SCO News Roundup

• Groklaw and Lamlaw on IBM's latest response to SCO's re-renewed re-reconsideration charade. You've just got to love that Alice in Wonderland reference.
  
  
• Slashdot and Ars Technica both cover Friday's flurry of PSJ motions from Novell. It also shows up on Digg too.
  
  
• Also see Lamlaw on the Braham and Amadia declarations.
  
  
• The latest piece on SCO in India, in which SCO's country manager discusses his bright hopes for the future, even giving a 5% marketshare target for Me Inc. this year. By all appearances, the guy really believes he works for a real company, not a litigation factory, the poor sap.
  
  
• Actually today's sort of a nano-bonanza for Me Inc. coverage, since there's also a new HipCheck article at IT Week. The big occasion is the impending May release of HipCheck 1.0.3. Seems SCO's adding Solaris support on the server side, but Vista support still isn't ready. On the client side, it sounds like they've got a Java (J2ME) version of the client, which will (supposedly) run on your phone, Blackberry, etc. Please note that I said your Blackberry, not mine.
  
  If you don't have a Windows Mobile gadget, or a Java smartphone, you aren't completely out of luck. Here's a howto on running J2ME apps under Linux. Heh, heh. I mean, if HipCheck phones home and SCO sues you for running it on Linux, or sends MOG around to peek in your windows or something, don't go blaming me for it. I'm just saying it might be possible, not that there's any conceivable reason you might want to try it.
  
  
• The latest short interest numbers are out. Looks like even short sellers are losing interest in SCO. Not too surprising really; it can only go down another 98 cents per share, still not a lot of money to be made there. Still, the short interest is still at over 2M shares, which tells me I'll probably never understand the short mindset.
  
  (I've probably said this before, but I will again just so it's perfectly clear: I don't have any position in SCO stock, short or long, never have, never will. Not even to buy a symbolic one share, suitable for framing. And if you short stock, any stock, you're wayyy more adventurous with your money than I am with mine.)
  
  
• It's happy 25th birthday to the ZX Spectrum. OT retrotech items usually end up towards the bottom of SNR posts, but this ZDNet piece about the anniversary actually mentions SCO. No, SCO hasn't sued anyone over ownership of the valuable and super-secret Spectrum IP, at least not yet. It's about Novell digging up those old Amendment 2 docs, thus demonstrating the value of open document formats and backwards compatibility.
  
  
• More Ralphie+CP80 coverage from Broadband Reports and TechBlorge
  
  
• I think I've figured out the real reason behind Ralphie's assault on open wireless networks and Utah ISPs. The primary target of the proposal seems to be XMission, a Utah ISP and wireless provider. Pete Ashdown, the company's CEO, was the one witness in opposition quoted in the media coverage of the recent hearings. As one of the posters in the IV thread notes, Ashdown's views about copyrights are about as different from Ralphie's as they could possibly be.
  
  Oh, and in an amazing coincidence, Ashdown was also last year's Democratic challenger to Sen. Orrin Hatch, and he polled better than expected (although he still lost by a wide margin). Ralphie's been a big financial backer of Sen. Hatch in the past, and of course Brent Hatch is one of SCO's top lawyers. So if you're cynical like me, you might get to thinking it's not a total coincidence, and maybe someone's trying to suck up to influential politicians and arrange to be owed a few favors.
  
  If I may paraphrase Clausewitz (badly), it seems that in Utah, politics is the continuation of business by other means, and vice versa.
  
  (Since this is not a political blog, and because it is a cynical blog, I'd like to point out there are plenty of places around the country where the same basic scenario could easily occur, but with the D's and R's reversed. It's just that this particular case involves people connected to SCO.)
  
  
• I don't like having to stick "nonpolitical blog" disclaimers on two successive items, but I probably ought to. So that we're clear on this, I'm linking to this opinion piece purely because of one analogy it uses, saying of recent media coverage of Iran: "It makes Darl McBride (CEO SCO Group) look like the Oracle at Delphi." Ow! A clever analogy really; the author manages to insult both Darl and the media, by comparing them to each other.
  
  
• Yet another free speech issue: Don't discuss bar exam questions on the net, OR ELSE!!!
  
  
• From /., A piece about the Best & Worst Internet Laws.
  
  
• One of the laws on the "worst laws" list mentions the act establishing the rarely used, "child-friendly" .kids.us domain. As the list of domains shows, it hasn't had a lot of uptake so far. So there's already a way for people (parents, schools, the whole state of Utah) to voluntarily wall themselves off from the rest of the scary interwebs if they want to. I'd forgotten all about the .kids.us thing, and I note that CP80 never breathes a word about it (because they wouldn't make a cent off of it, I expect).
  
  
• The Inq: Microsoft admits Vista failure.
  
  
• Apple tangles with yet another patent troll.
  
  
• If you enjoyed the post with the bunnies I linked to a few days ago, you might also like this one with assorted baby animals.
  
  
• And here's something to give the CP80 loons fresh nightmares. Sure, they're going to protect us from the naughty, naughty interwebs. But now they've got naughty, naughty robots to worry about as well.
  
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

By brx0 @ 3:57 PM