Thursday, October 12, 2006
10/12 SNR
- Buried among the avalanche of docs filed during the PSJcalypse is a certain declaration of Robert Marsh, the honcho at EV1 Servers. In it, we learn how SCO bullied EV1 into signing up for a SCOSource license, and immediately turned around and misrepresented the deal to the media, in violation of the license deal's confidentiality agreement. Exhibit 5 to the declaration is a full copy of the SCOSource license. SCO tried to keep the terms of this thing top secret, and it's not hard to see why. The terms are fantastic, so long as you're SCO, otherwise they're just godawful. It reads like something from back in the mid-80's heyday of copy-protected floppies. Which was SCO's heyday too, come to think of it.
- Daniel Lyons dives in to the Goldfarb fracas, noting many areas where Goldfarb's declaration differs from what Goldfarb told Lyons a couple of years back. It appears Lyons is suggesting Goldfarb lied under oath, because (apparently) that's much more likely than lying to some no-name hack journalist at Forbes. Well, it's a free country, and Lyons is certainly free to believe that if it suits him. Me, I'm not so sure. Call me crazy, if you like.
- Lyons also has what appears to be a gloatfest about the current GPLv3 ugliness. I haven't read it since you have to register with Forbes to do that, but it's titled "Toppling Linux" and he leads in by mentioning "software radical Richard Stallman". Which is about all you really need to know. I expect the rest is his usual steaming pile of deliberate misquotes, sleazy cheapshots and crude red-baiting, the usual Lyons stock-in-trade. Yawn.
- The very latest on the awful Hans Reiser situation. Freakin' evil murdering scumbag. Yes, yes, ReiserFS development will continue, perhaps under a different name. But really, should that be the primary concern in people's minds? Those twerps on Slashdot need a little perspective here. Sheesh. (I could go on a long rant here about why it's always, always wrong to name anything after living people, but that would be digressing.)
- We haven't heard from Kevin McBride, Darl's bro, in a long, long, time, but it turns out he resurfaced back in July, joining with fellow SCO veteran Morgan Keegan to lend a hand to "Affinity Technology Group", a patent troll outfit out of Columbia SC that focuses on parasitizing the online banking sector. This is kind of weird, considering Morgan Keegan itself is part of a bank, RegionsBank if I remember right.
- More remembrances of Ray Noorda: Obits at The Washington Post, NetworkWorld, The Inquirer and IT Jungle, a longer Computerworld article, and a memorial podcast. The last two both quote Darl, for some reason. At one point, Darl says:
"He was always forcing competition," says SCO Group's McBride. "When people think about the saying, 'Lead, follow or get out of the way,' there was no question which camp he was in. He was always leading."
Yes, ok, that's nice, Darl, but which camp are you in? - CNet presents a slice of the blogospace concerning Noorda.
- Remember Transmeta? They're suing Intel now. I guess they heard somewhere that the courtroom is a great place to salvage business models that don't succeed in the marketplace. Anyway, Enderle gets in a few words, remarking that Transmeta was overhyped. Stunning insights like this are why he makes the big bucks, I guess.
- Another Intel piece with an Enderle quote, this time an article about how Intel's now better chums with Apple than it is with MS.
- A piece from BYU mentioning some local charitable work by someone named "Ralph Yarro". It's not clear if it's the Ralph Yarro or not. Either it's a different guy, or he's trying to atone for something, or there's a nasty hidden gotcha to what he's doing that the article fails to mention. I mean, the guy's only genuine interest in kids involves swiping his victims' firstborn.
- Another random industry analyst says mean stuff about Linux. Yawn. Seems that now the big Windows vs. Linux battlefield is in server virtualization & hypervisors. So it's not TCO anymore, or indemnification, or whatever, but it's always something.
- A piece on the recent "decapitation" at McAfee. I haven't seen anyone remark yet that this is their second consecutive CEO to depart under a financial/regulatory cloud, although the last one (Bill Larson) was a few years back, when they were still known as NAI. I mention this because (IIRC) our old friend Gregory Blepp ran NAI's German operations under the Larson regime, until that pesky palace coup came along. You remember the Bleppster, right? He was the guy with the amazing n-dimensional suitcase packed with gazillions of lines of SCO's evidence. I sure do wonder what ever happened to that suitcase...
- A misanthropic list of 5 things that are going to hell. I'm not so sure about the other 4 things, but I quite like that Darl merited one of the 5 slots all by his lonesome.
By brx0 @ 12:33 PM 
