true believers
Message ID: 158547
Posted By: deepdistrust
Subject: true believers
Most of the posters on this board ridicule who they call 'SCO true believers' - those that bought SCO stock in the hope that SCO will win its case against IBM. It turns out most posters here are themselves true believers. They have a number of favorite beliefs for which they don't demand evidence from themselves. Here are some of those beliefs.
1. Groklaw's debunking of SCO claims led to SCO's downfall.
What exactly did groklaw debunk? SCO court filings were analyzed and some claims were shown to be false. Was this reported widely by the press? Journalists don't bother themselves with reading case filings for the most part, much less analysis of court filings. In fact, the most "public" debunking came from other sources - a couple of guys at lwn traced malloc's origin & Bruce Perens shared the findings with a few publications, red hat sued SCO challenging its claims of code theft, novell raised doubts about SCO's ownership of copyrights, novell revealed AT & T's clarifications of derivative code ownership. Unlike groklaw's contents (which may be too detailed for an executive), Novell's and Redhat's press releases are likely to be read by more CIO's. This public debunking may have hampered SCO's licensing schemes down the road.
2. This message board and groklaw have caused SCO's stock price to fall.
While SCO's claims were being fiercely contested and debunked, the stock price stayed disproportionately high for a very long time. SCO's poor court performance and poor financial performance are the more straight forward explanations for the recent decline in stock price.
3. Groklaw is monitored by IBM and other companies regularly.
The only sure way to know is to look at web server logs. What effect did groklaw have on IBM's processing of the case, if any? One IBM filing referred to groklaw in a footnote. Would IBM have done things differently if groklaw didn't exist? Not essentially. Would IBM not have done discovery? Of course it would have. Would IBM not have filed the PSJ? Was the idea of PSJ first brought up on groklaw? No! Considering that discovery & PSJ are the main elements of the case so far, the case would have progressed more or less the same way up to this point, even if groklaw didn't exist.
Red Hat referred almost derogatorily to groklaw as having made a cottage industry out of keeping track of SCO. There is no evidence that Red Hat used groklaw in its case either.
SCO pissed off a lot of people with its unfounded allegations against Linux and these people want to help defeat SCO. Unfortunately, they are not real participants in the battles going on currently - the courtime battle or the public perception battle. All they can do is post on message boards. If they are to spend several hours each day posting on message boards, they have to feel that they are making a difference. They have to "have faith." They have to hold on to certain beliefs without questioning them too much. They also have to fiercely attack anyone who questions their belifs. They label the questioner an 'enemy agent' or something else, so they can avoid facing the questions. They talk about "trolls", "keeping the board clean", "keeping the board focussed" and "divide and conquer" and pretend to each other that they are serving an important function against heavy opposition. They develop close ties to each other as they share their fantasies and attack the questioner together. The questioner has to serve as the "enemy" for now because the real "enemy" is not available for fighting.
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