SCO News Roundup

• New 52-week low today, 0.82, lowest since July 9th, 2002. And the day's young yet.
  
  
• More fun on the Wikipedia "front". Yet another nym cropped up, this time a "Cbush", who posted on WP here demanding changes to Darl's bio. This guy says he's speaking on Darl's behalf, and wants to remove the stuff about Darl getting fired at IKON. The WP admins said no, since the information is sourced. A subsequent Checkuser on Cbush & Cjhebgen confirms both originate from SCO IP addresses. So yes, SCO's officially in the rearranging-the-deck-chairs stage.
  
  
• Over in Me Inc. never-never land, Panglozz reports that Darl's wife Andrea is no longer Director+Treasurer+VP at Edgelink Solutions.
  
  
• Also from IV, another look at SCO's ELF-related claims. Seems that some of the ELF code SCO claims isn't even ELF code, and is actually part of the X Window System, with copyrights owned by MIT. SCO must have a firm policy in place of never, ever discussing anything code-related with a competent programmer before making a claim about it in court. And look where it's gotten them.
  
  
• After nearly 3 months of silence, Lyons has two new posts on his "Floating Point" blog. In one, he claims that PJ got cash from OSDL. I don't put a lot of stock in any story for which Lyons is the sole source, but even if it's true, I don't see the relevance of it. I guess he's trying to revive the tired "IBM funds Groklaw" meme again, this time with a new middleman. SCO and its remaining backers seem to have an increasingly obsessive focus on silly side issues. I wouldn't be surprised
  
  
• His other piece is about MOG. Seems she's been deposed in SCO v. Novell. He says the transcripts should be available soon. That may be mildly entertaining, but again, so what?
  
  
• Meanwhile, "Paul Murphy" occasionally does have something better to do than write about the thrilling adventures of his fellow denizens in the pro-SCO echo chamber. Here's a bit of word salad about the origin of Unix. It reads like he just now found out about Multics. Oddly, he gets through the whole piece without mentioning SCO even once. Possibly because adding Multics into the mix doesn't help SCO's case much. First, litigating over an OS from the mid-60's would be a little, um, what's the word, ludicrous? Second, SCO definitely doesn't own Multics. I think I've mentioned this before -- the Multics copyrights are owned by Groupe Bull, a French computer firm that happens to be a longtime IBM partner. Third, Multics is open source. MIT's got it here. If you've ever wondered what PL/I looks like, now's your chance.
  
  But just as Unix was sort of inspired by Multics, Multics was sort of inspired by the earlier CTSS system, from way back in 1961. And it's open source as well.
  
  But all that this family tree proves is that ideas come from other ideas, just like people come from other people. It's always hard to figure out what "Murphy" is getting at, and this article is no exception. But given his longtime SCO advocacy, he appears to be suggesting that any time an idea doesn't burst from its inventor's forehead fully formed, with no antecedents, a crime has just been committed. Which is so nutty that I have to think "Murphy" hasn't spent a lot of time thinking about the implications of this. He does assert at one point that the ideas behind Unix go back to ancient Greece. Which I think overstates the case somewhat. Besides, everyone knows that Archimedes ran RISC OS.
  
  
• Over in Canopyland, Canopy proper has transferred a couple of patents to Solera, both of which were invented by a certain highly entertaining "Chief Scientist" of theirs.
  
  
• A bit on About.com about SCO ACE certification, which is sort of SCO's equivalent to an MCSE. Sadly, the link that's supposed to go to SCO's site for more info comes up as a 404.
  
  
• ICANN has again rejected the proposed .xxx TLD. Seems they really, really don't want to be in the content regulation business. Which is probably why the CP80 mafia never bothered to take their proposal to ICANN, and went directly to the politicians instead.
  
  
• Speaking of CP80, here's a bio of CP80's general counsel.
  
  
• Stories about Dayjet are more OT than they once were, now that Mr. Iacobucci's giving up his seat on SCO's BoD. But it's still an entertaining saga, so here's a new piece about the company. One interesting bit is that they do their market research with a computer simulation, described as "Sim City on steroids".
  
  
• Vista, the new super-advanced OS from Redmond, can be laid low by a simple animated cursor. It's a bit like the ending of "War of the Worlds".
  
  
• The Telegraph (UK): "Vista flummoxes consumers".
  
  
• SCO still has a few hardcore true believers out there in the investment community, including this one guy who I can only describe as a serial kamikaze bagholder. Yes, I realize that "serial" and "kamikaze" don't really go together very well, but I don't know how else to describe this.
  
  
• Tom Yager on M$'s future plans to lock down Windows hardware. One "security feature" prevents users from installing what M$ calls a "guest" (i.e. non-M$) OS on the box. No vendor lock-in there, oh no sirreee.
  
  
• A M$ PR firm has screwed up royally, accidentally sending its secret internal notes on a tech journalist to that journalist. This is what's known as a "career-limiting move".
  
  
• A Reuters piece on the uncertain freedom to blog.
  
  
• This is probably old, but here's one user's experience trying to buy himself a SCOSource license.
  
  
• As a worker bee techie, one thing that's always puzzled me (in the SCO case & elsewhere) is how executive business types (say, Darl) have this mysterious ability to fail upwards (i.e. get fired as IKON VP, end up as SCO CEO). I don't know how they manage it, but I strongly suspect it involves golf somehow. Golf, and having been in the right fraternity back in college. It's too late to do anything about the latter, not that I'd want to. But as for golf, our fellow nerds at NASA may have the answer. I present to you Sector 6, a Flash-based golf game set on the moons of Saturn. Sadly, the game doesn't show you avatars for the other people playing the game, so there's no opportunity to network and wheel-n-deal and all that, which I'm told is the real point behind the game in RL.
  
  
• Here's a fun geek toy: A Tux that runs Linux. Or if you're looking for something a bit more lively, a different company markets the "Tux Droid". No Linux on the latter, but you can configure it to dance when you have new email, which is certainly a step up from biff.
  
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

• It seems that, among the recent chumbucket-load of SCO filings, there was a doc that should've been sealed but wasn't. The court's corrected the problem, but the cat's already out of the bag, the cows have left the barn, etc. If you want to know more, check out Al P.'s post on alt.os.linux.caldera. I actually have mixed feelings about linking to this. The "leaked" document just so happens to include an internal IBM email that appears to be the one SCO's been trying to leak since roughly day 1. They bragged to Lyons about it. They conned MOG into going to court to try to make it public. They repeatedly read it aloud in the courtroom, over the judge's objections. And now it just sort of happens to slip out. Maybe it really is a coincidence, but if so it's an awfully weird coincidence.
  
  That said, if you do read the thing you'll be left wondering what all the fuss was about. This is SCO's last, best hope? What a bunch of maroons.
  
  As an added attraction, there's a chunk of a Rochkind deposition in there, wherein he confuses RCU ("read, copy, update") and RCS ("Revision Control System"). Which I guess is understandable, since there's only a couple of bits' difference between the two acronyms.
  
  
• An analysis of those rosy Vista sales figures. I actually never doubted that Vista's sales figures would be impressive. There's a word for it when 95% of the populace ends up buying something they didn't want or need, but were unable to avoid. That word would be "monopoly".
  
  
• A bit of cheesy Me Inc spam on the forums over at MyTreo.net. Really, there's almost nothing funnier than watching clueless marketroids attempt to speak the lingo of "kids these days". Yeah, and back in my day they were trying to tell us that Xenix was, like, totally tubular. We didn't bite either.
  
  Besides, how many kids out there have Treo phones, anyway? Treos are boring (and expensive) phones for grownups.
  
  
• A rare bit of good news for SCO: Kevin McBride just lost his other IP-troll case (Affinity, down South Carolina way). So now he's got plenty of time (= billable hours) to exercise his unique legal talents on SCO's behalf.
  
  
• You'd think they'd have learned by now, but there's been another SCO-related vandalism incident on Wikipedia. This time, a new account named "Sonthemount" has been editing the articles on Ralph Yarro and Canopy Group, trying to erase (rub out?) any mention of Val Kriedel. Yeah, that's real classy there, guys.
  
  
• Meanwhile, Zen'sDen is seeing a bunch of dictionary attacks, trying to crack user passwords. Even classier! So, ok, we don't actually know it's the same guy(s), and my hunch is it probably isn't. But still, Darl once wrote a letter to every member of Congress, accusing the Linux community of "cyberterrorism" with even less evidence than this.
  
  
• Another legislative proposal that would favor ODF, open document formats, and free software in general. And this time it's happening right here in Oregon. Yay!
  
  
• A few days ago came the news that John Backus -- the creator of Fortran, and the 'B' in BNF -- had passed away. If you read about it, you probably read the AP story, and perhaps you noticed he lived here in Oregon. There's a good article about him at the Medford Mail-Tribune, a local newspaper. There's more to the story than you've probably seen. It's sad, but (I think) understandable under the circumstances.
  
  I've never used Fortran myself, except for one time just to see what "Hello World" looked like in it. But I still have a soft spot for the language; my parents met over a nice warm deck of Fortran punchcards. Or at least that's what they always tell me.
  
  
• More huffing and puffing over the latest draft of GPLv3
  
  
• A piece complaining about the new (and undisclosed) limitations on DOS apps under Vista. I commented about this earlier on the IV board. Although I should add that he makes a good point about M$ Visual Studio. As others have pointed out, the x86 architecture has a native 80-bit floating point type, but Visual Studio just won't generate code that takes advantage of it. Seems that was one of those rare M$ gestures towards portability. By which they mean, portability between x86 Windows and Windows on other CPU architectures. There really is such a thing, btw; over the years there've been versions of Windows for MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha, Itanium, PA-RISC, and Intel's i860, and possibly others -- although none were commercially successful, and at the last two were never released outside M$. Meanwhile, the two next-largest x86 OSes -- Linux and Mac OS X -- both support native 80-bit floating point. So much for portability, eh, BillG?
  
  
• In what has to be the ultimate Slashdot story of all time (so far), a professor at North Carolina State has created a Beowulf cluster of PlayStation 3 consoles. Now, to move the thing to Soviet Russia, and convince Natalie Portman to play celebrity sysadmin, with the precise role of hot grits TBD. Because at Slashdot, some things just never change. Although they do seem to be in touch with a part of the eternal nerd psyche. Somewhere, probably in the upper Midwest, I imagine there's a nursing home for elderly engineers, and the residents spend their days babbling on about "porridge" and "Marlene Dietrich" and shouting "In Hapsburg Austria-Hungary, horseless carriage drives YOU!!!". The staff thinks they're all crazy, but really they're just Slashdot kiddies who were born a few generations too early.
  
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

• A new SCO press release about Me Inc. They're flogging the same old apps again, but this time they're doing it at the CTIA trade show.
  
  
• One interesting bit from the press release is that they're back to using an external PR firm again. Unsurprisingly, there are many-tentacled ties between SCO and the Next Phase folks, with links to CP80 and the rest of the whole sordid circus.
  
  
• Speaking of CP80, they'd like you to sign up for their CP80 Action Team and help them police the interwebs, and keep track of what (if anything) is being said about CP80. Because I guess they've never heard of using Google or whatever. Still, this may work out really great for Ralphie & Co., because nobody expects the Spanish Fork Inquisition.
  
  (It's funnier if you realize that Spanish Fork is another suburb of Provo/Orem, a few miles south of Lindon.)
  
  
• While we're at it, here's a new profile of Ralphie titled "Ralph Yarro Putting His All on the Altar to Save Familes" which fawns all over him and gushes about how religious and super-moral he is. Blecchhh.
  
  
• Check out Novell's spoof of those Apple "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ads.
  
  
• Speaking of Apples, which we sort of just were, the Apple TV is out now, and sites are already cropping up full of hacks and tweaks for the little beasties. See AppleTVHacks.net and AwkwardTV for more. Running Linux on it is still a work in progress. The native OS, meanwhile, is a slightly tweaked form of OS X. No Mac GUI, but the usual tasty BSD goodness under the hood.
  
  
• A bit of OLPC-bashing, OLPC being the $100(ish) laptop initiative.
  
  
• A similar offering from Intel, the ClassMate PC, available with either Linux or WinXP.
  
  
• More fretting about the future of Palm. The Linux-based PalmOS they keep talking about would be a fun thing to have, but will it be too little, too late?
  
  
• Now here's a head-scratcher for ya. The guy who founded Debian has a new job at Sun, promoting Solaris.
  
  
• In a sign that maybe Oracle means to play nice and be a good member of the F/OSS community, they're joining the Open Invention Network patent commons. I seem to recall they have a serious boatload of patents, so this is kind of a big deal.
  
  
• A UK court has ruled that you can't copyright the ideas behind a videogame. Not entirely surprising, since it's well-established that you can't copyright the ideas behind a novel. But still, it's nice (& unusual) to see a sensible copyright ruling from any court, anywhere.
  
  
• A bit about IBM's new optical chipset. Sounds nice. I wonder how long it'll be before SCO claims it owns this new technology, just because IBM invented it?
  
  
• "Mr. Gates, tear down this wall", a piece comparing Microsoft's anti-Linux campaign to the Cold War.
  
  
• Meanwhile, our lil' buddy "Paul Murphy" picks up the tired "IBM funds Groklaw" meme that's been rattling around the pro-SCO echo chamber for years now. It's almost sad, in a way, watching the few remaining SCO diehards grasp at straws like this.
  
  
• The ongoing litigation over Vioxx, the withdrawn prescription drug, has a familiar cast of characters, with Cravath, Swaine & Moore on one side, and Boies on the other. Weird.
  
  
• Remember when Blakey jumped ship a while back? If recent insider trades are any indication, he might've jumped to the wrong ship. Nelson: Ha, ha.
  
  
• More recently, I mentioned the big iXorg winter shindig they were having down Utah way. I didn't bother to look at the member list, which I really should've done. About 30 members total. That's all. Seriously. This is the worldwide SCO user group.
  
  
• A somewhat OT item: This is one truly humongous cane toad.
  
  
• And a completely OT item, which is only here because SNR gets a substantial number of readers from the UK. They may have seen this already, but for everyone else, here's a rather icky video clip of Gordon Brown, presumably the UK's next Prime Minister and therefore Assistant Leader of the Free World. Public nasal hygiene is one thing. But eating the results, right there in Parliament, during Question Time, with the cameras rolling... That's just... Eeewww.....
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

In a previous post I briefly mentioned the Wikipedia antics of one "Cjhebgen", who was repeatedly vandalizing the Wikipedia pages for SCO & Darl, removing links to GL, deleting long passages about the Linux litigation circus, and even erasing mentions of discontinued products & programs, while also trying to add bits of Me Inc. propaganda copied-n-pasted directly from SCO's marketing materials. He or she was quite persistent about it, too, repeatedly making the same changes after various admins kept reverting them.

Someone with the same nym has occasionally trolled the Y! SCOX board as well. See here and here for examples.

One of the apparently discontinued programs that Cjhebgen wanted to erase from history was that "SCO Marketplace" thing where they'd allegedly pay you to write software for SCO OSes. Turns out an identical edit to the SCO page was made back on February 12th, by a user with the IP address 132.147.251.249, which is an interesting IP address. With a little Whois magic, we have:

132.147.251.249 = [ strider.ut.sco.com ]

(Asked whois.arin.net:43 about +132.147.251.249)

OrgName: The SCO Group Inc.
OrgID: THESC-8
Address: 355 South 520 West
Address: Suite 100
City: Lindon
StateProv: UT
PostalCode: 84042
Country: US
NetRange: 132.147.0.0 - 132.147.255.255
CIDR: 132.147.0.0/16
NetName: SCO-132
NetHandle: NET-132-147-0-0-1
Parent: NET-132-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Assignment
NameServer: NS.CALDERASYSTEMS.COM
NameServer: NS2.CALDERASYSTEMS.COM
Comment:
RegDate:
Updated: 2006-12-11
OrgTechHandle: ABR102-ARIN
OrgTechName: Bradford Andy
OrgTechPhone: 1-801-765-4999
OrgTechEmail: andyb-arin@sco.com

ARIN WHOIS database last updated 2007-03-22 19: 10


Yep, someone from SCO has edited the WP page about SCO at least once. Which is considered dirty pool under WP's rules & regulations. It's reasonable to infer a link between this individual and "Cjhebgen". Either they're the same person (which I suspect), or possibly multiple people acting in concert. I put it to you that the odds that two people would independently decide the "SCO Marketplace" stuff had to go are really quite small. There's no way to prove the Cjhebgen link with the info currently available, but we know for a fact that someone with SCO's tweaked WP at least once. The question is not whether they're doing it or not, but how much.

Later a third account, "Maryland217", popped up and started making some of the same edits. Edits were again reverted, and the person behind the account is now pleading his or her case with one of the admins.

The story's been picked up at Digg, and Texyt. The latter piece expresses some skepticism about the Cjhebgen-SCO link, which is reasonable, of course; I think it's a logical conclusion to draw, but that's not the same thing as having proof. Another thing we don't have proof of is whether the initial edit, the definitely-SCO one, was an "official" act by the company, or just the freelance act of a random employee who wishes the stock would go up. We'll probably never get a straight answer about that.

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

A few more items I ran across later in the day:

• There's been a huge steaming pile of new filings in SCO v. IBM lately, but they all boil down to SCO screeching "Me wanna 'nother do-over" again and again. GL has the goods here, and Lamlaw chimes in as well.
  
  
• For those of you who missed the big iXorg Winter Meeting -- iXorg being a semi-official group for SCO user(s) -- their site has the meeting agenda here. Some highlights:
  
  
  
  • It was a four-day event, with precisely 15 minutes devoted to Me Inc.
    
  • There's a Maintenance Pack 3 for OSR6 in the works, Real Soon Now.
    
  • Further down the road on the OS roadmap, there's a cryptic item labeled 64-bit O/S ("Project Diamond"?). This may be fairly far down the road, though, since the top agenda item for the Operating Systems meeting is "Engineering Priorities and Staffing".
    
  • There was a bit about pricing, meaning the upcoming 20% price increase. It would've been fun to be a fly on the wall for that agenda item.
    
  • A presumably much shorter agenda item: "SCO Forum 2006 commitments and follow through". Snort. Giggle.
    
  • The next meeting of SCO user(s) will be X-Fest, scheduled for June 1-2 in Pittsburgh. Mark your calendars now.
    
  • There's also a mention of SCOForum 2007. So at least someone's still feeling optimistic.
    
  • Both the Monday and Tuesday agendas end with "10:00 - ? Poker". I imagine there's no ending time listed because they're playing poker SCO-style, where you never, ever have to show your cards. Thanks, you've been a great audience. Try the fish.
    
  
  
• Another silly new column from "Paul Murphy". Mostly speculation about why M$ is so successful. That particular topic's been covered extensively by many people well above Rudy/Paul's rated wattage level, and they usually don't come up with howlers like:
  

  
  There's no mystery for "Phase Two" either: in the Jackson round of anti-trust trials Microsoft ended up convicted of numerous criminal counts before the government's lawyers (led by the same David Boies who seems to be having some difficulty proving the obvious in the SCO case) proved unable to demonstrate that Microsoft, whose revenue rose from around $9 billion to $23 billion during the trial period, benefited from its criminal activities during that period.
  

  
  
  Yes, he actually said "proving the obvious" in the SCO case. And yes, that whole paragraph is a single sentence, one monstrous gob of word salad.
  
  
• As noted some time ago, SCO isn't Kevin McBride's only foray into IP trolldom. He's also working for "Affinity Technology Group", and that gig isn't going too well either.
  
  
• A federal judge in Philadelphia has struck down the 1998 "Child Online Protection Act", or COPA. Too early to say whether this'll be a boon or bane for Ralphie's CP80 con game.
  
  
• J. Sizz on IV digs up the goods on a troll and possible CP80/SCO insider who haunts the boards now and then. Nice bit of detective work there.
  
  
• Also on IV, sco_source_scam points us at the antics of one cjHebgen, who had a go at rewriting SCO history the other day, erasing various things that portrayed the company (and Darl) unflatteringly. Edits already reverted, needless to say. Same nym occasionally trolls Y! as well (see here and here.) He or she claims to have bought at $7.70, and the stock hasn't seen the high side of $1 for seven days now. So a degree of frustration on the part of this Hebgen person is understandable, I guess. Might as well try to rewrite history, it's bound to work just as well as everything else has.
  
  
• A little OT, but here's an Economist profile of Elon Musk, who started PayPal before cashing out and going into the rocket business. Esker's role model, perhaps?
  
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

Once again, my apologies for the sporadic posts of late.

• GL summarizes the huge and rather shoddy pile of SCO filings we've seen lately.
  
  
• Via Panglozz on IV, a fascinating blog post about how Blakey and his underlings at SCO tried to turn the screws on SD Times after an unflattering editorial last year. Throwing your weight around as an aggrieved potential advertiser can work sometimes, if you have weight. If you're a real company with real products to advertise, and a significant advertising or other PR budget, sometimes it works. (See this for example). But if you're SCO, not so much. They aren't exactly experts in making credible threats, or in making good on those threats. And as the editor of a trade press publication, you'd have to balance the paltry amount of ad revenue you might get from SCO, with the number of subscribers you might lose by running SCO ads, and all the bad PR you'd get by knuckling under to SCO.
  
  
• A remarkably non-clueful piece by InformationWeek's Paul McDougall, who only just now found out about the IBM-iBiblio funding thing SCO's partisans have been bleating about for years and years. It certainly makes for a nice, lurid accusation, which drives page views, which in turn sells banner ads, so I guess the piece succeeds in at least that one respect.
  
  
• Ars Technica covers the recent SCO v. IBM hearings.
  
  
• The Age asks "Is computer science dead?". Their argument has two parts that don't entirely mesh up. First, software tools are so sophisticated these days that you don't need a CS degree to land a nice, cushy IT job. Second, kids don't want to study CS, and their parents don't want them to either, mostly because of the dot-com crash.
  
  I'm not sure they quite make their case, but it's an interesting article anyway.
  
  
• Here's a new one: Digital TVs that lock up when you try to watch an ill-behaved program.
  
  
• Don't ask me why I've got so many tech articles from .AU today. It just sort of worked out that way somehow. The Age describes the new AppleTV as a "ride-on chainsaw". You've just got to love those colorful antipodean metaphors.
  
  
• The WSJ likes the AppleTV too, albeit without peculiar turns of phrase.
  
  
• Also from The Age, the latest Big Media way to stop movie pirates: DVD-burner sniffing dogs! No, really, I swear I'm not making this up. So next time you see MOG wandering your neighborhood with a yapping pack of chihuahuas, you should realize it's not for exercise, or to look glamorous and trendy or anything. They're the SCOSource Police, and they're hot on the trail of that Ubuntu CD you just burned for your mom.
  
  
• /. linked to an interesting piece on "supercrunchers" a while back, in case you haven't seen it yet.
  
  
• John Carroll on M$/Novell. When a generally pro-M$ columnist writes about how something will be good for Linux, it's good to take it with a grain of salt or two. Not because
  
  
• I try to cover new versions of various *Nix OSes, free and sometimes otherwise, but here's one that slipped under my radar last December. 2.11BSD Patch 445 came out over the holidays, and now runs on PDP-11 models without an FPU. I didn't realize there was still an actively maintained *Nix for the PDP-11, or any non-32-bit hardware for that matter, but apparently there is.
  
  
• In the same vein, last August there came news of the rediscovery of LSX, a tiny single-user *Nix based on 6th Edition Unix that can run on a PDP-11 with just 48k memory. If you don't have one of those, and want to enjoy some of SCO's precious IP circa 1976, you can always try it in an emulator, such as SIMH. Or check eBay regularly, I suppose.
  
  
• An astute reader clued me in on an SL Trib photo from the Dutch oven world championships. A contestant from American Fork, UT -- just down the road from Lindon -- entered with apple & cranberry-stuffed chicken wrapped in bacon. Mmmm.....
  
  This may help explain why it seems like every time someone down there suffers an untimely demise, by default it's immediately chalked up as an "apparent heart attack"...
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

Shortly after clicking 'Publish' on the last post, more filings from SCO showed up on PACER. Zen's got 'em, naturally. In IBM, they're playing multiple angles trying to get another bite at the apple on the spoilation-of-evidence thing. And the same old extension-of-time, overlength-memo charade in Novell.

Via El Corton, here's what it looks like when a judge gets sick of litigants demanding do-overs.

Meanwhile, there's a fun new piece at GL regarding "Addendum E to IBM's Redacted Reply Memorandum in Further Support of its Motion for Summary Judgment on SCO's Contract Claims (SCO's First, Second, Third and Fourth Causes of Action)". No, really, it's fun. Honest.

The infuriating part is diagram #2. As IBM explains, SCO's theory of derivative works implies that they also have contractual control over Blackberry devices, since BSD originated from AT&T's Unix, and TCP/IP originated with BSD, and now Blackberries have TCP/IP too.

I don't know about the rest of you, but SCO can have my BB when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.

Oh, yeah, the same theory would make SCO the sole owner of the interwebs, too. Sure, Darl. Good luck with that.

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

Sorry about the lack of posts for a few days here. Been extremely busy in RL and all that.

• The long-awaited 10-Q came out Friday. GL story about it here.
  
  
• More filings in both cases. As usual, Zen's got 'em. Plus some nice vacation photos from sunny Puerto Rico.
  
  
• Enderle's latest fantasy involves M$ buying SCO(!), "shutting down" the litigation(!), and using the Unix code to compete with Linux. Which is a goofy idea, but the reason he's offering it is that he's decided Win2k3 is useless as a server platform, and he thinks M$ needs a new strategy
  
  
• hamjudo2000 noticed that SCO's finally brought out another issue of the "monthly" SCO Partner News
  
  I think HJ2K's analysis is dead on: SCO's looking to generate a short term blip in revenue by raising prices in the hope people will buy before the price jumps. I see they're also dropping support for a couple of older products, including UnixWare 7.1.3, I imagine with the idea that UW 7.1.3 users will then be forced to upgrade. Well, that or go elsewhere for their OS needs.
  
  
• SCO's falling behind on filing redacted docs like they're supposed to.
  
  
• Slashdot just discovered how tiny SCO's pool of "evidence" really is. Everyone else has known this for years.
  
  Ok, they got this from a recent Register story that makes it sound like a new discovery. Surely they knew before, didn't they?
  
  Actually this is getting a lot of play now. The Inquirer has it now, as does InformationWeek. Huh. I guess it's a useful update for folks who haven't been paying attention, but still...
  
  
• Ars Technica on cp80. As usual, Ralphie's SCO angle gets top billing.
  
  
• A recent c.u.s.m question on how to mount a UW 7.1.3 share on Mac OS X 10.4.x. I'm afraid this is probably a Mac-side problem this time. I've noticed that OSX can be remarkably flaky in the NFS department.
  
  
• The latest Vista activation hack. As usual, you can override just about anything with the proper registry settings. It's the Windows way.
  
  
• Meanwhile, Windows Live continues to struggle for traction. Their latest strategy: Bribe your company's PHBs so they impose it on you.
  
  
• Another piece about the Boies/Greenberg/AIG circus. I wonder if these eSapience guys know the AdTI guys?
  
  
• A piece about a tobacco lawsuit in Florida. Naturally, BS&F is working for the tobacco industry.
  
  
• Boies also suggested recently that the Scooter Libby case should not have been prosecuted.
  
  
• The latest twist in the Jack Thompson vs. Universe saga. One of his longtime targets finally decided to countersue.
  
  
• Elsewhere in Netkookistan, an activist in Colorado has it out for Archive.org.
  
  
• Today's curious and somewhat relevant bit of tech history: Linux-bashers (pro-SCO and otherwise) often go for the cheap shot of calling Linux users "communists", but it turns out that AT&T, SCO's predecessor-in-interest actually licensed Unix to the real commies, way back in 1988. The article discusses the Soviet "бЕСТА-88" ("Besta-88") workstation based on "Bestix". The author claims it was a legal, licensed Unix from AT&T. Not to be confused with "DEMOS", an earlier BSD-ish OS for Soviet PDP-11 clones.
  
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

• SDTimes: "SCO v. IBM: Case Closed?" I think it's still kind of premature to say that, but it's a good article anyway. Even if it quotes Rant-for-Rent Rob a bit too much.



• More from hgc about OpenXML and the b0rken ISO standards process.



• Ralphie's latest CP80 push has made it to Slashdot, and the SCO connection gets a lot of play. Yarro's not dumb. Surely he's figured out that religion can be the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card.



• BusinessWeek: "Vista: Slow and Dangerous".
  
  
• Slashdot picks up the HSBC Linux story I mentioned yesterday. I didn't pick up on the part where the joint press release includes a quote from an HSBC IT guy insisting that Windows has a lower TCO than Linux. Slashdot claims this is a Novell endorsement of that statement, which I think is reading too much into it. I actually doubt they had any choice in the matter. It's just another of the endless indignities you have to put up with when you "partner" with the Beast of Redmond.



• Meanwhile, RHEL 5 is now available. Also, RHEL 4 Update 5 is expected any day now. But that's not going to be confusing or anything.
  
  Still no ETA for an OpenServer 7, though. Or a 6.1, or even a 6.0.1.
  



• SCO's stock has been spending a lot of time under the magic $1 mark the last few days. Someone apparently ran out of the magic dust that keeps it over a dollar. But why now, all of a sudden? Maybe "they" are letting it sit at under a dollar for a while in hopes of luring in a new crop of penny-ante daytraders and clueless fund managers. Maybe the guy who cares about it staying over $1 is on vacation right now, and left the job to a room full of bunglin interns. Who knows? The possibilities are nearly endless, but "natural market fluctuations" is probably not among those possibilities. Anyway, wake me up when there's a new 52-week low, ok?
  
  
• Larry Goldfarb, of Baystar fame, has written a book (well, part of a book) dispensing his unique wisdom about the investment world. He says there's no rocket science to it.
  
  Insert your own cheap shot about "MIT rocket scientists" here.
  
  
• Dayjet Eddie's found some new bagholders, er, investors. One analyst quoted in the article describes DayJet's business model as "utopian" and based on several improbable assumptions about the marketplace.
  
  
• Good news on the patent front, although sadly not in the US. A German court has invalidated an M$ FAT32 patent. Specifically the long & short filename kludge that results in all those silly "~1" filenames. The court decided that was not "based on inventive activity". Which seems like a fair assessment to me.
  
  
• Also from SJVN: He recently received -- and for the sake of fairness, printed -- an angry rebuttal to one of his recent columns. From none other than Laura DiDio herself. You remember her, she's one of the lucky few who got to see SCO's gigantic pile of super-secret evidence, albeit under a strict NDA, and she insisted for a long time afterward that they had an extremely strong case. That sort of thing tends to impact one's credibility, I'm afraid.
  
  The gist of Ms. Didio's argument is that the Yankee Group is absolutely, positively not paided or otherwise influenced in any way whatsoever by M$, and the fact that their research always favors M$ products shouldn't be cause for speculation. Apparently it happens purely by random chance, or something.



• LinuxDevices has a geek's view of Nokia's N800, their new mobile Linux WiFi whatzit. Drool! Drool!
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

• In SCO v. IBM, a bunch of new filings from the IBM side. As usual, their stuff is clear, well-written, and highly amusing. Apparently I'm not the only person who thinks so, because GL's really slow at the moment. I haven't checked yet, but I'm sure Zen's got the new docs too.
  
  
• If you can get through to GL, you'll also want to check out the previous story, about "Yarro's Law", a vague "unfair competition" law Ralphie shoved through the Utah legislature in 2003 and now wants to apply retroactively against IBM.
  
  
• I hate contributing to the general server overload at GL, but they've also got transcripts from March 5th hearing, if you're interested.
  
  
• NIST is thinking about banning Vista. At minimum, they aren't rushing to embrace it.
  
  
• A fascinating IV post by hgc on the ISO fast track process and how the system's being gamed w.r.t the proposed "OpenXML" standard.
  
  
• A CBR piece about HP's involvement w/ Linux & open source. I do think it's pretty kewl that they're specifically embracing Debian rather than one of the big commercial distros. Still, I haven't quite forgotten that pretexting stuff just yet.
  
  The piece also mentions SCO Unix briefly, for some reason.
  
  
• And the on-again, off-again Dell+Linux thing is on again. If you went to the trouble if giving them feedback, you are going to buy a Linux Dell once they're available, right?
  
  
• The huge international bank HSBC is switching to SuSE. That's the good news. The (probably) bad news is that it's a result of the M$-Novell thing, and they're actually paying Redmond as part of their support deal. Hmmmmm...
  
  
• A WSJ article: "Linux Starts to Find Home on Desktops". By which they mean the corporate desktop, which is nice to see. One fun bit:
  
  

  
  In places such as China, Microsoft has made some progress curtailing piracy -- a change that could be spurring PC users to pick up Linux, avoiding both paying for Windows and the risk of being nabbed for illegal software. "That in some respects drives the adoption," says Al Gillen, an analyst at IDC.
  

  
  
  Let's all bow our heads and give thanks for Windows Genuine Advantage.
  
  
• Here's one of those rare birds, a product announcement that mentions SCO. Yet another terminal emulation app. It's always either terminal emulation or backup stuff. Yawn. Double yawn.
  
  
• Today also brings the one thing rarer than a SCO-related product announcement: A remote vulnerability in OpenBSD. Believe it or not.
  
  
• The latest PR from Concurrent, a vendor of real-time Linux on specialized hardware. I've mentioned them before, as another ex-SVRx licensee that moved to Linux and took some of their homegrown technology along. SCO hasn't even threatened them, as far as we know. I used to think SCO was just being inconsistent, but it's possible Concurrent is a special case: According to this history, they're the firm formerly known as Interdata, and variants of Unix have been running on their hardware since 6th Edition was ported to their 7/32 minicomputer, wayyyyy back in 1976, which is years before OldSCO was founded. So sorting out the license issue and putting a case together could be an impossible tangle, certainly for the, uh, caliber of attorney SCO tends to hire.
  
  
• New on Gizmodo, TIE Fighter speakers.
  
  
• If you're reading this, either you survived Sunday's Daylight Savings disaster (a.k.a. "Y2K7"), or you live in a sensible country where the legislature doesn't mess around with timezones every time it gets a random whim.
  
  Here's how I survived the Great DST Apocalypse.
  
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

• On GL, transcripts from all the recent SCO v. IBM hearings. So far I haven't had time to read 'em all, so I don't have anything cynical or snarky to say about 'em just yet. It looks like our merry band of intrepid courtroom junkies has covered most of the salient points already anyway.
  
  
• A very belated Slashdot story about Monday's hearing.
  
  My token Gentoo-using hipster friend recently informed me that Slashdot is totally 20th century, and Digg is the new Slashdot. But I just checked there and I don't see any stories I haven't seen before. But at least there's nothing there about Soviet Russia or hot grits, which is something, I guess.
  
  
• Our lil' buddy "Paul Murphy" has posted his latest rant about the IBM case. At one point he actually says: "as regular readers known my belief is that SCO has a strong case". No, this isn't an old piece from 2003, this is current.
  
  The rest of the piece is the usual "Murphy" word salad. I can't make head or tail of it. It's eye-glazing from thirty paces, and it takes hours for your vision to completely recover. I'm not kidding.
  
  
• A tech publishing co in .ZA is switching to Fedora (and not Ubuntu, their "local" distro).
  
  
• And the French parliament is going with Ubuntu (and not Mandriva, their "local" distro).
  
  
• The very latest on the AIG + Greenberg + BS&F saga. Seems Greenberg hired a PR firm to polish his public image, but never quite got around to paying them. So now they're suing.
  
  One of the PR firm's many uber-genius ideas was to set up at least one public appearance by Boies himself. So it's possible Greenberg feels he's already paid them what their assistance was worth.
  
  
• Here's something fun. This may just be a weird coincidence, or possibly I'm not enough of a conspiracy buff to see how the dots connect. The other day I was poking around in the dusty corners of ancient Unix history, and did a search on Venix, a very early commercial *Nix from a company called VenturCom. As you can see in the WP article for VenturCom, they changed their name to "Ardence" in 2004, and in 2006 were acquired by Citrix. Yes, that Citrix, founded and until recently headed by none other than Dayjet Eddie, recently of SCO's board of directors. And there's more Venix stuff hosted at iBiblio, coincidentally also home to Groklaw. Hmmmmmm....
  
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

• I'm a little behind on this one, but here's Part 2 of GL's coverage of the March 7th hearings.
  
  
• SCO gets a quick mention in a piece titled Open Source Software in 2006: A Year in Review. Way down the list. In a section titled "No Major Lawsuits or Legal Disputes Regarding Open Source". Snort. Giggle. Oh, and the article's at SYS-CON, formerly MOG's soapbox on the interwebs. How's that for an unkind cut?
  
  
• An opinion piece at ZDNet UK, "The politics of open source". Most of the references will be lost on anyone who doesn't follow UK politics closely, but at one point it does refer to Darl as SCO's philosopher-king. Somehow I don't think they mean that as a compliment.
  
  
• The threatened SuSE exodus doesn't seem to have happened, if the latest sales numbers are any indication.
  
  
• A nice FUD-fighting article: "'Don’t Trust Your Network to Open Source” — huh?
  
  
• But the FUD just keeps on coming. Here's the latest angry rant about Linux from Enderle. He comes across as a rather unhappy person, doesn't he?
  
  If I have time later, I may have a go at picking apart his talking points, but for right now here's a fun tidbit about one of Enderle's external sources. Note to Rob: If you put links in your piece, you can't reasonably assume people won't click on the links. And if you say The Register said something when it's actually your own piece at The Register saying it, that's bound to raise an eyebrow or two.
  
  
• The University of Nebraska has escaped Microsoft in favor of products from JasperSoft.
  
  
• While Dell continues to dither about desktop Linux, HP's making a pile of cash off of it.
  
  
• Another study on IE vs. Firefox marketshare, which puts FF at close to 40%. I generally don't trust browser marketshare numbers much; the notion is hard to define, and even harder to measure with any reliability. As for visits to SNR, FF typically to run around 65% of total traffic, with IE at 25%, and Safari around 10%. But I think it would be fair to suppose that SNR attracts people who aren't fans of IE.
  
  
• Meet HD Photo, the latest proprietary file format from M$. So sure, they're going to submit it to a standards body. They actually do that a lot these days, probably to throw the antitrust folks off the scent for a while. And yet the resulting standards never turn out to be very "open" in practice. Look at C#, for example.
  
  
• A Y! poster found this Feb. 2003 profile of BS&F at Law.com that gives some insight into how SCO's star law firm operates.
  
  Since the piece came out just before they filed the SCO v. IBM case, this passage caught my eye:
  
  

  
  Boies concedes that he has a hard time saying no to prospective clients. He is so bad at it, in fact, that he is forcing himself to delegate screenings to a partner: "I say [to a potential client], 'We're too busy, talk to Bob Silver.'"
  

  
  
  
• A new gadget from Sony for transferring video from old formats to DVD. I wouldn't have expected to see this kind of widget from them, given the company's decades-old fascination with proprietary media formats. If it only read Beta and Memory Stick, and only wrote Blu-Ray, I could kind of see that, but this reads just about everything, and writes to nearly all recordable DVD formats. Doesn't do HD-DVD, but it doesn't do Blu-Ray either actually. I guess if it did, there's no way it would run in the $200 range like it does.
  
  The article doesn't mention anything about the gadget wanting to CSS-encrypt or region code your newly-digital home movies. So either it doesn't, or that's one of those nasty little details to be discovered later on, like that music CD rootkit fiasco last year.
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

• Reports on the March 7th SCO v. IBM hearing: GL reports on the day's festivities. And on IV, eyewitness reports from lttscoparty, Ruidh, and _Arthur.
  
  
• Also on GL, a transcript of Monday's hearing.
  
  
• ITJungle on SCO's Q1 numbers. A little late, but hey.
  
  
• Intel's not upgrading its own machines to Vista until SP1 comes out.
  
  
• Wikipedia's new policy on credentials: If you claim to be an expert with credentials when editing at WP, your claims should be verifiable.
  
  
• A piece about a guy in scotland taking on a spammer. You can probably guess which side I'm for in this. Speaking of which, I haven't heard any more from ol' whatsisname in Blackpool lately. Perhaps that's a good sign, but it's probably too early to tell just yet.
  
  
• What happens if Windows Genuine Advantage wants to install on your machine, and you say no? The installer rats you out to Redmond, of course.
  
  
• On the heels of Dell dithering about whether to ship machines with Linux preinstalled, it seems that HP is thinking it over as well.
  
  
• Since the release of Vista, there seems to have been a real upsurge in IT interest in moving to Linux instead of the new Windows release. It's too soon to say whether that'll translate into a significant number of seats migrated, but here are a few stories related to the trend:
  
  
  
  • eCommerceTimes: "IT Pro Learns Lesson Through Linux Install"
    
  • SiliconValley.com: "Time to start casting the Linux 'Switch' commercials"
    
  • DesktopLinux.com: "Calif. school district aims 5,000 desktops at Linux".
    
  
  
  
• Vista's also raising new antitrust concerns. Which is about the least surprising thing I've heard all year so far.
  
  
• And the latest on Linux on Sony's PS3.
  
  
• A weird article about the growing size of corporate data, and the world's total data capacity. The words "zettabyte" and even "yottabyte" make cameos.
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

• Today brought another lull in the proceedings in SCO v. IBM, but Ruidh offers a preview of tomorrow's thrills, chills, and spills.
  
  He actually made a special trip to SLC just for the hearings. In the not-so-balmy month of March, no less. And yes, many of us envy him for making the trip. So he's earned the right to call tomorrow's PSJ motions "sexy".
  
  Yes, yes, we're all a bunch of obsessive nerds with a weird hobby. Feel free to taunt us about it, if you like. The SCO saga is sort of like a soap opera for geeks. The plot's ridiculous, the acting wooden, and the production values laughable. But you still keep tuning in to see the next day's episode anyway. You just never know what sort of crazy off-the-wall crap will happen next.
  
  
• Ok, now GL's got a new piece up about tomorrow's PSJ fiesta. Tomorrow's hearing really is a big deal, and some of the key issues in the case may get resolved as a result. But let me be the very first to go wayyyy out on a limb and predict nothing's going to be resolved tomorrow. We'll get some fun transcripts to read, but it'll all be taken under advisement, and we won't hear anything more about it for months and months. I'm just basing this on what's happened just about every single time in the past, so I guess I could be wrong.
  
  
• Speaking of travel, the FAA is thinking of ditching WIndows in favor of Linux & Google apps.
  
  
• Schools in Japan might make the switch too, mostly upgrading from Win98/Me. C'mon, you diehard Windows fans out there, just try to tell me that junking WinME doesn't count as an upgrade.
  
  
• Even the city of Birmingham (uk) may finally sort out its ongoing Linux woes, just maybe.
  
  
• An interview with a Novell exec including some enthusiastic happy talk about desktop linux. I'm not 100% sure it's on the mark, but if it makes the Y! trolls angry, it's done its job.
  
  
• One reason why I'm not 100% sure about the desktop thing is that people are still writing articles trying to dispel myths about Linux.:
  
  
• HardOCP's Consumer column spends 30 days with Linux.
  
  
• Yet another Linux item, the last for today, I promise. This one's the latest news about Linux on Atmel's AVR32 CPU family.
  
  
• Today's Xbox 360 item concerns the console's legendary reliability, or the lack thereof.
  
  
• And finally, McSweeney's offers a choice selection of jokes made for robots, by robots.
  
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

• First reports from today's PSJ hearings in SCO v. IBM. Everything taken under advisement. Nothing resolved today. Film at 11.
  
  It's come to my attention that the phrase "film at 11" tends to mystify people outside the US. As always, WIkipedia rides to the rescue. Don't tell me you don't know what "rides to the rescue" means. Sheesh.
  
• One minor new doc in the Novell case, relating to the scheduling order tweakage we heard about earlier. Zen's got it here, if you simply must read every last filing in the case. One interesting bit is that the deadline for dispositive motions is now April 13th, so we can expect to see some interesting stuff filed on or around that date.
  
• The author of that Vista activation key exploit from the other day now says the whole thing was a big fat hoax. False alarm. As you were.
  
• But here's another bit of Vista schadenfreude, from CRN: "Partners report 10 annoying Vista problems as conflicts dampen debut".
  
• A fun lil' diskless Linux doodad. As far as I can tell, the cute penguin toy is just there for scale, and doesn't come with the device.
  
• The latest software update for the Xbox 360 makes it even harder to install non-M$ OSes on the machine. But at least you don't have to upgrade to Vista 360 Edition just yet.
  
• Every now and then, I like to take a moment to poke fun at Real Journalists. If you've ever wondered why, here are two more amusing reasons, this time from the wonderful world of television. Since this is not a political blog, I won't spend any time speculating on which cable news network is likely to hire the guy in the first clip, if they ever run short of incoherent blowhards. Actually it could be any of them.
  
• If I may go even further afield for a moment, and I really mean further, here are some cool recent pics from around the solar system:
  
  
  
  • The ESA's Rosetta zipped past Mars a few days ago, on its way to a comet.
    
  • Right around the same time, New Horizons dropped by Jupiter on its way to Pluto and sent back some nice photos.
    
  • More kewl pics of Jupiter, this time from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter -- which is, yes, in orbit around Mars. Be sure to look at the "full image" link. The pic is rather huge, but it really gives you a sense of the scale of things.
    
  • And a fun movie of Comet McNaught from the STEREO solar research spacecraft.
    
  
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

Ok, there's a bit of a lull in major SCO news right now, but here's what's out on the interwebs today:

• Check out this spoof SCO commercial. Someone has way too much free time...
  
  
• A ZDNet piece from Friday on the q1 numbers.
  
  
• A blog post also about SCO's q1 numbers.
  
  
• Lamlaw chimes in about those numbers too.
  
  
• The USPTO's finally issued a cry for help. Seems they've realized the current system is so broken that even advice from random people on the internet will probably improve it. Ok, well, at any rate, the first step is to admit you have a problem.
  
  
• Today's small blast from the recent past: Remember that big announcement back in '05, when SCO had supposedly convinced Cymphonix (a Utah network gear startup) to switch its product line from Linux to OSR6? Haven't heard much about that lately, have we? The company's press release page doesn't mention SCO anywhere. Ok, so I don't see the word "Linux" featured prominently either, and I guess that's not surprising. If you sell a product as a drop-in "appliance", you don't spend a lot of time talking about what OS it runs.
  
  If you read the 2005 PR closely, you'll see that they only agreed to look at porting their software to OSR6. So I'm guessing that, like most forward-looking press releases, this stuff never actually happened.
  
  
• More antivirus trouble for Vista. Maybe some genius in Redmond decided that since Vista's virusproof, the M$ antivirus tool doesn't actually have to work. That's the best theory I've got right now, anyway.
  
  
• Someone up in Redmond must be getting worried about Vista vs. OSX, if the latest Enderle FUD is any indication.
  
  
• Rant-For-Rent Rob is also peeved that Intel and AMD are spending so much time and money focusing on the future and advancing CPU technology, and trying to compete with each other, instead of focusing just on immediate quarterly results.
  
  I'm not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work, there, Rob. Making CPUs is a capital-intensive business with a fairly long development cycle, and the history books are littered with once-proud CPU architectures whose makers didn't invest enough in staying competitive. Remember the Motorola 68000 series, or the 6502?
  
  
• Probably don't need to cover the Eclipse jet saga quite as closely, now that Dayjet Eddie's left the SCO BoD. But here's the latest anyway. It's just one problem after another.
  
  
• A piece about the upcoming Daylight Savings apocalypse. I'm surprised local TV news stations haven't picked up on this yet and started running panic stories about the upcoming "Y2K7 Disaster". It's sweeps month and everything. I'd be the perfect scare story, if someone was naughty enough to tell them about it.
  
  No, no, I'm not going to do that. But you have to admit it'd be a hoot. And think of the consulting cash to be made going around editing /etc/TIMEZONE for terrified PHBs at $500/hr. Sigh. I could be so freakin' rich if it wasn't for these pesky ethics...
  
  
• RIM's CEO is out due to options trouble. Doesn't really have much to do with SCO, really; it's just that one part of being a Crackberry addict is the absolute conviction that the rest of the world envies you and wants to take your precious gadget away. Trust me, I know what I'm talking about here. Whether it's M$, or those bastards at NTP, or some pesky government regulators, or whatever, there's always a conspiracy afoot.
  
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

New on Pacer: ORDER DENYING SCO’S MOTION FOR RELIEF RE SPOLIATION (IBM-973).

It's a very brief doc, which reads:

Plaintiff and Counterclaim-Defendant The SCO Group, Inc.’s (“SCO’s”) Motion for Relief for IBM’s Spoliation of Evidence came before the Court for hearing on January 18, 2007. Mark James appeared for SCO. Todd Shaughnessy appeared for Defendant and Counterclaim-Plaintiff International Business Machines Corporation (“IBM”). The Court, having considered both parties’ papers, having heard argument of counsel, and for good cause appearing,
IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that SCO’s motion is denied for the reasons set forth by the Court at the hearing held on January 18, 2007.
DATED this 2nd day of March, 2007.
BY THE COURT
____________________________
Brooke C. Wells Magistrate Judge

Nelson: "Ha, ha!".

I seem to be quoting Nelson a lot lately.

Updated: It's on GL now, along with some scheduling minutiae in the the NOVL case. People who are more cynical and conspiracy-minded than I might note that deposition deadline and start planning a "Welcome Back PJ" party for April 1st.

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

• More coverage of SCO's Q1 numbers at The Inq and eWeek (SJVN). The dominant theme in both is that the company's starting to get the red ink under control, so the SCO circus won't be leaving town any time soon. Which is actually fine by me. I'd much rather see them lose in the courtroom than just run out of money and shut down.
  
  
• GL reports on yesterday's SCO v. IBM hearing. It sounds like SCO's still trying to use various bits of "evidence" that Wells already tossed out. We'll see what that gets them.
  
  IBM showed several videotaped depositions during the hearing. I doubt Pacer's set up to handle video exhibits, so I wonder if they'd consider putting them up on YouTube or something? I kind of doubt that, but it'd be kind of interesting. Ok, kind of interesting to those few of us out here who get a tad obsessive about these things. Mea culpa....
  
  
• In a move that may please other obsessive types, the Fedora project's doing a bit of package cleanup and license policing.
  
  
• Ooh, looky, another product announcement that mentions SCO. VArmour is some sort of security product that now runs on Vista, and will be available on UnixWare 7.1.4 by Q1 2008. So you've actually got another year to wait if you need the magic VArmour+UnixWare combo. UW 7.1.4 is an odd choice in this day and age. It sounds like one of those ports you do just to make one large customer happy. I've been there myself. Not with SCO OSes, thankfully, but I've been there.
  
  
• The Inq reports that Vista's activation scheme has been pwn3d. But other than being able to say "ha ha" in your best Nelson voice, why on earth would you want to do this? Getting a free copy of Vista is like getting a free bucket of cobras. Just because you didn't pay for it doesn't make it a good idea.
  
  Anyone who gets tripped up while pirating non-free copyrighted material won't get a sympathetic ear here. But the activation scheme hack can also trip up innocent folks as well: Grandma goes and buys a PC at Wal-Mart, mostly to stay in touch with the grandkids, with a little World of Warcraft on the side. When she gets it home, Vista needs to phone home to the mothership and activate itself, but someone's already guessed and used her machine's activation key. MS labels her a pirate, no Vista for you!
  
  Great plan, BillG. Just great.
  
  
• The BBC has a new piece on Vista as well. Upgrading to Vista proved to be a semi-simple matter of buying a new video card, upgrading a bunch of software, dedicating a full day to getting it running, and dealing with everything that breaks that Vista's upgrade advisor fails to warn you about. Nice.
  
  On top of everything else, the author even had to troll eBay looking for Rambus memory for his Dell. And his older PocketPC (running the 2002 version of the OS) won't speak to Vista at all, even though they're both Microsoft OSes. Niiiiiiice.
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

The CC was kind of amusing this time. Darl says the company's "undervalued", and called SCO's court opponents "enemies", so I think he's taking this a little personally. Headcount's way down to 123 now, because 20 additional people "fell out" through "transitioning", and it's all Linux's fault, but they've got some sort of OpenServer+Me Inc fusion product in the works, and once it takes off and they win the lawsuits, they'll reverse that pesky 90% decline in Unix revenue real soon now. Or at least that's what they say when talking to a clueless investment type -- this time "Hank Feinstein" from "Gagnon Securities" who's already bought about 400k shares without having a clue about what the litigation's all about. Okayyyyy....

• Some early news coverage:
  
  
  
  • InternetNews.
    
  • The Register
    
  • TechSpot.
    
  
  
  
• If you'd prefer something a little less polished, I was posting to IV as I listened to the call, so my notes are in three parts: [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3]. When I say it isn't polished, I'm not kidding. I'm linking to it mostly because I don't have time to do a big writeup about the call just now.
  
  
• Or if you'd rather just listen to the call yourself, there's a torrent of the call here -- it's a 16MB Ogg, so it may not be the thing for you dialup users out there.
  

Haven't seen any reports from the courtroom yet, but I'll link to those when I see 'em.

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

SCO's Q1 earnings numbers are out, in the form of an 8K with their Q1/07 earnings press release attached.

The bottom line:

Revenue for the first quarter of fiscal year 2007 was $6,015,000, down from $7,343,000 for the comparable quarter of the prior year. The net loss for the first quarter of fiscal year 2007 was $(1,024,000), or $(0.05) per diluted common share, an improvement over the net loss of $(4,581,000), or $(0.23) per diluted common share, for the comparable quarter of the prior year.

...

Cash and cash equivalents, available-for-sale marketable securities and restricted cash to be used for certain legal expenses totaled $11,616,000 as of January 31, 2007, compared to $12,664,000 as of October 31, 2006.

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

• It's CC time again. I'll try to listen in this time, and either way I'll report on the festivities later on.



• SCO filed a Schedule 14A form yesterday, which is juicier than it sounds. We already knew Dayjet Ed wasn't running for reelection. Now we learn that they're not replacing him, and they're just shrinking the board from 8 to 7 members now. So even the BOD is downsizing, apparently. Another interesting tidbit is that Sontag's no longer listed among the exec staff in the stock disclosure section. You have to wonder exactly what that means.
  
  Panglozz has sorted through all the eye-glazing verbiage and explains the disclosure stuff in plain English. In short: Most BOD members don't own any SCO stock now. They didn't even buy any after getting appointed, as a symbolic vote of confidence or anything. Likewise, the exec staff isn't buying SCO stock either, despite having an ESOP plan in place and everything. So the guys who aren't voting with their feet yet are at least voting with their wallets. I guess they don't want any of their own money riding on this POS.
  



• Oh, there's also a hearing on a slew of PSJ motions in SCO v. IBM scheduled for today in front of Judge Kimball. When it rains, it pours, I guess. When I see any reports from the courtroom, I'll post 'em here.
  
  
• A couple new SCO v. IBM filings in ibm case. Doc 970 is just a notice about today's hearing. 971 concerns an excerpt from a deposition by one Lawrence Bouffard, a deposition actually taken as part of the Novell case (or so the doc says). It's a bit of bickering over APA terms and such, and I'm not sure what point they're trying to prove with it. I imagine we'll hear more about this thing in today's hearing.
  
  
• A Y! poster got a chance to play with UnixWare the other day. His impressions here.
  

It feels sort of weird to include semi-OT items on a big news day, but I'd already accumulated a few, and here they are.

• The latest fun bit of malware: A blog worm that spreads itself through blogspam, among other things.
  
  
  
• Some poor sap at Macworld installed XP on his Intel Mac on a lark, left it running, and was shocked to discover he'd ended up with a boatload of worms and spyware.
  
  
• IHT on Vista's upgrade weirdness.
  
  
• Canon takes a $5.6M hit in a patent case involving a small, money-losing US firm.
  
  
• More fun litigious IP madness. This time, a certain litigious celebrity psychic has trademarked her own name, in an effort to silence internet critics. She's even got a lawyer going around threatening critics with trademark infringement simply for mentioning her in a negative light. You must read the response letter by the critic's attorney. Talk about not taking any prisoners. Wow. Awesome.
  
  
• Move over, IPv6 and ten-digit local dialing. Seems the world is rapidly running out if ISBN numbers, so they'll be migrating to 13 digits from the current 10. And people say that printed books are dying out. Ha!
  
  
• Archos has a new portable media widget with a builtin camcorder. Kewl.
  
  
• China invents the Borg pigeon.
  
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech