SCO News Roundup

It's a second-tier legal holiday here in the US, so the markets are closed, some businesses are open and others closed, and the malls and car dealerships are packed with shoppers. I'm sitting here at home waiting (once again) for the heater repair guy to show up. I should mention that I'm not much of a hardware guy. If it was a microcontroller issue, a problem with a component one can reason with, I might have a slim chance.

But I digress. I mention the bit about the holiday because there isn't much going on in the SCO world today. Here's what we've got right now:

• On the newly terse and dry GL, new posts about the latest SCO v. IBM filings, and IBM-961 in particular.
  
• Lamlaw on IBM-961.
  
• A recent CNN piece about the ongoing BS&F/Amici scandal. The piece has somewhat of a pro-Boies slant, which isn't surprising since they're CNN and he's a famous celebrity. The piece does have a good bit of background on all the key players in the case, and how they all go back years and years.
  
• From the boards, another tale about switching to Linux. The site the piece is about is kind of interesting, too, IMHO, although totally OT. I've always thought it was a shame this part of the world wasn't settled (by Europeans, I mean) until canals were already past their heyday.
  
• Ballmer says Vista isn't selling well, and it's all the fault of those pesky pirates. Even though they've been claiming for months now that Vista would be pirate-proof. Go figure. Although why anyone would pirate Vista is beyond me. So the plan now is to make "Windows Genuine Advantage" even stricter. As the Inq notes:
  

  
  Of course he is ignoring the fact that a lot of people are not buying Vista because it does not offer much more than XP and Windows Genuine Advantage makes their lives a misery. Cranking up WGA might backfire.
  

  
  
• A recent item about SGI's Linux+Itanium-based Altix line. Recall that SCO threatened SGI early on but never got around to suing them. And now, almost four years later, SGI's dropped its old IRIX+MIPS product line to focus on Linux & Itanium. Presumably their XFS filesystem (which SCO also complained about) makes an appearance on their Altix boxes as well. On the other hand, SGI doesn't have anywhere near the deep pockets that IBM has. I may sound like a broken record here, but this just goes to show, yet again, that SCO's IBM suit was all about trying to extort a quick-n-easy payoff rather than about actually defending SCO's "IP rights", such as they are.
  
• At the Daily Rotten, some rather NSFW comments about Ralphie's CP80.
  
• From Usenet: It's a bit late for Valentine's Day, but here's a post from a woman who's searching for an old AT&T 3B1 as a surprise gift for her husband. If you have one lying around and feel like making someone's day, more details are in the thread.
  

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Updated:

• The heater guy came and replaced a faulty relay, for a mere US$172. Of course, that's only the beginning of what the new relay is going to cost me. You see, relays not entirely unlike my shiny new one were used in some of the earliest computers, such as Harvard's Mark I, back before everyone switched to those newfangled vacuum tubes. The Mark I was built by none other than IBM, the <very same IBM that later went on to develop JFS and contribute it to Linux. So in some sense, Linux is a derivative work of the Mark I, therefore SCO retroactively owns it too. And by extension, they also own the relay in my heater. Clearly I need a $699 SCOSource license for all that precious SCO IP.
  
  Sure, the heater doesn't actually have a CPU inside or anything, but the idea's not any stupider than anything else SCO's been proposing, so why not? Besides, even without a CPU you could probably still get it to run NetBSD....
  
• But seriously, folks, here's a great IV post by KWL listing seven ways SCO is oh, so screwed.
  
• Some more coverage on that quantum computing story from a couple of days ago, at: Daily Tech, ExtremeTech, Geek.com, and HPCWire. It looks like a lot of people are quite skeptical about the announcement and whether the whole thing is legit or not. It'll be interesting to watch how this plays out. The ExtremeTech piece refers to D-Wave's machine as " a new type of analog processor that taps into quantum mechanics", which is an interesting bit of phrasing. Analog computers (much more here) are actually a very old, almost forgotten, and deeply unfashionable subject -- albeit without any quantum weirdness mixed in. So if the new announcement is actually a new advance in a long-forgotten field, well, that would be pretty cool too. On the other hand, if it's all a big con game, that would fit in pretty well with this blog's ostensible topic.
  
• Also, you might (not) have noticed the addition of alt.os.linux.caldera to the left sidebar, in the "Tech" section. I didn't realize such a thing still existed, but it does, and it's in semi-active use by the good guys. Kewl.
  
• Oh, and I finally got around to officially adding the Creative Commons logo to SNR. It's in the sidebar, just scroll down a bit.
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech