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To: Bush2000
when are you going to provide me with proof that nobody from Santa Cruz Operation joined SCO after the purchase?

That's your formulation, not mine. I never said "no one" was transferred. The context was your claim that there was some significant quantity of ill will towards IBM over the fate of Project Monterey, and that this ill will entered Caldera in the form of institutional memory among the transferred employees. If you are now going to claim that it only took one employee of unspecified position to cause this effect, I think I'll ignore you.

Have you bothered to think through the implications of Doug Michels entering into talks with Caldera to sell them the crown jewels that he had been bragging about for years, just on the eve of the cancellation? Although the deal did not close for a year, SCO and Caldera publicly announced their intention to do this deal on August 2, 2000. The public announcement of the cancellation of Project Monterey was then three weeks away, although there were already rumors circulating for weeks before that.

Smarter people would have said, "Forget it, Doug. You tried to snooker us. You tried to sell us a 30-year-old bag of crap right before everyone found out the bad news."

Did Caldera do that? Nooooooo. They spent the next nine months futzing with lawyers and regulatory agencies to make the deal go through. I'm sure when they had the signing ceremony, the Caldera boys grabbed the champagne and jumped up and down, shouting "We bought it! We bought it!" And Doug Michels said, "Thank you P.T. Barnum! There really is one born every minute."

The year 2000 sucked for SCO. They were "restructuring" and laying people off months before any of this happened. IBM had nothing to do with that; Monterey wasn't even shipping. SCO's bread-and-butter business was tanking. In fact it's obvious now (because of the way Michels restructured SCO to position the "server software business" as a separate entity, all packaged up with a bow around it) that he decided to jettison the thing some time in the first quarter of 2000. So he can't be bitter; he was getting hammered on that side of the house, Monterey or no Monterey. He decided to bail before IBM did.

People aren't stupid. Whatever SCO employees might have been left after the various rounds of layoffs would see immediately, when the Caldera deal was announced, that they had been positioned for exit months before, when they were made a separate division. IBM didn't do that to them. Doug Michels did it. Had he not sold the division to somebody, he would have laid them all off. As a division they were losing money. A lot of money. They were lucky that anybody even wanted it.

136 posted on 02/11/2004 10:50:36 PM PST by Nick Danger (Give me immortality, or give me death)
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To: Nick Danger
That's your formulation, not mine. I never said "no one" was transferred. The context was your claim that there was some significant quantity of ill will towards IBM over the fate of Project Monterey, and that this ill will entered Caldera in the form of institutional memory among the transferred employees. If you are now going to claim that it only took one employee of unspecified position to cause this effect, I think I'll ignore you.

You haven't debunked the assertion (mine and Torvalds, ironically) at all. You've argued that (a) SCO knew what it was getting into and (b) that anybody who cared stayed with the Santa Cruz Operation.

To which I now reply that (a) SCO/Caldera most certainly does bear some bad feelings toward IBM over Monterey (regardless of your assertions to the contrary), and (b) there's no evidence that everyone from Santa Cruz Operation bailed after the Caldera purchase. It's interesting to probe why you're so upset about this. It's like sticking electrodes in a rat's brain. You're not telling us the whole story about your relationship with IBM, Nick. Your unrelenting defense of Big Blue leads me to believe that you are (or were) some kind of marketing droid for those cretins.
137 posted on 02/11/2004 11:07:01 PM PST by Bush2000
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