SCO News Roundup

• 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

By brx0 @ 7:57 AM