First, a little history; back in 2003, a failed Linux distributor, Caldera, started making noises about suing Fortune 1000 companies, and even private users, of the Linux operating system, for violating their "intellectual property rights" - they were of the opinion that software code from the Unix operating system, had been purloined illegally, and placed in Linux, and they felt they had the right to charge users for that code. Unfortunately for Caldera (now known, in an attempt to confuse people, as The SCO Group), the various court cases that have been allowed to progress as far as they have, have shown that the code in question was either a) already in the public domain, b) freely distributed in academia, and not protected any longer, c) "owned" by Novell, and not Caldera, d) industry standard coding, and thus, also not protectable (POSIX), or e) released under the GPL (GNU Public License) by Caldera itself, during their brief Linux distributor stint.
Little did the braintrust at Caldera know, that the Linux user base, many of whom had contributed hundreds of thousands of lines of code for Linux over the years, knew that these claims were a load of dingoes' kidneys, as Douglas Adams would have put it, and they set out to debunk each and every one of the bogus claims put forth by the upper management at Caldera/The SCO Group. There were many places where this debunking took place; one was groklaw.net, where the cases are still being followed closely. Another one was the SCOX boards at Yahoo Finance, and at InvestorVillage.com. Over the years, many people directly involved at SCOX were caught posting at the Yahoo SCOX message board - mostly in an attempt to pump up the stock price, but on several occasions, they posted taunts, and in a couple of posts, thinly veiled threats, to the regular posters of the board, in a failed attempt to silence their most vociferous critics.
Fast forward to mid/late 2006... a poster from the NOVL board decides to stop by, create dozens and dozens of bogus Yahoo accounts, and then posts literally thousands of off-topic messages, mostly filled with profane language, and racist/homophobic epithets. We dutifully reorted them as best as we could, and, little by little, the garbage was ultimately deleted. Some time shortly after that, however, we noticed that several of our *legitimate*, 100% on-topic, and non-TOS violating posts, were also being deleted. Some of our longest-standing board members had their entire Yahoo *profile* automatically deleted, which was totally arbitrary, and not at all acceptable. It has been surmised that the person(s) responsible for the initial board destruction might also be behind this action; I really can't say, because every attempt to alert Yahoo of this blatant abuse of their automated system has been totally ignored. I've even tried enlisting the help of Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), but even they have gotten no worthwhile response to my queries. So, that leaves me one option - post it here, and tell the world exactly how badly broken the Yahoo Finance message boards really are.
