SCO's Suit: A Match Made in Redmond? (BusinessWeek)

Posted Mar 11, 2004 15:02 UTC (Thu) by knobunc (subscriber, #4678) [Link]

No problems for me with 1.6b (build 2003120808) on Win2k (at work).

Granted I have adblock and bannerblind killing a lot of stuff on the page, so perhaps some ad nailed you?

-ben

Posted Mar 11, 2004 15:23 UTC (Thu) by ccyoung (subscriber, #16340) [Link]

works fine on mine, 1.4.1 under Linux

Posted Mar 11, 2004 15:52 UTC (Thu) by kh (subscriber, #19413) [Link]

It's because of funky javascript ads - turn off javascript and you will be able to access it.

Posted Mar 11, 2004 18:50 UTC (Thu) by Eudyptes (guest, #15589) [Link]

"If Microsoft doesn't think they're doing anything wrong, why did they
hide behind baystar?"

Precisely! Of course if cornered on this particular subject they will
undoubtedly have some creative spin on the whole thing - and like any good
mob the boss is protected behind layers of foot soldiers and leutienents.

But on a more serious side consider why they would want to keep this mum?
IMHO it's pretty obvious. They have many enemies, of which IBM can be
counted as one of the oldest in this category. And, toothless as they
often appear, the 3 person oversight panel keeping an eye on Microsoft can
only turn a blind eye so often.

I mean they are always under scrutiny for monopolistic manipulation of the
market and this would be pretty obvious. This becomes especially risky in
light of the fact that SCO has yet to provide any viable evidence of
"anything" yet. If it can be at least inferred the M$ was aware the SCO
claims are little more than fabrications intended to run a stock scheme
and stab at the tide of Linux adoption in enterprise and its enevitable
carry over to the desktop then M$ can be seen as once again trampling
competition via it's monopoly position - hence the DOJs watchdogs would be
forced to step in, the press would offer its usually contridictory spin vs
fact reporting and M$ would be yet again in a barely defensible postion.

Let's remember M$ has dominance in the desktop sector and desperately
wants to expand into corporate enterprise to supplant unix - Linux is
beating them up badly. And their real fear is as I stated earlier.
Corporation look at LOD, get it operational, then workers become
accustomed to it. This in turn makes ISV consider Linux as a vaible
market and start porting apps, which in turn starts consideration of more
generic consumer apps - becuase they fear that what a worker uses at the
office will translate to using at home. Lord forbid should their be a
version of Quicken or photoshop or what have you that works natively on
Linux. The the OEMs start to pre-install and all bets are off.

M$ shows definite signs of feeling the heat. The rush for legislation
essentially fell flat. Now we see a plethora of filings with the USPTO -
such as the "virtual desktop pager" patent and others like XML patents.

Furthermore, we now hear of the U.S. Army and other gov agencies telling
M$ and Gates not to send free OFFICE cd's to their employees. The truth
is if they are implicated in blatent subdrifuge and manipulation it could
backfire big time. Not only because their detractors have yet more ammo
to throw at them, or the government will have to at least look like they
are intervening. But the market perception is really what they fear - and
as a side they run the risk of giving credibility to Linux as "ready"...
Otherwise why all the effort to muzzle and kill it?

Posted Mar 11, 2004 23:56 UTC (Thu) by wildpossum (guest, #17744) [Link]

It's completely in character with M$ to do such underhand things. Their shameful history is well documented. Companies bear the hallmarks of their founders.

Now if they took half the energy they use trying to undermine rivals and strove for technical excellence instead... but that would never happen in a million years.

Posted Mar 12, 2004 18:39 UTC (Fri) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

I suspect there are legitimate reasons for Microsoft not to own stock in
SCO. Since SCO is theoretically an OS provider, and therefore in a space
that Microsoft has been found to have a monopoly, it would probably be
bad for Microsoft to have the sort of deal that BayStar has (consider
what people would say if Microsoft made that kind of investment in Red
Hat). So, even if Microsoft wanted to be explicit in their support for
SCO, they probably would have done so by suggesting to some independant
entity that they invest in SCO. I think the secrecy was actually more to
allow SCO to claim that they were judged by an impartial entity to have
value, not to hide Microsoft's interest.

Posted Mar 12, 2004 6:40 UTC (Fri) by MortenSickel (guest, #3238) [Link]

>What could persuade him to do so?

"You did read that EULA, didn't you?"