SCO News Roundup: 1/2 SNR

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

1/2 SNR

So my naming convention doesn't include the year. So sue me. If we're lucky, the SCO situation will be over before this blog's been around for a year. If not, the month & year are encoded in the URLs for individual posts anyway.

In any case, here's the news:

As noted on IV, SCO stopped issuing security advisories back in July, and hasn't released a new issue of its monthly newsletter for SCO partners since October. Gee. It's almost as if the people responsible for these things were, I dunno, laid off or something. And all this time SCO's been telling us the Unix business is thriving, making buckets of money, assured of long-term viability, the envy of the entire industry, etc. I'm almost starting to wonder whether maybe they weren't telling the strict absolute truth about that.
Also, it turns out that there's a new OSR6 update available as of December 21st. Meet OSS706c, a new Supplement to Maintenance Pack 2. So this tells us that someone is still keeping the lights on somewhere in the Unix division.
FWIW, Vista and WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS: Not the bestest of friends.
A bit about those free Vista laptops MS gave out to a bunch of bloggers. This will come as no surprise, but for the record, nobody's offered me one of those, and if they had, I would have said no. Even if you wipe the thing and put a real OS on it, it's still one of those silly Ferrari laptops. I'd be embarrassed to be seen in public with one. Enderle thinks they're great, and maybe they are if you're having a midlife crisis, and can't afford a real Ferrari.
More on that weird class-action suit where the plaintiff was trying to fire their current law firm in favor of BS&F, for some reason.
Meanwhile, BS&F loses another case, this time their defense of a sleazy bank in Miami that was doing a little money laundering on the side.
From c.u.s.m, yet another printing issue. It amuses me how often you see these, since SCO has argued repeatedly that the SVR4/UnixWare print system is one of those super-advanced, ultra-valuable things that IBM has misused and abused in some unspecified way. I have to say the evidence suggests otherwise. In fairness, this is not a SCO-specific situation, but for the kind of money SCO says their print system is worth, simply having a SCO box on your network ought to magically straighten out this kind of thing without any human intervention.
PC-BSD 1.3 is out now.
Another piece on the ongoing $100 Linux laptop project. This time the focus is on the software, which the article argues may end up being more important than the laptop hardware itself. Maybe. Of course, all those disadvantaged kids in the developing world are going to need to buy SCOSource licenses to go with those laptops, at $699 a pop, or face the wrath of SCO (such as it is).