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

By brx0 @ 2:42 PM