Wednesday, December 27, 2006
12/30 SNR
The holiday lull continues, with very little to report. Friday the 29th came and went with nary a word about a conference call. This is apparently the first time SCO/Caldera has ever gone without a Q4 call in December, so you have to wonder what's going on, just a little. Not a peep out of SCO, and no new juicy rumors to report either. As I've said before, I'm usually not interested in rumors, but that's about all we've got right now.
Before we get to the news, you might've noticed the new color scheme here at SNR. I decided I was sick of all those ugly orange and brown tones, and it was time for something a little more soothing. I'm trying for a simple, straightforward, and non-annoying design here. Feedback is always welcome, of course.
There is one juicy bit to report. Last week SCO filed a couple of redacted documents that weren't really redacted. Instead of removing the sensitive passages, they left the text in and made it invisible, so that it was child's play to highlight the super-secret stuff and copy and paste it into, say, an emacs window for example and see the illicit info. Given SCO's history of trying to leak sealed information by, for instance, reading it aloud in open court, my working assumption is that this was a deliberate move. The pseudo-redacted text does mention a few internal IBM and Novell emails in passing, so perhaps SCO thought they could get a leg up by getting this info out there. The emails would've been mildly embarrassing if SCO had leaked them a couple of years ago, but at this point they just seem irrelevant. Everything else seems either innocuous, or actually damaging to SCO, so if this was a deliberate move, it was a stupid deliberate move. If you want to take a look for yourself, GL's taken the dodgy PDFs down, but this IV post shows where you can find the two PDFs in question, IBM-907 and IBM-908.
Meanwhile, SCO's stock rose a bit toward the end of last week, for no obvious reason. Call me cynical, but I wonder whether the markets are rewarding the company for the long-term decline in its stock price, since that makes it less likely SCO will see an Apple-style backdated options scandal. That's probably not the real reason, but I just thought I'd toss that thought out there to the peanut gallery, FWIW.
Only a handful of other news items to relate right now:
Before we get to the news, you might've noticed the new color scheme here at SNR. I decided I was sick of all those ugly orange and brown tones, and it was time for something a little more soothing. I'm trying for a simple, straightforward, and non-annoying design here. Feedback is always welcome, of course.
There is one juicy bit to report. Last week SCO filed a couple of redacted documents that weren't really redacted. Instead of removing the sensitive passages, they left the text in and made it invisible, so that it was child's play to highlight the super-secret stuff and copy and paste it into, say, an emacs window for example and see the illicit info. Given SCO's history of trying to leak sealed information by, for instance, reading it aloud in open court, my working assumption is that this was a deliberate move. The pseudo-redacted text does mention a few internal IBM and Novell emails in passing, so perhaps SCO thought they could get a leg up by getting this info out there. The emails would've been mildly embarrassing if SCO had leaked them a couple of years ago, but at this point they just seem irrelevant. Everything else seems either innocuous, or actually damaging to SCO, so if this was a deliberate move, it was a stupid deliberate move. If you want to take a look for yourself, GL's taken the dodgy PDFs down, but this IV post shows where you can find the two PDFs in question, IBM-907 and IBM-908.
Meanwhile, SCO's stock rose a bit toward the end of last week, for no obvious reason. Call me cynical, but I wonder whether the markets are rewarding the company for the long-term decline in its stock price, since that makes it less likely SCO will see an Apple-style backdated options scandal. That's probably not the real reason, but I just thought I'd toss that thought out there to the peanut gallery, FWIW.
Only a handful of other news items to relate right now:
- First, in the wake of their blockbuster MS deal, Novell has coined a new phrase to describe their business model: "mixed source". Now, I'm taking a wait-and-see attitude toward their new friendship with the Beast of Redmond, but the phrase itself sounds rather alarming. One of the more annoying chores for programmers these days is making sure you aren't commingling code with incompatible licenses. It's annoying, but important. At minimum, "mixed source" is something that goes on your annual performance review, and not in a good way. You don't want to use GPL'd code in your closed-source app, and you don't want to open-source any code you're supposed to keep confidential. And then there's the forest of incompatible F/OSS licenses: GPL, BSD, CDDL, APSL, Mozilla, Apache, blah, blah, blah. In an ideal world, programmers would never, ever have to get a lawyer's approval before doing their job, but sometimes you have to if you're serious about respecting copyrights. It's the right thing to do, but it's a damn shame nonetheless.
- Processor Magazine compares the new SCOoffice Server 4.2 with MS Exchange 2007. If David and Goliath were both bad guys but had a tiff anyway, it would be a lot like this. The piece does actually quote a real, live SCO employee, so we know there's at least one left, or at least there was when the interview happened. The key bit from the article, to my mind, is that SCO hasn't announced a product roadmap for SCOoffice Server past the new release.
- Here's another of those year's-end pieces, this time a preview of what 2007 may hold for Linux. The article says the Novell and IBM cases will go to trial in 2007, and I wish I could share in that confidence, but I've long since stopped trying to predict when/if that will ever happen. It's dragged out for so long now that the safe course of action is to predict it'll continue to drag out, at least into 2008. And when we get closer to 2008, we can reassess whether we think there'll be a resolution in 2009, and so on, and so forth.
- Another year's-end piece, about what happened and what didn't in the desktop Linux world this year. Actually the title is something of a misnomer, since about half of the piece is about Firefox and various web technologies, which aren't really tied to Linux at all. I was disheartened to learn of a project called "Tamarin", which is supposed to be a glorious melding of Flash and JavaScript. I mean, they can do that if they like, if they really think it's wise for some reason. But naming it after a cute-n-cuddly rainforest primate? That's just wrong, that is. I don't know, call it "Flashenstein", or "JavannoyingScript" or something, but leave the poor little tamarins alone, ok?
- From InfoWorld, a trade press reporter explains "Why bloggers will never replace reporters". And really, I have to admit this is true. I've met a few reporters now and then, and there's just no way my liver would withstand the kind of abuse reporters' livers experience on a daily basis. But seriously, I'm not going to say I'd turn down a chance to chat with BillG. A lot of what I do in RL is Windows-based, and I'm as curious as everyone else about what's supposed to come after Vista and Longhorn. I might ask the guy about SCO, or I might not. But regardless, my opinions are not for sale, and quite honestly I haven't had any serious inquiries anyway. That's kind of a shame, really, since having high-minded and inflexible principles is no fun at all unless you get a chance to be all outraged and self-righteous every now and then.
- Yet another Linux-based smartphone. And by "yet another", I mean yet another article. I've never actually seen one in real life, and I'm not sure anyone else has either. What gives, guys?
- A piece about Linux in the SMB space. (Where SMB == "small & medium-sized business", not "server message block"). Seems it may not be quite ready to displace Windows, but it's getting there. And when it does, well, small niche businesses are one of SCO's few remaining markets where they have any presence at all. They were already getting clobbered by Windows in that area, so having Linux join the pigpile doesn't represent a fundamental shift, but it would be a nice bit of poetic justice. Plus any stories about businesses migrating from SCO to Linux are guaranteed SNR fodder, so I like to encourage that sort of thing.
- From InfoWorld, a normally pro-MS columnist says "New year's resolution No. 1: Get OpenBSD". And I mostly agree; OpenBSD is da shiznit, just maybe not da fast, modern shiznit. But definitely da secure shiznit.
By brx0 @ 9:15 PM 
