Wednesday, November 01, 2006
11/2 SNR
I've been pretty busy the last few days, but here are some things I ran across, plus some things various astute readers alerted me to.
- On GL, yet another doc from the PSJ avalanche, the Declaration of Michael DeFazio, which basically lets us know that AT&T's SVRx license agreement doesn't say what SCO says it says. We all knew or at least assumed that already, of course, but this latest doc lays it all out in rather excruciating detail. You know you're a complete geek about the SCO case if you read the whole thing. Double points if you understand it. Triple points if you enjoy it.
- A bit about the rumored Novell-MS tie-up. The piece insists MS would offer support for SuSE, which doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I'm immediately reminded of the deal where MS bailed out Corel in return for Corel dropping their (rather sucky) Linux distro.
These days Xandros is saddled with the ex-Corel distro, and they're having trouble making a go of it as well. - The notorious Brothers Yarro have added a whole "portfolio" of "companies" (or at least names of companies) to their metastatizing ThinkAtomic empire: Nanotop, Surf Recon, Jump Seed, That's Atomic, Nanobionica, Exo Applied Science, CP80, Hydruga, Facera.
A highly astute SNR reader has looked into these entities:
Facera has a LLC registration in Utah from 4/18/05. CP80 is known. The Nanotop and Jumpseed trademarks have a legal trail, but no business registration. Web domains are owned, but parked with "free hosting" pages.
Hydruga is most interesting. This is the genus name of the Antarctic Leopard Seals-- best known for their voracious predation of Adelie penguins. Yarro uses a leopard seal head as the logotype, just to make sure the point is not missed. Yarro hasn't registered hydruga as a domain yet.
Hydruga, the latin name of a seal that eats penguins. This is the sort of hilarity that ensues when suits and marketing types try to swagger and play tough guy. In related news, I used to know some people who named their dachshund "Fenris", but despite giving it a tough, scary name it stubbornly refused to morph into a huge hungry wolf. In fact, mostly it just sat around and slept and begged for table scraps and widdled on the rug. Given Ralphie's track record, I expect similar results for "Hydruga". - Remember that embarrassing metadata whoopsie back in SCO's DaimlerChrysler suit, where it turned out they were originally going to sue BofA instead? Here's yet another article using that incident as a classic cautionary tale of what not to do.
- A podcast that mentions SCO. I haven't listened to it yet.
- In those rare spare moments when they aren't going to the mat for Darl & Co., BS&F & the feds just settled the Medco case for $155M. Medco is a big player in the prescription drug sector, and they ran afoul of something called the "False Claims Act". BS&F's press release about it is here. This may help explain why I've been getting so many visitors from BS&F lately.
I haven't seen them put out any press releases about the SCO case in a long, long time. Actually I didn't realize it was typical for lawyers to put out press releases at all, but I could be wrong about that. Not a lot of media coverage about this, and what there is doesn't mention BS&F's role. The NYT has a short blurb about the case.
For another take on the story, here's another press release about the settlement, this time from the National Community Pharmacists Association. - In other Boies news, DB and his wife are donating $5M to a local hospital in the New York 'burbs. The same hospital also scored a cool $1M recently after treating Martha Stewart after a turkey-carving incident. Who says the health care system is broken in this country?
Call me crazy, but I'd be much more impressed if they donated the money to, say, a cash-strapped hospital in the inner city, something New York has an abundance of. - Another of those rare birds, a product announcement that briefly mentions SCO. The company makes x86 boxes, and wants you to know that all sorts of OSes run on it, which shouldn't come as a huge surprise. Yes, even UnixWare 7.x runs on it. Which probably means OpenServer 6 will work too, since it's basically just a rebadged UnixWare.
- One of those less-rare birds, a new-hire announcement mentioning that so-and-so used to work for SCO back in the day. The guy's name doesn't ring a bell to me, but I thought I'd pass it along anyway.
- Dana Blankenhorn has a piece about Oracle Linux
- Ubuntu: Doing OK.
- A post about the early years of the relationship between MS and Ed Iacobucci's Citrix. Recall that Iacobucci is a SCO BOD member.
- A recent blog post by Harald, wringing his hands over whether GPL enforcement is doing any good.
- A new commercial office suite for Linux (and FreeBSD)
By brx0 @ 12:30 PM 
