Thursday, December 14, 2006
12/14 SNR
- GL: "SCO Fights for Survival". The latest motion by SCO is a real doozy. Back in July, the magistrate judge said they had no case. So they appealed to the district judge, who recently said they had no case. So now they're appealing to the district judge again, the guy who just slapped them silly. I suspect this is more about public relations, as in investor relations, rather than about any realistic chance in the courtroom.
- Stop the presses: SCO's latest whining is up on PACER now. Details here. Three new items:
- IBM-897, in which SCO presents a laundry list of frivolous complaints, and asks to introduce some new "evidence". The doc ends with the usual obsequious legal boilerplate, which seems oddly appropriate these days:
- IBM-898 is the inevitable memorandum in support of the previous item. In it, SCO argues that tossing out its claims due to lack of factual support would be predjucial. Well, I would certainly hope the courts would work that way, generally speaking.
They go on to argue that things would be going their way if only a.) Wells had considered the wise and sober testimony of Messrs. Marc Rochkind and Evan Ivie (whoever he is); b.) They're given permission to harrass IBM developers about methods and concepts again; and c.) They get another chance to re-argue much of their discarded "evidence" again. - IBM-899, in which they say they're objecting to Wells' ruling on November 30th, claiming they'll be able to say just what it is they're unhappy about in no more than ten additional days. Which given their history means they'll be dumping a fresh glob of idiocy on the court's lap late on Christmas Eve. Wow. Classy!
For the foregoing reasons, SCO prays that this Court will reconsider its Order of November 29, 2006, and grant relief as requested.
Yeah, good luck with that. - IBM-898 is the inevitable memorandum in support of the previous item. In it, SCO argues that tossing out its claims due to lack of factual support would be predjucial. Well, I would certainly hope the courts would work that way, generally speaking.
- BillG has a "candid" chat about Linux IP, etc. Seems he's never heard of Baystar, knows diddly about SCO, etc. Which may be true, really. It's called "plausible deniability". If you need some dirty work done, you don't tell the boss about it. If you're going to trade arms for hostages, Ronnie shouldn't know anything about it. If you're going to trade money for litigation, BillG shouldn't know anything about it.
- Some fresh hand-wringing about the many "risks" of free & open-source software. It's not completely off base, since it spends a lot of time on the confusing proliferation of source licenses. Those of us who write code for a living find it confusing, so I can only imagine how scary it seems to the PHB crowd.
On the other hand, the article mentions SCO as if they still pose any sort of threat at all, which is so 2003. - BS&F pops up in a case over municipal bond naughtiness.
- More criticism of the MS-Novell deal, and Microsoft's recent IP fud.
- Two pieces about Microsoft's alarming new foray into the world of robotics. Eek! The cheap shots are just too easy. The obvious Asimov and TNG references are taken already, but the world of pop culture is full of um, less than perfect robots. Like, say, the Gunslinger from Westworld. Or that creepy freeze-ray robot in Logan's Run. And that guy in Alien who turned out to be an evil white-blooded robot. Yikes. And further back, Ro-Man in the classic film Robot Monster. And Bender, obviously. Oh, and there's Ahhhhnold, of course. Today's the day we learned that our future nemesis is not Skynet, it's Sky.NET.
- Yet another thread about printing problems over on comp.unix.sco.misc. Seems that the poor guy's saddled with an ancient COBOL program on SCO Unix 3.2, and said COBOL program wants to talk to /usr/bin/lpr, except that there isn't one on the box, and he doesn't know what to do. If this was a Linux problem, someone would tell the guy where to grab the current lpr (or more likely CUPS) source, but in the world of SCO it's all about unsatisfying workarounds.
Ironically, the SCO Unix box in question is almost certainly IBM hardware. The guy posted the output of uname -x on the box, and it appears to be an ancient 486 with a MicroChannel bus. Wow. And no, the guy is not posting from a "smithsonian.edu" address.
In case you're wondering, yes, you can run Linux on an old MCA box. Your crufty old COBOL app, though, that may be another matter entirely. - The clowns over at Gartner are predicting that blogging is set to peak next year, and it'll decline after that. Apparently the entire blogoverse will run out of of anything new to say within 12 months, and so we'll fold up our tents and go back to being nice, mute Big Media consumers, grateful for whatever content MSN and AOL deign to offer us. Well, anything's possible, but one could argue fairly that the blogoverse ran out of anything new to say years ago, and that hasn't even slowed it down.
- Ubergeek tool of the day: Plan 9 from User Space, a set of Unix tools ported from Bell Labs' fabled (and uncommmon) Plan 9 OS. I'm not yet sold on acme as a replacement for Emacs, but it's rather fascinating stuff. If nothing else, it may be the only OS I know of with an actively maintained quote db for fortune(1). Which is something, certainly.
- A piece about why free software isn't on the activist agenda. Possibly that would be because there are much bigger issues out there than mere software. I'd just like to remind people about that, because we tend to forget. And even if all the world's life-and-death issues were resolved, I'm not sure there's a single coherent & unifying ideology behind F/OSS. I'm just not seeing it.
- Today's MS cheap shot revolves around Mr. Allchin's recent comment that if he didn't work for MS, he would have bought a Mac instead. In reality I think he was just trying to motivate the drones with a little tough love, but comments like that play differently outside of Redmond. So "Ha, ha!".
- The binary module brouhaha continues on LKML. Linus is Not Enthusiastic about the new proposal.
By brx0 @ 5:02 PM 
