SCO News Roundup

• Before we get to the news, it's come to my attention that this humble blog has broken the top 250,000 sites on the interwebs. We're number 230,094! W00t!
  
  To celebrate, I'm going to go to the beach for a few days. Before anyone asks, no, nobody's trying to subpoena me, at least not that I'm aware of. Not really a health break either, although my big toe's been bothering me for a couple of weeks now. It's just a quick mini-vacation, and I should be back early next week.
  
  So if my usual luck holds, SCO will implode sometime in the next few days. I mean, don't make any investment decisions based on my usual luck or anything. I'm just saying it's my usual luck.
  
  
• Anywayyy, AMD just donated servers to Groklaw. Which is nice to see, and hopefully it'll cut down on the panicked "GL DOWN!?!?" messages you see on the boards every few weeks.
  
  I wonder what SCO and friend(s) will have to say about this?
  
  
• Earlier on GL: Fun with the Kim Madsen deposition. It's kind of long, but PJ helpfully highlights the interesting parts. The longer the deposition goes on, the more damaging it gets to SCO's case, and like PJ says, it's pretty surprising that SCO chose to attach this to their PSJ filing instead of sealing it in a lead box and burying it somewhere out in the desert. D'oh!
  
  
• Day 2 of a promised week of debunking SCO's allegations, from the good Mr. Sizz. In which we learn that numerous claims are based on brief comments on a mailing list. Claim #61, for instance, asserts that SCO deserves billions of dollars because of the sentence "Similar work on PTX for Oracle had shown good TLB savings". Oops, you were just exposed to a super-secret SCO method and/or concept. Sorry about that.
  
  
• And here's Day 3. In which we discover that the idea of making the lowest page in memory non-writable is also a super-secret SCO method and/or concept, and that IBM owes SCO even more billions for it, even though Linux has done this since at least 1994. A quick search shows a non-Unix OS that did the same thing in 1995. Oh, and Windows doesn't let you touch the first page of memory either. Man, this could be really lucrative for SCO, well, um, except that the idea isn't theirs....
  
  
  
• Every few days, it seems, someone discovers another piece of open-source code still being distributed from SCO's website. This time it's Caldera's own NKFS filesystem.
  
  
• More fodder for nutty IP trolls in Utah, this time in the guise of the state's new "Trademark Protection Act" More stories at SL Trib and WebProNews
  
  And unsurprisingly, the EFF opposes the new law.
  
  So who's behind this thing? Well, here's a "guest blog" post promoting the law on the Utah Senate's website. The byline on the article describes the author as "Matthew Prince, Adjunct Professor of Law, John Marshall Law School". But as the SL Trib article notes, that's not his current occupation:
  

  
  The Trademark Protection Act is the creation of Unspam's Prince, father of the controversial child-protection registry. That law, which is being challenged in court by a pornography trade group, requires companies that sell adult-oriented products and services to submit their e-mail lists to Unspam to be "scrubbed" of e-mail addresses to which minors have access. The cost is half a cent for every address they submit.
  Likewise, Prince has positioned himself to benefit from the new law. If the state decides to hire an outside company to manage the database of registered trademarks, and if the deal is financially attractive, Prince said he might create a company and bid on the contract.
  The entrepreneur insisted that wasn't his primary motivation in pushing the bill. The idea, he said, came out of a class he taught two years ago at The John Marshall Law School in Chicago
  

  
  
  You remember UnSpam, right? They're the company behind Utah's "Child Protection Registry", and they made the news last October after failing to conceal kids' email addresses. Note that their high-powered attorney is Brent O. Hatch, who you may recognize from his work for SCO. Apparently the guy specializes in hopeless damage control jobs.
  
  
• A breather in the courts yesterday; only action was Boies himself being admitted pro hac vice in both cases, so now there's a nonzero possibility he might show up in person on SCO's behalf. If he does, probably there'll be an alert to local news media beforehand, in the hope there'll be a gaggle of TV cameras watching him walk into court in his usual sneakers and thrift-store suit.
  
  
• More SCO hypocrisy: In the IBM case, some of their allegations concern System V IPC, but they themselves are still distributing SysV IPC code for Linux.
  IMHO they can keep SysV IPC. It's evil, and they can keep it as far as I'm concerned.
  
  
• The next PalmOS: Linux. They've been dithering about it for years, following an earlier misbegotten attempt to create a BeOS-derived PalmOS. Looks like they finally made up their minds.
  
  How this will affect your 100% totally mission-critical Treo-based Me Inc. apps remains TBD.
  
  
• Speaking of Linux (which I've been known to do on occasion), here's a review of Cedega 6.0, the gaming app I mentioned the other day. They seem to like it: More supported games, and performance about par with XP, and wayyy better than Vista. Nice.
  
  
• Yet another IBM chip breakthrough. They've figured out how to run vertical wires thru chips to create layered 3D chip modules. Okay. Wake me up when they come up with 4D chip modules.
  
  
• SJVN tries to clear up the FreeType/SuSE controversy, pointing out that it's not a result of the M$-Novell deal. Which is good to know, certainly.
  
  
• Sony's dropping the low-end PS3, because nobody's buying it. So now if you want to
  
  
• By year's end, you won't be able to buy a new PC with WinXP preinstalled. Why? Because M$ said so. Vista Is The Future. Resistance Is Futile.
  
  
• I always say this is not a political blog, and it isn't, so I'll just pass this item along without further comment: "Cheney is target of rare protest at Brigham Young"
  
  
• A proposal to sponsor a Linux car at the Indy 500. Hmm. I dunno. It might be cheaper to just hand out Ubuntu CDs to each race fan at the gate.
  
  
• I'd just like to point out that I got through this whole post without mentioning any pro-SCO "journalists" by name, not even once. I'm not sure I'll be able to manage that every day, but today it felt really good.
  
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

By brx0 @ 9:22 AM