofsky
      Time Posted (ET): 16-Jul-06 05:40 pm

      Panglozz writes:
      > 4. Usenet (C.U.S.M. or A.O.L.Caldera) ... virtually un-searchable

      "Virtually un-searchable"? All messages in alt.os.linux.caldera,
      going back to its creation in July 1995, are archived and
      searchable with the fast and powerful google search engine at
      groups.google.com.

      I always would have preferred to post SCO-related information to a
      usenet group rather than a yahoo, geeklog, scoop, or whatever site.

      Some of the many reasons: killfiles; gnus; failure-resistant and
      non-owner-dependant architecture; google archived & searchable;
      easily archived elsewhere as well; and likely to long outlive the
      SCO litigation, just as alt.suit.att-bsdi outlived the previous
      round of litigation and was available to be searched for this
      round.

      Another reason (as I ranted about here in message #126862) is that
      through the miracle of text/plain support, you can post a wide
      variety of tabular data, with aligning columns!

      And the big one: if you've just obtained some interesting document,
      you can simply post the full text of the damn thing, rather than
      split it into a million bite-sized pieces, or go to the headache of
      setting up a website for yourself.

      Back in April 2004, I posted a couple SCO messages to
      comp.os.linux.advocacy and comp.unix.sco.misc. It was clear,
      though, that both were being used by other audiences. I considered
      re-newgrouping alt.suit.att-bsdi, which was rmgrouped in 1995, but
      I never got around to going to the trouble of working up a
      consensus for doing so on alt.config and trying to ensure that it
      got decent propagation again.

      I didn't notice that alt.os.linux.caldera appears to be available,
      and already to have decent propagation. At least, it is available
      to everyone through http at groups.google.com, and nntp feeds are
      available through supernews.com.

      So, that's where I'll be posting next time I have something to say
      about SCO.

   (<http://finance.messages.yahoo.com/bbs?action=m&sid=1600684464&board=
   1600684464&tid=cald&mid=391740>)

   I ended up moving to IV in 2007 because that's where everybody else
   was, and, at the time, I didn't really have much to add myself.

   Since then, Investorvillage has become increasingly unacceptably
   unfree.  What finally made me say "I'm out this bitch" last month was
   was the moment I discovered that all posts older than two months had
   become unsearchable to all but premier members.  (It looks like
   they've since backtracked and liberalized that a little bit, but it's
   still a major crippling of the functionality that's available to the
   world at large.)

   Fuck that.  It's completely ridiculous (and always has been) that a
   bunch of Linux fans are locking themselves into a non-free,
   proprietary website where all their data is doomed to oblivion when
   the vendor goes under.

   -al

   P.S.  Sometime tonight I intend to post to a.o.l.c the complete
   107-page transcript of Maureen O'Gara's March 2007 deposition (which
   the parties agreed to file publicly in Denver last year, even though
   one or both of them had considered it confidential a couple years
   earlier when it had been filed in Salt Lake).  It's hilarious.
   There's enough material for a ShitMyOgaraSays twitter feed.
   Sample:

      Q.  And then [Blake Stowell] reports back, "Aaw, shucks, I'm
      blushing now."

      Do you see that?

      A.  I guess that's because I said he was cute.  I call most people
      lamb chop.  Most guys think they're the only ones I say it to.  I've
      got 2000 senior executives in the computer industry who think
      they're the only ones I call lamb chop.  Come on, honey.