SCO Site Will Aim to Offset Groklaw Coverage

Tired of being lambasted on news and opinion site Groklaw.net and elsewhere, SCO says it will provide its own side of the litigation story on an upcoming company Web site.

SCO is sick and tired of being "dissed" by online bloggers and journalists, and its not going to take it anymore. So, its launching its own Web site to tell its side of the story concerning its many legal disputes.

The SCO Group Inc. is launching the site, Prosco.net, on Nov. 1 to give its side of its Unix and Linux IP (intellectual property) litigation war stories. This is the next step from SCOs existing "Corrections in the News" section of its main Web site.

SCO has been locked in battle first with IBM, but also with other companies such as Novell Inc. and Red Hat Inc., over issues concerning whether SCOs Unix IP property had been stolen and placed in Linux. Because of its aggressive posturing toward Linux, SCO has become widely hated in Linux and open-source circles.

Darl McBride, SCOs CEO, announced the sites impending launch while speaking at the ETRE (European Technology Roundtable Exhibition) conference Tuesday in Cannes, France.

"Weve taken the step of creating a site where people can come and gain information about the companys litigation," said Blake Stowell, director of communications at SCO. "We had a lot of requests from people who wanted to hear our side of the story, but couldnt seem to get it from other sites or news outlets."

Specifically, according to Stowell, the new site is a reaction to Pamela Jones Groklaw.net news and opinion site. Groklaw is a popular site devoted to reporting on SCO and on legal issues of concern to the open-source community.

In addition to providing reporting and opinion, Groklaw has long provided copies of all available public filings and related documents in SCOs multiple lawsuits.

Because of its comprehensive resources on SCO, Groklaw has become the site of choice for journalists, businesspeople and lawyers who follow SCOs case closely.

IBM is pushing for an end to SCOs case against it. Click here to read more. According to Stowell, SCO plans to answer the requests it has received by not only presenting its side of its cases but also by "providing them with copies of the filings, dates of upcoming hearings and filings, links to news articles, etc."

But SCOs site—unlike Groklaw, which has lively discussion boards that are venomously negative to SCO—will not offer message boards.

"If we opened it up to that, it would just become another site that our detractors would use to try to overwhelm us," Stowell said.

Check out eWEEK.coms Linux & Open Source Center at http://linux.eweek.com for the latest open-source news, reviews and analysis.

Be sure to add our eWEEK.com Linux news feed to your RSS newsreader or My Yahoo page