354-1 - Filed: 12/13/04; Entered: 12/13/04
Docket Text: Certificate of service re: subpoena duces tecum upon PointServe by Intl Bus Mach Inc

You remember PointServe. Darl McBride was CEO at PointServe prior to joining FranklinCovey in 2000. And guess who is on the board at PointServe? McBride's old friend, Mike Anderer, the old pal who helped McBride come up with SCO's IP litigation strategy and approached Microsoft on SCO's behalf, according to Newsweek's Brad Stone, which led to the Baystar hookup.

Frank Sorenson noticed something else that is positively riveting. Check out PointServe's management page:

G. Edward Powell, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer - ... For eight years prior to founding PointServe, Dr. Powell was a Member of the Technical Staff at the MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory

Mark T. Lane, Chief Scientist - ... Dr. Lane spent 10 years as a member of the Technical Staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory

So, what do you think? Has IBM found the "MIT rocket scientists" Darl bragged about and then backed away from and that we imagined had somehow disappeared into the mist or into the Bermuda Triangle, thus becoming, alas, unavailable to testify for SCO as experts at trial about their purported comparisons of UNIX/Linux code?

When Anderer asked for his cut, the revealing memo got leaked to Eric Raymond. I've always wondered if that was a deliberate leak, just Microsoft testing the waters to see if there would be outrage sufficient to block them from taking the next step or whether there would be a green light to continue. Who can forget Anderer's spilling the beans on what he thought was the longterm Microsoft strategy, namely to sue and sue and sue over patents until Red Hat and any other competitive GNU/Linux companies run out of money? Funny how Sun has begun attacking Red Hat in the media. Well, what do you know? Both Microsoft and Sun are PointServe partners. It's a small world, of course, with weird coincidences happening every day.

Morgan Keegan raised money for PointServe, before becoming SCO's investment banker and an early recipient of a warrant for 200,000 shares of SCO stock. If I recall correctly, I believe Morgan Keegan was paid $2M for the Baystar deal. And you'll recall it was a Patrick Scholes of Morgan Keegan who was reported as hinting to the head of Sony a year ago that "Hollywood companies use a lot of Linux," taken at the time as a starting "assault on Hollywood," an assault that went nowhere, as it turned out.

Here's the MIT Lincoln Laboratory home page and a little bit about what they do and yes, according to this page, they are directly linked to MIT:

"MIT Lincoln Laboratory has pioneered in advanced electronics since its origin in 1951 as a Federally Funded Research and Development Center of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology."

There is a little more on Mr. Powell of PointServe in this article. Look under the heading "Rocket Science".

A subpoena duces tecum is a demand for a witness to produce documents, or to bring them with him or her to a deposition, for example, so whatever it is IBM is looking for, they believe there is documentary evidence that PointServe has that IBM would like to see.