SCO News Roundup

More coverage of SCO's attack on PJ:

• The Ars Technica piece is appropriately scathing, and gets points for mentioning MOG's stalking debacle from a while back.
  
• A brief bit at OSDir points at the Lyons story.
  
• At LinuxToday, a repeat of the OSDir tidbit. The user comments are original, at least. Mostly just Lyons-bashing, though. Speaking of Lyons, it's awfully curious how he knew about this before anyone else. I wonder if he'd be gloating so much if IBM ever decided to subpoena him about his dealings with SCO?
  
• A piece by CRN's Barbara Darrow takes more of a ha-ha-isn't-it-funny attitude, quoting Lyons and the Inq article from earlier. Ms. Darrow, you may recall, interviewed Darl & Chris back in November '03 and seemed to buy into SCO's party line back then. It's always good to pair Darl up with a sympathetic interviewer, because he ends up telling some real whoppers; in fact, the whole interview ended up as Exhibit #361 to IBM's so-called "Greatest Hits" filing last October. So maybe she holds a grudge towards PJ over that, I dunno. In any case, I'm adding her "Unblog" to the Pro-SCO column in the sidebar, even though it's really more of an "I (heart) Microsoft" blog than anything else. (Thanks to J. Sizz for the background on Ms. Darrow.)
  
• Out in blogsville (I'm trying to avoid saying "blogosphere"), Jeff Kaplan, bytewriter, and the "Boycott Novell" blog all focus on the free speech / intimidation angle. Speaking of Novell, it's interesting that SCO's trying to go after PJ as part of the Novell case, even though they allege she's somehow tied up with IBM. Perhaps they figure Novell won't put up a big fight about it, after all the stuff PJ's had to say about Novell and Microsoft lately. That would be my current hypothesis, anyway.
  
• A Robert Lemos piece focuses more on the earlier MOG situation, and how much privacy PJ should really expect under the circumstances. He concludes with what I think is a rather ill-considered and unnecessary remark:
  

  
  One last thought: While I have no idea if Jones is really a 61-year-old spinster living alone (as O’Gara describes her) or a team of corporate lawyers, I would point out that “a 61-year-old woman” and “Linux enthusiast” are two sets that I would have imagined to have a really small intersection, if any at all.
  

  
  
• The subpoena thing gets a mention at PCSpy too, including about the ten millionth underpants-gnome reference I've seen in connection with SCO. Heck, I may have been responsible for one or two of those myself. But like all pop-culture reference memes, it's gotten old, and we need a new one. Ideas, anyone?
  

Elsewhere in the Land 'O SCO:

• On GL, MathFox has the latest batch of SCO filings. It's stuff we knew about already, so the real news here is that GL posts are continuing, albeit without PJ's usual wit and flair for the time being.
  
• And some new ownership disclosure docs on Edgar, with both Jet Capital and Glenhill reducing their stakes in SCO. Both firms were players in SCO's last cash infusion back in 2005, so it's interesting that these guys are getting out now, and apparently doing so at a loss. (They got their shares at $3.50, and Glenhill's filing shows them selling at $3.16-$3.19.) They could've all saved themselves a pile of cash if they'd only listened to us, but nooooo....
  
  Glenhill, btw, is Glenn Krevlin's outfit, and they specialize in distressed companies. So what does it say if they're untangling themselves from SCO?
  
• SCO gets a brief mention in an Enterprise Unix Roundup piece at ServerWatch. But only as a joke, as usual.
  
• MS has settled the Iowa antitrust case, although we won't learn details until mid-April for some reason.
  

Oh, and here's a fun (and mildly relevant) blast from the past. I was doing some retrocomputing googlin' the other day, seeing what I could find out about a weird machine I vaguely remembered from a company I used to work for years ago. The thing was from a firm called General Automation, and ran an OS called "Pick". I never touched the thing myself, but I knew the sysadmin, and so I had to put up with the occasional rant about why the world was full of idiots who didn't understand the glories of his favorite OS.

His second-favorite OS was NetWare, and he kept proposing to replace everyone's desktop machines (well, everyone who didn't have a dumb terminal to the Pick box, which was still the ideal) with diskless PC's hooked up to the NetWare mothership. The existing fleet of Macs (along with their unauthorized LocalTalk networks) and Amigas would be banished from the realm, forthwith. If you couldn't find a DOS-based, non-graphical replacement for your QuarkXPress or Video Toaster, well, that wasn't IT's problem, was it?

Eventually he and the company parted ways, and I later had the pleasure of helping nuke the existing NetWare server, turning it into our very first Linux box. This was around kernel 0.9x or so, if I recall correctly.

Anyway, I mention all of this because of a few weird connections and similarities with our friends in Lindon.

• The Pick OS vendor, then known as Pick Systems, was involved in near-constant IP litigation at the expense of promoting the OS and keeping it modernized. I'm not familiar enough with the situation to know the merits of the various court cases, but it shows again that litigiousness often isn't a good long-term corporate strategy, even if you win.
  
• Their business model seems to have been fairly similar to SCO's, with a focus on small & medium businesses, a reseller-based sales model, and a reliance on licensing the OS to third-party hardware vendors.
  
• The company had a partnership with OldSCO's Tarantella division, back in the day.
  
• Meanwhile, General Automation's president back in the early 70's was a certain Ray Noorda, as noted in this highly amusing Time article from 1975. When Noorda left the building, the wackos took over. Sound familiar, anyone?
  
• IBM's first commercial stab at the RISC market, the IBM RT, featured an early microkernel-esque environment. One of the OSes hosted on top of the RT's microkernel was AIX v2, and another was the Pick OS, and apparently you could switch between OSes with a simple Alt-Tab. (IBM later abandoned the microkernel in AIX v3, the first version of AIX to run on the POWER architecture). The WP article notes that the AIX v2 kernel was written mostly in PL/I, not C, so I don't see how that version could've been a SCO/Novell/AT&T Unix derivative. This is one of the prehistoric AIX versions SCO was recently fussing over, claiming IBM was "spoilating evidence" or some such nonsense.
  

(Much more in the way of Pick oldtimer reminiscences here in case you're interested.)

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech