SCO News Roundup

• 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

By brx0 @ 10:55 AM