SCO News Roundup

• 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

By brx0 @ 10:38 PM