Free Republic

Jurors Debate Whether IBM Lied About Cancer-Causing Chemicals By Rachel Konrad Feb.24, 2004 The Associated Press SANTA CLARA, Calif. (AP) - In a trial that could have sweeping consequences for the semiconductor industry, lawyers have portrayed IBM Corp. as a deceitful exploiter of workers who now suffer the ravages of cancer-causing chemicals used in disk-drive factories. But in closing arguments Tuesday, the Armonk, N.Y.-based computer giant reminded a state jury that it was a pioneer in employee health - and repeated its contention that there is no conclusive proof that work conditions were responsible for the plaintiffs' illness. A verdict...

NEW YORK · IBM Corp. owes back payments -- possibly worth billions of dollars -- to 140,000 older employees who were harmed when the technology giant converted to a new kind of pension plan in the 1990s, a federal judge has ruled.

IBM Perfects New Method for Making Low Power, High Performance Processors Friday February 13, 12:08 pm ET Award-winning 64-bit PowerPC 970FX Also Includes New 'Power Tuning' Technique EAST FISHKILL, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 13, 2004--IBM today announced it has developed a new method of manufacturing low power, high performance microprocessors using an industry-first combination of silicon-on-insulator (SOI), strained silicon and copper wiring technologies. IBM is putting the technique immediately to work in volume 90 nanometer production at its 300mm manufacturing facility. The company's award-winning 64-bit PowerPC 970FX microprocessor will be the first chip built using this trio of IBM technology breakthroughs. Early...

Novell says waiver cancels SCO's claims on Linux By Bob Mims The Salt Lake Tribune     Novell Inc., claiming it sold only limited rights to the Unix operating system in 1995, has issued a waiver it says negates the SCO Group's claims on the offshoot, freely distributed Linux operating system.     Claiming the purchase excluded control of "derivative works," or improvements to the program's code by independent developers, Novell had given SCO until noon Wednesday to retract its claim that Unix code was illegally imported into Linux.     That allegation is at the heart of SCO's federal lawsuit against...

News.com is reporting that Novell has filed a motion to dismiss, on the grounds that SCO hasn't proven that Novell doesn't own the copyrights and thus SCO can't establish that it owns Unix and UnixWare copyrights. The motion also seeks dismissal on the grounds that the allegations don't establish specific grounds for damages. "They are precisely the type of general allegations of some speculative injury that the special damages pleading requirements for a slander of title action are meant to avoid." SCO released a statement from whatever cave they have been hiding in all week. Here is a snip from...

Now They Own It, Now They Don’t: SCO Sues Novell to Stay Afloat ~ Eben Moglen February 5, 2004 The SCO licensing campaign—which has been all bark and no bite since its introduction by way of threatening letters to the Fortune 1500 last summer—lost a wheel last month, and is now headed for the wall. From the beginning of this irresponsible attack on the freedom of free software, SCO has promulgated public positions about the nature of its supposed rights that conflicted with facts known to the free software community, and relied upon legal positions that were untenable given the...

Now They Own It, Now They Don’t: SCO Sues Novell to Stay Afloat Eben Moglen February 5, 2004 The SCO licensing campaign—which has been all bark and no bite since its introduction by way of threatening letters to the Fortune 1500 last summer—lost a wheel last month, and is now headed for the wall. From the beginning of this irresponsible attack on the freedom of free software, SCO has promulgated public positions about the nature of its supposed rights that conflicted with facts known to the free software community, and relied upon legal positions that were untenable given the real...

SCO's suit not all that simple By Bob Mims The Salt Lake Tribune     U.S. Magistrate Brooke Wells met for nearly 30 minutes in chambers Friday with attorneys for Utah's SCO Group and IBM, hoping to keep their open-court debate simple and to the point.     But when arguments ended shortly before noon, nearly 90 minutes later, Wells acknowledged she would need time to unravel competing motions related to SCO's claims that its proprietary Unix operating system was illegally incorporated into the Linux OS.     Noting the "complicated" nature of the issues, Wells told her tiny, standing-room-only courtroom that...

SCO abandons trade secret attack on IBM By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco Posted: 07/02/2004 at 03:14 GMT The SCO Group abandoned a major rationale of its case against IBM by dropping its trade secret claims. These were the basis, last June, for SCO revoking IBM's UNIX license. IBM didn't blink, and has simply carried on selling its AIX Unix without blinking. But today SCO dropped the trade secrets and claimed breach of copyright instead. But such claims need proof, and it proved to be another hearing in which the SCO Group vs. IBM without the Utah company showing any...

...... "SCO Files Motion to Amend Complaint And Add Affirmative Defenses Authored by: RDH on Thursday, February 05 2004 @ 07:43 PM EST Yeah, I probably shouldn't post this stuff, but it's the only way I can make sense out of what is possibly going on in the minds of SCO. This is satire. If the concept is foreign to you, or if you are completely devoid of a sense of humor, please do not read any further. Satire is intended to poke fun at an issue or otherwise make a person think about the issue in a different light....

IBM released on Tuesday two new higher-end versions of its z990 mainframe, along with a promotion to coax customers to try blade servers and other Big Blue products. When IBM began selling in May the first z990, code-named T-Rex, there were two configurations: Model A with eight processors and Model B with 16. Now the company will sell Model C with 24 processors and Model D with 32, IBM said. IBM is trying to make the new systems more appealing in other ways as well. For one thing, customers that buy the z990 will get a discount of as much...

Culturecom Takes on Wintel with V-Dragon By Doug Young HONG KONG (Reuters) - Watch out, Wintel -- a new "Draglin" is coming to China. Hong Kong's Culturecom Holdings Ltd. has combined its Chinese-friendly V-Dragon central processing unit (CPU) with the open-source Linux operating system. The plan is to take on the dominant "Wintel" combination of PCs that run on Microsoft Corp's Windows software using Intel Corp CPUs. In its drive to take on Wintel, Culturecom has found powerful allies in IBM Corp, which is making and supporting the new chips, and the Chinese government, which is promoting Linux...

<p>Why is the Free Software Foundation given a pass on the issue of contract enforcement under state law on binding legal agreements like the GPL? The consequences are dramatic indeed for the commercial enterprise environment.</p> <p>When the Free Software Foundation speaks of unilateral permissions or bare license law enforcing the GPL, they are referring to a long line of case law concerning patents that was summarized by the Supreme Court in General Talking Pictures Corp v Western Electric Co, Inc., 305 US 124,125.</p>

This is an article at Groklaw on the financial outlook for SCO done by Decatur Jones' Dion Cornette. The article at Groklaw has links to the PDF, and I have taken the text from Groklaw along with Pamela Jones introductory commentary. ++++++++++++++ Decatur Jones' Dion Cornett on SCO Friday, January 30 2004 @ 07:34 AM EST Here is the PDF of Dion Cornett's January 13 report on SCO. As you will see, the OSDL legal defense fund, the Novell indemnification, and the Open Source Risk Management vendor-neutral indemnification program seem to him meaningful events, which he believes make it unlikely...

Inventor of Ctrl-Alt-Delete Combo Is Retiring From IBM The Associated Press RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. (AP) - The man who spent five minutes writing the computer code that would bail out the world's PC users for decades is retiring Friday. David Bradley programmed one of the most well-known key combinations around: Ctrl-Alt-Delete. It forces obstinate computers to restart when they no longer follow other commands. Bradley, 55, is leaving IBM Corp. after 28 1/2 years. By 1980, Bradley was one of 12 people working to create the IBM PC. The engineers knew they had to design a simple way to...

SCO Files Slander of Title Lawsuit Against Novell Tuesday January 20, 3:25 pm ET Complaint Requests Injunctive Relief and Damages Against Novell for Copyright Misrepresentations and Alleges Bad Faith Effort by Novell to Interfere With SCO's Intellectual Property Rights to UNIX and UnixWare LINDON, Utah, Jan. 20 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- The SCO Group, Inc. (Nasdaq: SCOX -News), the owner of the UNIX® operating system and a leading provider of UNIX-based solutions, today filed suit against Novell (Nasdaq: NOVL - News) for its alleged bad faith effort to interfere with SCO's rights with respect to UNIX and UnixWare®. Among the allegations in...

In a rare look at the numbers and verbal nuances a big U.S. company chews over when moving jobs abroad, internal documents from International Business Machines Corp. (IBM, news) show that it expects to save $168 million annually starting in 2006 by shifting several thousand high-paying programming jobs overseas, Monday's Wall Street Journal reported. Among other things, the documents indicate that for internal IBM accounting purposes, a programmer in China with three to five years experience would cost about $12.50 an hour, including salary and benefits. A person familiar with IBM's internal billing rates says that's less than one-fourth of...

NEW YORK - IBM will hire 15,000 new employees — 50 percent more than originally planned — in areas like software and services because of a rebound in the economy, a top executive said Saturday. Armonk, New York-based International Business Machines Corp., which has faced criticism for its plans to shift some U.S. workers to cheaper locations such as India and China, will add about 4,500 net jobs in the United States this year, according to Randy MacDonald, IBM’s senior vice president for human resources. “We are going to hire more in the U.S. than we shift” overseas, MacDonald said...

IBM to add 15,000 new jobs Last modified: January 18, 2004, 9:40 AM PST By Reuters IBM will hire 15,000 new employees--50 percent more than originally planned--in areas such as software and services because of a rebound in the economy, a top executive said Saturday. Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM, which has faced criticism for its plans to shift some U.S. jobs to cheaper locations such as India and China, will add about 4,500 net jobs in the United States this year, said Randy MacDonald, IBM's senior vice president for human resources. "We are going to hire more in the U.S. than...

ARMONK, N.Y. (AP) -- On the heels of strong earnings reports, IBM Corp. announced Saturday that it will add 15,000 jobs worldwide. About 4,500 new hires will be made in the United States, primarily tied to high-growth areas such as software and services, company officials said. The remainder of the jobs will be in emerging markets such as China and India and in Europe. The job additions were 50 percent over company projections and will increase Big Blue's work force to nearly 330,000, officials said. More than half of the company's employees are outside the United States. Garrett Walker, director...