On December 14, 2007, the California Court of Appeals ruled in favor of two of the defendants. In one appeal, Eagle Broadband was appealing the award of legal fees to one of the defendants as excessive. The defendant had succeeded in his anti-SLAPP attempts and had the claims against him stricken. In that appeal, Eagle lost and has been ordered to pay defendant the amount the trial court had ruled.

With my new job, I'm now faced with a major challenge. They are a Windows shop with a mix of servers running locally and some hosted, including their major ERP package. Although I've only been working there for about a month, it looks like the overwhelming majority of people confine their work to using e-mail(via a web interface), a web browser, and office productivity suites (e.g. MS Word or Excel, some Powerpoint sprinkled in). There are a few people using tools like MS Project and Visio (and they have a license for Project Server, but I can't tell that they are actually using it). I'm guessing the corporate communications employee is using some graphic packages and some desktop publishing, but I'm not sure what yet. And our fraud investigator, who also manages security, has some apps for creating employee id badges and access cards for doors. Beyond those, I'm not sure there is anything else in use (granted, I haven't even attempted a census of applications yet).

The opening of the story is quite telling as it starts with the question, "To Vista or not to Vista". The question was one faced by a school district in Illinois - going forward, would they stick to the Microsoft platform or look at a Linux platform. I raised the same issue with one of my clients a few months - although no action is needed at the present time, eventually they will be forced to upgrade to Vista or try an alternative. Many other people I work with continue to struggle to get PC's with XP loaded instead of Vista - seems you pretty much have to order them on-line as retail stores don't have anything with XP loaded (I'm guessing they are prevented for contractual reasons even if they did want to sell something customers want).

Thanks for reading,
Jeff

Anyway, another company that I have followed due to their legal shenanigans is Eagle Broadband (EAG on the AMEX). I first started following them about 1.5 years ago when I was alerted to the fact that they had filed a lawsuit against message board posters over at Yahoo! alleging the "negative" posting history of some posters was evidence that they were engaged in a "short and distort" scheme to drive the stock price down.

In response to that, the OpenOffice.org project released a PR and an open letter to Michael Dell urging Dell to install OpenOffice.org on PC's sold by Dell. I'm sure you will see this news showing up shortly via some of the major media outlets. In the meantime though, I have gone ahead and reproduced a copy of the open letter here.

-- TWZ

Broiles Correspondence re sanctions award

Jeff

Thanks for reading,
Jeff Causey

Anyway, every time I get suckered into visiting Groklaw (and I admit, I fell for it this time) I am always reminded of just how much Ms. Jones does not seem to walk the talk she is so fond of publishing. This reminded of an old post I made here regarding open source principles. I've been wanting to repost it as an article as I felt it warranted more than a comment. Readers should keep in mind that my approach to open source principles probably differs greatly from someone in the software development community. Much of my background was in the public sector where we focused on trying to keep information open and available for citizens. Likewise, as a manager, I found it to be a constant struggle to try to keep information flowing through an organization despite the efforts of so many to bottle it up in an attempt to amass power. Below I've built upon that earlier comment (and removed most of the references to Groklaw).

From the research I've been doing into the company, it appears to me to be obvious they are losing money because they don't have good products to sell and they have been doing a bad job of executing their business plan. One interesting thing is that the current CEO, David Micek, appears to be making several "right" moves to try to save the company. This lawsuit to some extent seems to be an anamoly. I say that as it appears EAG approached the problem from the point of "if there are people critical of the company, they must be engaged in short-selling" instead of figuring out that short-selling was occuring and the posts were evidence of that. As those familiar with IPW are aware, some of us in this world just like exposing bad business when we find it.