Tuesday, October 03, 2006
SNR for 10/2/06
- On Friday, yet another shoe dropped in SCO v. Novell. Novell filed for a PSJ, or at least a preliminary injunction, against SCO on the Microsoft+Sun SCOSource issue. I can't sum that up in 25 words or less, but there's coverage at Slashdot and Groklaw. The rest of the media hasn't really picked up on the story so far. Like the recent PSJ storm in the IBM case, right now we're just seeing court filings flying back and forth, and nothing's actually been decided yet. But if Novell wins this and gets a constructive trust on all that SCOSource revenue, it's probably curtains for Darl & Co.
- The stock market hasn't really noticed yet either. That, or the stock manipulators are back in business. Either way, SCO closed up a few cents today. I suspect that for most normal companies, a court filing that would immediately put you out of business if granted would have precisely the opposite effect.
- Remember Opinder Bawa, who used to be SCO's CIO around the time the anti-Linux jihad kicked off? Seems he's changed careers a bit, and now works in the healthcare industry. The article suggests his handicap when changing careers was his lack of healthcare experience. Maybe that's true, and maybe it isn't, but the article ought to have mentioned that the name "SCO Group" is a scarlet letter in the tech industry. Nobody will hire you. You may even need to change careers.
- The GIF format is finally patent-free. This article mentions the foray by Unisys into patent trolldom, and says all that business happened in the "pre-SCO era". Perhaps that'll be how SCO's finally remembered: Merely as a geological marker, sort of like the tech industry's K-T Boundary. Future generations of geeks will wonder how all that iridium got there, and old-timers like me will spin F/OSS litigation yarns to make their little heads spin. As for Darl and minions, well, the dinosaurs had a front row seat 65 million years ago, but I doubt they had anything insightful to say about what was happening.
- From comp.unix.sco.misc, a way to get an OpenServer 6 kernel panic before you're even done installing the OS. Niiiiiice.
- Also from c.u.s.m, a glorious bit of retrocomputing: A termcap configuration question from someone who has a customer upgrading from XENIX. That's SCO for you: Always pioneering the far reaches of technology's trailing edge.
- In the same vein, someone else asks about disk trouble with UnixWare 2.1.3. The answer? Knoppix, of course. Well, duh.
- A rare in-passing mention of SCO, from someone who installed SCO Unix-based systems for the Indonesian Tax Office. No date is given, but it sounds like this happened some years ago, so this probably happened back when Indonesia (including the tax office) was still a corrupt dictatorship.
By brx0 @ 12:44 AM 
