SCO News Roundup

• Those of us who (thankfully) don't own SCO stock and weren't eligible to attend today's big shareholder shindig can still read the proxy statement filed about it on Edgar. It was actually filed back in February but I didn't pay too much attention to it at time. They're reelecting the board, and reappointing the same accounting firm, so it sounds as though they like the deck chairs just the way they are. The director bios mention that Darcy Mott is now a part-time ThinkAtomic employee, which I hadn't heard before. My, how the mighty have fallen.
  
  
• Still no word about any deficiency letter, but the stock kind of tanked today, back down to 0.89 after almost beating the magic $1 closing bid mark for a couple of days.
  
  
• I usually put SCO product announcements at the top of SNR posts, partly out of a residual sense of fairness, and partly because they're just so rare these days. But today I think the financial stuff is bigger news, so this one only rates #3. Remember that DayTimer Me Inc. app SCO's been promising for something like a year now? Seems that the "DT4" app is finally available, but it looks like you can only get it in India for the time being. Either that, or SCO's domestic PR machine is asleep at the wheel, or they're too busy playing Freecell, or they all got downsized recently.
  
  Toward the bottom, the PR mentions that Day-Timers will market the app in a "phased manner", which I imagine means they're not actually selling it right now, and may or may not do so in the future. So if you really want it, you'll have to get it from your friendly neighborhood SCO reseller. Yes, a few of them still exist, or so I've heard. I think a lot of them switched to Maytag repair in recent years, but maybe your neighborhood has one of the last holdouts. If you do, I'll bet he has some fascinating stories to tell about the good ol' days, and plenty of time to tell 'em, too.
  
  
• 2 new GL articles:
  The Declaration of Kenneth Brakebill - exhibits re the 4 new Novell SJ motions
  
  Selected Copyright Principles, as text -- Addendum A to IBM's Sur-Reply
  
  The second one is pretty funny, actually, as IBM patiently explains what copyright law does, and doesn't do, as if they were talking to a room of reasonably bright 7th graders. They never overtly say anything insulting about SCO, but it's not hard to imagine IBM's lawyers sighing and rolling their eyes as they wrote the thing.
  
  
• A curious tale about OSR6's support for Windows Media files. According to sk43999's latest research, SCO's been distributing some Microsoft DLLs and claiming they're GPL'd, which they obviously aren't. Ahh, you've got to love SCO's typical competence and attention to detail...
  
  
• Maxthon, the Firefox killer? Apparently it's a new browser out of China. I've never used it, myself. The article says it's nice, but it's based on IE and only runs on Windows. This isn't the first attempt I've seen to build a "browser" that basically wraps a nicer skin around IE internals. I've seen this on and off ever since IE4 or so, when the browser became a jumble of COM objects awkwardly "integrated" with the operating system (Active Desktop, anyone? Channel bar?) -- and all the previous attempts went nowhere.
  
  
• While we're talking about browsers, a piece on Firefox vs Safari on the Mac.
  
  
• A somewhat relevant retrotech item, from mists of Unix history, OMU, or "One Man Unix", with source if you've got sufficiently ancient hardware lying around somewhere. Actually a lot of present-day microcontrollers are descended from Motorola's 6809... and come to think of it, I'm pretty sure my dryer has one of those. Ah, if only I had time to tinker with stuff like that...
  
  
• InformationWeek says 30% of businesses have no plans to "upgrade" to Vista. Of course, many of them will be forced to upgrade anyway after January 1, when XP is mostly withdrawn from the market.
  
  
• One reluctant upgrader is NASA. They're still planning on a Vista rollout, but it's been delayed a few months. I love this Ballmer quote: "Vista has been anything but banned from most parts of the U.S. federal government". Way to spin-doctor it, Steve.
  
  
• And The Reg compares present-day M$ to the old IBM stagnant and clueless in the late 80's and early 90's. The article says they need a Lou Gerstner of their own to straighten things out. In other words, present management has to go before anything changes. Personally I'd be quite happy to see them keep bumbling along on their current course, wasting amazing amounts of money and overextending itself by trying to have a finger in every last pie in the tech sector, from cable tv to music players, to search engines to databases and joysticks. I agree with the article in that something's gotta give eventually, but not just yet. Let 'em keep stagnating while they can, as far as I'm concerned.
  
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

By brx0 @ 9:32 AM