SCO News Roundup

• 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

By brx0 @ 12:47 AM