SCO News Roundup

Everything taken under advisement, no rulings from the bench, like always. Big surprise there. GL's got the early reports here, although nothing really juicy yet.

We do know that SCO's last-minute submissions were simply ignored today, at Kimball's order. I wonder how much cash SCO just wasted on those new expert reports? After years of smug stalling tactics, it's nice to see they've switched over into frantic flailing mode. That'll probably mean even more delay, but at least it's more enjoyable to watch.

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

• Nothing from the courtroom yet, but check out this latest zaniness. Seems that SCO's been watching too many old Perry Mason reruns, and thought they could introduce new materials right before today's hearing, giving Novell no opportunity to read it properly, much less any time to respond. Novell, understandably, is Not Happy.
  
  I expect that made for highly entertaining hearings today, the kind of thing professional diplomats call a "frank exchange of views".
  
  
• Here's an outdoor activities calendar for the Lindon area. Seems that someone with SCO would like to invite you on an evening hike to a remote canyon off in the desert. Yeah, that sounds like a great idea. Yikes.
  
  
• An uninformative bit on SecurityFocus about a vulnerability within OpenServer's audit facility. It's actually an old vunerability from 2005, but shows up because the bug report was just updated. I can't tell what was updated, though. The bug report says the problem still hasn't been patched.
  
  
• Good news out of Seattle, for once: They've busted one of the top 10 "Spam Kings". Something tells me this'll just drive more of the spam "industry" offshore, but hey, it's a start.
  
  
• If you like open source software, you'll love open source beer. Mmm.... Beer....
  
  
• In gadget news, the AppleTV gets a bigger HD, and now you don't have to do it yourself.
  
  
• A bit about Google Maps' new "Street View" feature, currently debuting with a bunch of cities that I'm not interested in. Amazon used to do this with their late, lamented A9 Maps, and I found it surprisingly handy. Knowing the street address of your destination is nice, but you can't beat knowing what the building actually looks like.
  
  I was kind of hoping A9 would pull it off, since the whole all-Google all-the-time thing is starting to grate on me a little. But Amazon bailed on it, so I guess Google Maps it is. Sigh.
  
  
• David Pogue's take on the M$ "Surface" beastie, @ NYT.
  
  
• A bit about yesterday's Gates + Jobs mano a mano.
  
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

• Another round of hearings in the Novell case today, with leftovers heard on June 4th. No news yet, obviously, but I'll link to it when I hear anything.
  
  
• Right on the heels of that second hearing, SCO's Q2 earnings call will be held after the markets close on June 5th.
  
  
• Yesterday was the 3rd consecutive close over a dollar for SCO's stock. Another seven days of that and they'll be off delisting watch, for all the good it'll do 'em.
  
  
• You might've seen the oohing and aahing over M$'s new "Surface" coffee-table computer. I'm dubious, myself, and not just because it's a Microsoft product. What happens the first time you spill a brewski on the surface, it interprets the spill as a "gesture", and deletes all your files? Great. Just great. Oh, and coffee tables tend to sit right in the middle of a room, and now you'll need to run a power cord and maybe a network drop to it, giving you a couple more things to trip over on your way to the fridge for a replacement brewski.
  
  Besides, it isn't even new. Think of Dillinger's cool desk in Tron, for one thing. You may recall that Dillinger was the bad guy, and made his fortune swiping other programmers' innovations. Hmm. Remind you of anyone?
  
  As you might expect, the Mac community is skeptical. I imagine it's more than the eternal Mac vs. Windows thing this time, too. If the stereotype holds any water at all, a substantial number of Mac folks are affluent design-geek types, and it's unlikely they'll want to redecorate their living rooms around an ugly coffee table from Redmond, even if they do redecorate often enough to keep up with the usual PC obsolescence cycle.
  
  Rumor has it that SCO's already hard at work on a competing product, the OpenServer bidet. The target market remains unclear right now, but at least it fits in with the company's core competencies.
  
  
• CRN says Vista isn't more secure than WinXP. Film at 11.
  
  
• The M$ patent FUD is still generating copy. Here's an unintentionally hilarious screed from an M$ fanboi. M$ Word already flags grammar issues with a green underline. Wouldn't it be nice if it could do that for illogical, poor-quality writing, too?
  
  
• PC World on the brave new world of Web 2.0 security, or more precisely, the lack thereof. Yikes.
  
  
• On the same day the Surface surfaced, Palm unveiled a decidedly non-palm-sized device, the new Palm Foleo. It's sort of a Linux subnotebook device with flash instead of an hd. I think it looks kind of cool, although mine seems to be a minority opinion. The cool kids at Engadget aren't impressed, for one thing.
  
  This isn't the only gadget of its kind. Most coverage of the Foleo mentions Nokia's N800, and I seem to recall that Sharp had/has a similar Linux-based Zaurus gadget, which they only sold in Japan. And let's not forget the late, lamented Psion gadgetry of years past. Oh, and word on the street is that we may see a flash-based subnotebook from Apple sometime later this year. Call me a cynic, but something tells me that the same people who say they just don't get it coming from Palm will dance in the streets when the Apple version ships. That's just how the industry works, I'm afraid.
  
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

• The stock's up again today, for still-unknown reasons. No news of any kind, still, not even any more content-free Me Inc. PR. So I lean towards the shorts covering / short squeeze hypothesis. I suppose it could be some sort of collusive insider scheme, but I always tend to favor alternatives that don't require a conspiracy. It's not that I don't think they'd try it, it's just that I don't think they'd have suddenly become competent at pump-n-dumping after all these years. If you ask me, the very "success" of the runup argues against anyone at SCO having a hand in causing it.
  
  
• A SYS-CON piece about Novell, M$, EFF, patents, etc. The byline is ".NETDJ News Desk", but it sure reads like a MOG piece. Blech.
  
  
• More assorted articles about SCO, M$, Novell, the EFF, patents, etc., at InfoWorld, ZDNet, InformationWeek, Ars Technica. These probably all deserve more analysis than I'm giving them, but it's a busy day, and it's sunny outside (a rarity here in Oregon), and so I'll just pass the links along for your enjoyment. GL has sort of a roundup of recent media coverage around the whole mess. The gist of it all is that SCO is/was just the opening act in Microsoft's anti-F/OSS jihad, and the main event is still to come.
  
  
• SCO & M$ both get a mention in this piece about another company spewing patent fud.
  
  
• Comments from Moglen about his stepping back at EFF. The proposed SCO gag order gets a quick mention.
  
  
• A product announcement that mentions SCO OSes briefly. No, I don't think this accounts for today's big runup.
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

Well, I said I'd update you if I heard anything about why SCO closed up nearly 30 cents today. Nothing so far. Nada. There are a few inconsequential (and sealed) filings on Pacer, but that's nowhere near enough to account for today's financial excitement. A number of theories are floating around right now, suggesting it's due to shorts covering, or fear of SCO getting booted from the Russell Microcap Index, or investor confusion due to great numbers from the French firm Scor SA (ticker symbol "SCO"). But no obvious candidate stands out yet, and I'll happily defer to the financial experts on this item. What we do know is that the courts didn't do anything interesting today, unfortunately. On the bright side, this means we -- or those of us in the US, anyway -- can spend the 3-day weekend outside doing something unproductive, instead of poring over legal PDFs. It's a great relief, let me tell you. For those of you outside the US, as you were. Y'all get, like, six months of paid vacation every year, required by law. Don't begrudge us our piddly little 3-day weekend, ok? Thanks.

In lieu of any long-awaited rulings, here's a great example of what not to do in court, if you're an attorney.

And for your Memorial Day weekend enjoyment, you might enjoy this video clip of The Kill -9 Song.

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

The stock's way up today for unexplained reasons. No press releases, and nothing on EDGAR so far. Maybe there'll be some news after the markets close. Good news, bad news, I really couldn't guess at this point. It's strange, either way.

Yesterday the court scheduled some more PSJ hearings in the Novell case. That news made it to Slashdot -- and Groklaw, of course -- but that's not the sort of news that would make the stock jump 25% percent in a day, which is what's happening right now.

Updates if/when we learn what the heck is going on....

Updated: A comment on GL mentions a new IBM filing, but it's just a further stipulated extension of time on various deadlines. So we still don't have our explanation, I think.

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

• Couple of new press releases from Lindon today. Product-related and everything. The first one: " The SCO Group, Inc. and Genisys Software, Inc. Announce the Availability of a Mobile Workforce Automation Solution for Equipment Rental and Point of Sale Software". Me Inc. PR about a custom app they cooked up for a partner of theirs. I don't know enough about the equipment rental software segment to know whether this is a useful development or not. I didn't even know there was such a thing as equipment rental software, quite honestly, so I suspect SCO's pursuing an exceedingly small niche. Maybe the equipment rental biz will go hog-wild for this stuff, for all I know. But even if they do, I don't expect we'll see a blip on SCO's bottom line.
  
  Genisys Software's press release page doesn't mention the big announcement. So clearly it's bigger news for SCO than it is for them. This seems to happen a lot with SCO. Almost always, in fact. Funny, that.
  
  The announcement does get a quick mention here, on a page that indicates the equipment rental software segment is far more crowded than I ever would've anticipated.
  
  
• The other PR for today informs us of the arrival of HipCheck 1.0.3. This isn't really the newest of news; I linked to a story about the upcoming release exactly a month ago. In a way, I really feel for the HipCheck team. They added support for Solaris, UnixWare 7.x, and Win2k, so adding Linux would probably be a no-brainer from both a technical and a sales standpoint. It's just that Darl, Ralphie and the other PHBs won't allow it, for purely ideological reasons. That kind of behavior usually isn't the hallmark of a company with a future, is all I'm saying.
  
  
• A bit about Ralphie's pro-CP80 documentary. The post itself is just the press release, which we've seen already, but there's a short & somewhat interesting user comments section discussing the merits of the proposal.
  
  
• Those tasty Dell Linux boxes go on sale today.
  
  
• A WSJ event next week promises to deliver Bill Gates & Steve Jobs together on stage. Enderle pipes up with the super-useful observation that the two guys are like night and day. I guess that's why he makes the big bucks.
  
  
• As you may have heard, Jack Thompson (you know, the video game lawyer from Florida) has declared jihad against Microsoft over Halo 3.
  
  
• Someone's come up with a proof-of-concept OpenOffice worm. Yow. At least it hasn't been seen in the wild so far, unlike all the M$ Office worms out there. The funny part is that depending on the OS it runs on, it drops additional proof-of-concept script viruses on the machine. On Linux, the "malware" is coded in Perl and Python, and on OSX you get two naughty Ruby scripts. So clearly somone had a lot of fun putting this thing together, and had nothing better to do with their time.
  
  Sky: still not falling.
  
  
• HP just landed a big $5.6B deal with NASA, to supply machines with "Linux and Unix capabilities", as the story puts it. By Unix they probably mean HP-UX, although HP does still have a bit of a partnership with SCO. I've never heard of NASA using SCO OSes for anything, but I suppose it's possible. Maybe once the promised moon colony is up and running, a decade or so from now, they'll eventually need a McDonalds of their own, and a SCO box to run it. It's like the pro-SCO trolls used to say: "To the moon!!!"
  
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

One thing I ought to have mentioned yesterday is that among the pile of SCO filings was an unsealed declaration by one G. Gervaise Davis III. Discussion at Groklaw and Lamlaw.

He's a semi-retired IP lawyer, and he tries to explain what agreements like the OldSCO-Novell APA deal "usually" mean. Novell came up with the people who actually negotiated the deal, and they explained quite clearly what they had in mind at the time. SCO just has a guy who had nothing at all to do with the deal, but who has an extremely long resume. They appear to be arguing, now, that Novell accidentally transferred the copyrights, despite their intentions, and despite the plain wording of the asset purchase agreement. It's a stupid and nonsensical argument, but it's all SCO's got at this point.
It's important to see the Davis declaration in context. SCO's using it to try to fend off a looming PSJ motion. To do that, they don't actually have to prove that the copyrights really did transfer. They just have to convince the judge there are disputed facts around the issue, and the truth of the matter can only be resolved by a jury. That's all they need to accomplish right now, but even that might be a hard sell. Davis's argument is all about legal opinions, not disputed facts.

That's a strange bit, by the way. Davis is a lawyer, and he offers his professional legal opinion in his declaration. Yet SCO presents him as an expert witness, not as another attorney working on SCO's cases. I'm no lawyer, but this seems like dirty pool. They're making a nutty argument, and not really taking responsibility for it. Is this really SCO's position in the case, or isn't it?

After reading the declaration, one has to wonder who this Gervaise guy is. Well, details are starting to emerge. Over on IV, a great bit of research by Spanishinquisition brings some fun details to light. Gervaise Davis has been around the block a few times, and happened to work for Digital Research back when they failed to land the OS contract for the original IBM PC. Seems he argued against signing an NDA with IBM, for some reason, which was a bit of a dealbreaker. Then he convinced DR not to sue Microsoft for substantially cloning their CP/M operating system.

There may be even more to that. In his declaration, Davis also says he worked on DR-DOS for Digital Research. DR was eventually bought by Caldera, and Caldera soon launched their well-known suit against M$. M$ ended up coughing up a large pile of cash to make the suit go away. And now Caldera is [New]SCO. I don't know what that might mean. Just that there's prior history between Davis and one of SCO's predecessors-in-interest. Hmmmm...

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

Not a lot going on in the SCO universe right now. Seems like everything's stuck in a holding pattern, waiting for news, waiting for something to happen. Hopefully the thing we're all waiting for will be a nice, tasty PSJ ruling, and/or a BK filing, and/or indictments. In any case, news is this blog's middle name, so I'll be all over it whenever that happens. In the meantime, here's the catch of the day. Ok, the last few days:

• SCO filed a big steaming pile of docs in the Novell case. And -- big surprise -- they're all sealed. We know they're playing defense in these docs, trying to ward off Novell PSJ motions, but we don't know exactly what howlers they're telling to accomplish that, at least not yet.
  
  
• A rather anachronistic piece titled "Navigating the Legal Risks of Open Source", complete with a bunch of OSRM-will-save-us babbling. You remember OSRM, right?
  
  
• Continuing the theme somewhat, InfoWorld asks "How risky is open source?". The word "overstated" appears right off the bat. Like most other pieces about the M$ patent circus, SCO gets prominent billing.
  
  
• New PR from Linspire about new virtualization offerings that supposedly make it easier to migrate away from SCO, among other things.
  
  
• Regarding the M$ patent fud, here's yet another Joe McCarthy analogy. Last week I offered a Golden Cookie for the best original analogy to describe M$ and its patent FUD. The three nominees were: Stalin, Godzilla, and Joe Isuzu. Godzilla won the popularity contest, going by recs received, but I'm going to have to go with Joe Isuzu, because it's a really obscure pop culture reference, and it fits pretty well. And for bonus points, the Darl <--> Joe Isuzu analogy is even better.
  
  
• Here's the inevitable Enderle spin on the M$ FUD. Like everyone else, he talks about SCO a lot. Being Enderle he still tries to hold out a glimmer of hope that SCO might have a case, but he does make one useful point: The SCO case changed how the industry views people who make allegations and refuse to back them up. Someone in Redmond should've thought of this before they started financing SCO v. Universe.
  
  
• M$ wuvs ODF now, allegedly. Call me skeptical if you like. Mistrustful, even.
  
  
• They also wuv UOF, a third competing doc format backed by China.
  
  
• What you can't do with Windows Home Server. WinHS is yet another Windows variant, basically Win2k3 for Closets.
  
  
• Much wailing & gnashing of teeth about the promised & undelivered "Halo 3" beta. Because not getting beta software from M$ is a bad thing to some people. Or so I gather.
  
  
• Say "hi" to the Copyright Alliance, the folks behind Gonzo's new IPPA proposal. I expect we'll be hearing a lot from these guys over time.
  
  
• Vista's copy protection seems to have been broken already. Color me uninterested; Even if it was legal, which it isn't, a "free" copy of Vista is still far too expensive, so far as I'm conncerned.
  
  
• IBM just launched its new POWER6 cpu. I usually don't start writing Dear Santa letters in May, but I may have to make an exception. Naturally Forbes is Not Impressed, since it's not a Microsoft product.
  
  
• You thought the bit about a guy getting banned from the US after a border guard googled his name was bad. Here's a case where someone got in immigration hot water because of his Wikipedia bio. Yow!
  
  
• You might've noticed that Google changed some things around over the last few days. The "search engine marketing" folks (i.e. people who get paid to game the system) are outraged. Really, really outraged.
  
  
• If you haven't seen it already, here's that Medieval Helpdesk skit again.
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

• Ok, did I say it was a slow news day a couple of days back? It's even slower now, at least SCO-wise. Nothing on GL, nothing on Pacer, nothing on Edgar, the stock's been wedged at 84 cents and minimal volume for days now. There isn't even any pro-SCO babbling from the usual suspects.
  
  
• Over on comp.unix.sco.misc, there's a fun thread about running OpenServer 5 & 6 under VMWare. One poster reports success with OSR 5.0.7, running VMWare on Vista. Now that's a marriage made... somewhere. And in the Unnatural Acts Dept., someone else asks if anyone's had success running OpenServer under Parallels on an Intel Mac.
  
  
• A blog search doesn't pull up much of interest either. A diarist at DailyKos just now found out about the delisting warning letter, and thinks it means SCO's hosed. Which illustrates the dangers of getting one's tech news from a political blog, or one's political tidbits from a tech blog like this one.
  
  
• A CERT vulnerability that mentions SCO, along with a whole list of platforms, since it's an issue with libpng. It occurs to me that in a weird way, CERT advisories are a measure of a platform's aliveness. If CERT stops checking whether you're vulnerable or not, or your OS is so obsolete it doesn't have the library with the newly found hole (i.e. even your OS's bugs are obsolete), you can be really sure you're a goner. So SCO's OSes aren't completely dead just yet.
  
  
• You may recall the 2004 controversy that erupted after a certain well-known individual tried to buy the rights to all of Linux for just $50k. That got people wondering what the kernel might actually be "worth", and a subsequent study estimated it at about $176m. Turns out there was a subsequent study that put the number even higher, at around $612m. I don't remember seeing that study, although I might have and then forgotten about it. In any case the second study shows up (in English) on this Korean blog post. The post comments about the study, but in Korean, which I can't speak or read a word of. If anyone out there can translate, feel free to post it as a comment here. TIA.
  
  
• SCO gets a quick mention in a post titled "My Current News Obsessions". It's down the page, after the RIAA rant.
  
  
• Here's something rare. The website of a firm in India, one of those virtual-office / office hotel kind of things, and their main page includes a testimonial from SCO's Indian division:
  

  
  SCO Software India Pvt. Ltd.
  
  Though OCBC, as a business center the name is a new one in the corporate business space in Kolkata, but still the kind of services the management provides are sufficient enough and help us to concentrate in our jobs only. Hope to see OCBC to become a landmark in the Corporate Hospitality & Business Space very soon.
  

  
  
  
• And an audio-visual services company in India that openly claims SCO as a client.
  
  
• M$ only just announced that Longhorn's official name will be Windows Server 2008, and now we learn that there's already a Win2k8 Release 2 in the works for 2009
  
  
• Washington Post on Amazon's new DRM-free music store.
  
  
• Guardian article on the net being carved up into "information plantations", a few megasites that get the lion's share of web traffic. Heck, Blogspot blogs like this one are outposts of the Google empire.
  
  
• A Guardian piece on AACS: "How many freedoms will we give up to help business get richer?"
  
  
• Shankland: Experts say Microsoft's patent quest won't go far.
  
  You see a lot of people expressing doubts about the quality and validity of Microsoft's patents, the usual argument being that if they really had a solid case, they'd have laid it on the table a long time ago. There's another angle to this I haven't seen anyone comment on. If they really were constantly inventing all sorts of genuinely new and original stuff, you'd expect to see some of these advances showing up in innovative and exciting new Microsoft products. But when was the last time that happened? The scrolly-wheel mouse, maybe?
  
  
• A post at capslock for coffee talks about Linus's response to M$, and includes a genuine photo of a FUD Van. You did realize FUD is delivered in vans, right?
  
  
• It seems like everyone's comparing microsoft's patent insanity to SCO. It's unavoidable. See LJ's "The Microsoft FUD Campaign vs. the Customer" for a good example. Since SCO's pretty much the baseline analogy anymore, some writers are looking further afield for novel comparisons.
  
  An InfoWorld piece looks to Greek mythology, sort of, asking "A Microsoft Pyrrhic victory?". Although even the victory part isn't at all clear at this point.
  
  A post at Wired is the second to compare Microsoft and its secret list of patents to Sen. Joe McCarthy. Actually it points at comments by Tim O'Reilly, so it's the third. The Blankenhorn piece I linked to the other day was the first. Like the SCO analogy, this is a fairly obvious comparison. It's what you drag out when comparing someone to Darl just isn't enough.
  
  And Sam Varghese at ITWire really goes for the jugular, with "Microsoft: shades of Saddam Hussein". And he compares them to SCO later on. Wow. That's just harsh. Much more of this and we'll have to start handing out Godwin points or something. Those Aussies really know how to play it close to the edge.
  
  Haven't seen any WMD analogies yet, although the handwaving about top-secret evidence looks pretty similar. So I volunteer to be the first on that one. I don't mean that in a partisan way, just in a phony-secret-evidence, unsupported-accusation way. In the interest of bipartisanship (or multipartisanship, if you're outside the US), I think it'd be fair to draw another analogy: These outrageous allegations from M$ are part of an intimidation campaign to bully the tech industry around, one which takes a page straight from Al Sharpton in his heyday.
  
  
• Cockpit software on jetliners tends to be a conservative field, basically the very last place in line when trends percolate through the industry. The Boeing 777 marked the first usage of any Unix in an aircraft cockpit, and it was a weird variant, VenturCom's Venix EDS. Yes, Venix, which I mentioned as a retrotech item back in March. It's been been around in some form or other since slightly after dirt was invented. I'd thought it was long departed to the great bit bucket in the sky, but apparently it found a low-profile ecological niche and hung on, coelecanth style. Who knew? I can't find much on the net about it now, so it doesn't appear to be actively marketed these days. But still, next time you fly on a 777, there'll be a weird *Nix helping out up front.
  
  Venix EDS doesn't show up much on the net, but it does appear on this Canonical List of Operating Systems That Suck. Along with every other OS you've ever heard of, probably.
  
  
• The iPhone isn't out yet, but McSweeney's has a fun User's Guide up for your perusal...
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

• New filings in both the Novell & IBM cases. Novell-292 is the main event today, and it's a pretty big deal. In it, Novell explains exactly why SCO never got any copyrights. We've seen some of that before, but this doc goes into much more detail than we've seen before. Some tasty bits:
  
  In the OldSCO -> Caldera deal, OldSCO included a caveat indicating its ownership of copyrights was uncertain: Assignor may not be able to establish a chain of title from Novell Inc.. Novell goes on to detail precisely how this caveat got into the document during the negotiations.
  
  Next, Novell provides a timeline showing that SCO kept hassling them to transfer the copyrights, over and over again. It really makes you feel for them, having to deal with Darl, Sontag, and Ralphie repeatedly like that. They repeatedly quote Darl as saying stuff like “SCO needs the copyrights", and “the asset purchase agreement excluded copyrights from being transferred”, and We only need you to amend the contract so that we can have the copyrights.”, on multiple occasions.
  
  It goes on from there, but those are a couple of bits that stood out immediately.
  
  
• Updated: PJ analyzes the new filings at length. You'll probably want to go read that at some point and get a real analysis of the docs, instead of the simple vgrep I'm qualified to perform.
  
  
• El Reg on Linus on Microsoft. You didn't really think Linus would mince words and make nice, did you?
  
  
• El Reg on Schwartz on Microsoft. Whatever you think of Schwartz, or Sun generally, he doesn't mince words either this time around.
  
  
• SCO gets a quick mention in this ITJungle piece about Unisys. If anyone out there is an expert about Unisys mainframes, perhaps you'd care to post a comment and explain what's going on here. It seems like a deeply weird hardware and software platform, with Xeon plugin boards running either Windows or a SCO OS, virtualized mainframe OSes running on top of Windows, and all kinds of oddness. TIA.
  
  
• Motley Fool has a piece on investing locally in the Salt Lake area, and they chose to mention SCO as a "high risk, high reward" stock, as if it was still 2003 or something. Sure, they also call SCO "much-maligned", and link to a story about Wells gutting SCO's case, but stuff like that is just red meat for would-be contrarian investors, people who may not have heard of SCO before. So don't be totally surprised if we see a new crop of penny-ante daytraders showing up on the boards in the near future.
  
  
• From Juha Saarinen's blog on Geekzone.co.nz: M$'s Bill Hilf (which sounds like a made-up name but apparently isn't) says Linux doesn't exist anymore.
  
  Saarinen responds:
  

  
  Hilf needs to work on his FUD-slinging as well. The hippie Love, Peace and Harmony is hardly what Open Source is about in 2007, thank goodness.
  

  
  
  Hear, hear. It's just freakin' software, already. Software that lets you get the job done without locking you into proprietary file formats and protocols, intrusive DRM, increasingly ridiculous EULAs. It's like the old NASA slogan, "better, faster, and cheaper". How hard is that to understand?
  
  
• A product head-to-head that mentions SCO briefly. So briefly that I usually wouldn't mention it at all, but the article itself is kind of interesting. Ok, well, I thought so anyway. YMMV.
  
  
• Enderle's take on the Simpsons. No, really.
  
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

• Late Friday, SCO filed a pair of sur-surreply memos begging the court to let it use all the "evidence" it didn't bother to disclose by the Final Disclosures deadline. There are two stories on GL about the filings, so it's not exactly breaking news anymore. They're a bit more slick than SCO's usual work, so perhaps these docs weren't farmed out to BS&F interns for once. I don't see why they went to all the trouble. At the point where you're doing sur-surreplies on motions for re-re-reconsideration, it's a tad late to start bringing the (relatively speaking) heavy hitters.
  
  
• Some stories about the new Microsoft patent FUD. This isn't the top story because they're still just making noise at this point. I think it's pretty clear at this point that the sad SCO saga is just the opening act in the M$ war against everyone who isn't M$. Many of the stories mention SCO, because the parallels are so freakin' obvious that even the trade press can't ignore 'em.
  
  
  
  
  • Fortune: "Microsoft takes on the free world"
    
  • PJ's take on the Fortune piece.
    
  • Blankenhorn: "Why Microsoft hasn’t sued (yet)"
    
  • ZDNet UK: "Microsoft's Linux stance threatens self-harm"
    
  • Matt Asay @ InfoWorld: "Making sense of Microsoft's open source fetish"
    
  • ComputerWorld: "Microsoft 'desperate,' says patent target OpenOffice.org".
    
  • E-Commerce Times: "What Does Microsoft Want From the Free World?"
    
  • PC World: "Microsoft Patent Claims Hint at Internal Issues"
    
  
  
  
• As noted by the ever-relentless Panglozz, Royce has given Jonathan Cohen the boot. Cohen, as you might recall, was one of the earliest and most vocal SCO supporters within the investment community. We'll probably never know for sure whether there's a connection between that and the termination, but a lot of people have lost a lot of money betting on SCO, and losing money typically isn't a career-enhancing move in the investment biz.
  
  
• Some new-hire PR about a Caldera alum:
  

  
  Cottle started his career in 1990 marketing large technology brands for companies such as Iomega, Infocus, and Adaptec at Dahlin Smith White. He left DSW to start his own marketing company, Oxygen Studios, which was later sold to Caldera (now SCO). Cottle helped Caldera go public, acquire SCO and grow to over 600 employees. He left SCO to launch a health publishing company which was acquired in 2003.
  

  
  
  600 employees. Wow. Those were the days, huh?
  
  The only mention of Oxygen Studios I can find is this article from 1999. Sounds like they were a web design firm, and one of the company's founders became Caldera's "creative director". Betcha they don't have anyone with that job title anymore. But they do still own the OpenLinux.org domain until next August, although there's no server behind the name anymore. They don't redirect you to the SCOSource license purchase page (which doesn't exist anyway), they don't even send you to PR about why OSR6 is the OS you really want. Nope. Netcraft indicates the site went dark last June.
  
  Archive.org doesn't have much of interest about the OpenLinux.org site, and last pinged it back in 2001. But there was a mention of Caldera OpenLinux for SPARC & UltraSPARC, which I'd never heard of before. Here's a 1999 Register story about it. One of SCO's many peeves about IBM is that they made Linux supposedly "enterprise-worthy" by helping port it to the 64-bit Itanium architecture. Well, um, UltraSPARC chips are 64-bit too, and this port came years before the first Itanium saw the light of day. Surprised? Me neither.
  
  
• Jeremy Allison writes about his unhappy experience with Vista & Office 2007. Ironically, he ended up needing the OpenXML plugin to OpenOffice, a product of the M$-Novell deal that caused him to quit Novell.
  
  
• InformationWeek's Microsoft Blog asks "
  Why Doesn't Microsoft Have A Cult Religion?". Admit it, you giggled when you read the title, out of the question's pure absurdity. Sure, there's probably still plenty of M$ fanboys out there, but they keep a lower profile these days.
  
  
• An interesting piece on LinuxWorld: "What the IT Media learned from the SCO case (or should have)". It's the first time I've seen a suggestion within the trade press that they mishandled the SCO situation early on, and bought into the lies Darl & friends were spewing without asking any tough questions. If you've read SNR for any amount of time, you're probably aware of my utter contempt for the trade media. I expect that most (not all, but most) of them got into the field when they couldn't hack it in the mainstream media. We get all our tech news from people who weren't talented, principled, or diligent enough to land a job lying to us about WMDs. Think about that for a minute.
  
  
• As if visitors to the US didn't have enough unpleasantness at the border, now border agents are Googling visitors to the US looking for any dirt on 'em. Even dirt from forty years ago. That's enough to get you permanently excluded from the country, period. Talk about sur-surreal.
  
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

• "Paul Murphy" is extremely upset that everyone's (supposedly) ignoring him over the SCO thing. So naturally he gets top billing on SNR today.
  
  Ok, fine, fine, it's a really slow news day.
  
  
• Over on the Y! SCOX board, there's a long thread about Murph's self-pitying rant. This makes two Murph items in a single day, sort of. Did I mention it was a slow news day?
  
  
• In today's non-"Paul Murphy" news, Ralphie gets a Buffalo Chip from his local paper.
  
  
• The strangest use of the DMCA yet: A little company out of Santa Cruz, CA is sending out cease-and-desist letters to big companies for not using their DRM technology. Apparently they aren't joking, either. Here's an IV post of mine with more about these weirdos.
  
  
• Almost as strange, spoon-bending "psychic" Uri Geller used the DMCA to take down a 3 second YouTube clip that portrays his "talent" as a simple parlor trick. Now the EFF's suing him for abusing the law to stifle criticism.
  
  
• A bit on Red Hat's new slimmed-down desktop distro.
  
  
• And here's Red Hat's PR for their new "Red Hat Exchange" program.
  
  
• One more RHAT item and we're done with 'em for today. They're teaming up with IBM to enhance mainframe Linux (which is one of Murph's pet peeves, btw). The current announcement deals with multilevel security, aimed primarily at government customers. The piece reads like the author didn't really grasp that part, which isn't too surprising. Multilevel security is a strange and esoteric subject indeed.
  
  A fun bit from the article:
  
  

  
  The vendors stressed security in their announcement, saying "the mainframe's fortress-like security is legendary."
  

  
  
  Which is true, of course. Seems like every week you hear horror stories about lost or stolen laptops full of critical data, but when was the last time someone misplaced a mainframe?
  
  
• Yet another article full of handwringing over Palm's OS roadmap. By now, everyone figures the future has something to do with Linux, but what, exactly, and when? So far, they ain't sayin'.
  
  
• An article on the DVR industry in China. It caught my eye because at least one runs embedded Linux, although most use proprietary OSes (VxWorks, etc.) If you read closer, you'll notice these aren't entertainment DVRs, they're CCTV recorders for security cameras. Enhanced security cameras in an undemocratic country aren't anything to cheer for. The GPL doesn't restrict how you can employ GPL'd software, and even if it did, there'd be no way to enforce the restrictions in a case like this. But I'm still not happy about it.
  
  
• EE Times piece hoping this is finally the year for patent reform. Biotech/pharma is the industry opposed to reform, they like the rules just the way they are, thank you. Ok, fine, why not just treat them differently, so tech doesn't suffer?
  
  
• A contrarian opinion: Patent trolls are good for open source. As the argument goes, open source projects have no money, and thus are uninteresting to patent trolls, who will go after the moneybags closed-source big boys instead. Hmm, it's an interesting notion, certainly. I'm not sure I buy it. It's quite the cynical strategy, too. Sort of like letting vampires loose in the office because you heard somewhere they prefer a different blood type than yours, so that they'll chow down on your workplace rivals first and maybe they'll be full before they notice you. Not a great plan, if you ask me.
  
  
• PR for an allegedly fun and educational video about patent trolls.
  
  
• Wired interviews the guy at the center of thee AT&T/NSA domestic spying controversy.
  
  
• More on the FAA's worries about Vista.
  
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

• More coverage, again from India, about SCO's custom Me Inc. business. I'm starting to think Me Inc. only exists in India these days, if the company's PR is any indication. From reading the media coverage, it appears that India's tech trade press is fine with just paraphrasing someone's press release, just like the tech trade press everywhere else.
  
  
• Some dirt on "Datadiscovery", a new corporate tentacle financed under Ralphie's new VentureQuest "canopy". Some earlier rumors about the company here.
  
  
• Novell's top Linux guy has moved to Google. The article speculates whether this has to do with the M$ deal. Which is possible, although since nobody's commenting, it could just as easily be all about the Benjamins.
  
  
• The Old Media's desperate war against New Media gets even uglier:
  
  

  
  "The Googles of the world, they are the Custer of the modern world. We are the Sioux nation," Time Warner Inc. Chief Executive Richard Parsons said, referring to the Civil War American general George Custer who was defeated by Native Americans in a battle dubbed "Custer's Last Stand".
  
  "They will lose this war if they go to war," Parsons added, "The notion that the new kids on the block have taken over is a false notion."
  

  
  
  That's perhaps not the best historical analogy he could've used. Besides being in rather poor taste, he might want to go back and look at who won the battle, and who ultimately won the war.
  
  
• Not to be content with picking a fight with Google, Time Warner's also declaring war on Canada.
  
  
• BIFF, everyone's least favorite persistent pro-SCO troll, has a new blog. Ok, not really. I think.
  
  
• Patch Tuesday is still with us, mostly Office, no Vista this time around.
  
  
• This week also marked Patch Tuesday for your Xbox 360, except they call it "Spring Update". In addition to the patches, you also get MSN Messenger. Nice bit of vendor lock-in there.
  
  
• El Reg covers Sun's JavaOne conference. The JDK really is open source now, and they've got some sort of new web technology called JavaFX they're all stoked about.
  
  
• BusinessWeek's JavaOne coverage refers to Java as "dated". And sure, it might seem that way if you think it's just for doing web page applets.
  
  
• "Paul Murphy" asserts that Linux is not Windows Lite, to which I can only say, "Well, duh...".
  
  There's a small glimmer of a reasonable idea drowning in all that word salad, at the point where Murph attempts to complain about OpenOffice looking too much like M$ Office. Trying to clone M$ products is not a winning strategy, something most people figured out years ago. Firefox looks nothing like IE (although IE7 sure tries to change that), and it's had a fair bit of success. Apache is nothing like IIS, thankfully, and that doesn't seem to be scaring folks away.
  
  So sure, Murph's flogging a dead horse. Big surprise there. But at least he's starting to suspect the object he's flogging might be shaped something like a horse, which I suppose is the first step.
  
  
• A blog post on ZDNet asks whether 2008 will be the Year of Mobile Linux. I usually regard all "Is X the year of Y?" stories as lazy journalism, which they are. But he does mention the Nokia N800, which counts for something, I guess.
  
  
• Today's bizarro IP litigation: This famous yoga guru's "copyrighted" a set of yoga positions, and sues anyone who teaches yoga that resembles his unless they take an expensive class and get certified. Is this really what the founding fathers had in mind when copyright law was created?
  
  
• It seems someone's finally created a working Apple Lisa Emulator, after all these years. This is not an entirely OT item either, since at one time there was a version of Xenix for the Lisa, undoubtedly chock full of advanced methods and concepts. If you could locate a copy of that (a 100% legal copy, of course), the project website indicates you could actually run the thing.
  
  Although once you've got a SCO OS up and running, you're just begging for SCO to sue you. I've never understood quite why they think suing their own users is a wise strategy, but I guess that's why they make the big bucks and I don't...
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

• More Me Inc. PR from India, and a trade press mention of same. Seems they'd like to custom-build a Me Inc. "solution" for your small or medium business. While I'd give the SCO India guys some credit for apparently thinking and acting as if they worked for a real company (the poor saps), I question their business model. The only proven way to make money in mobile apps is to get mobile phone carriers to preinstall them, since it's quite rare for users to install 3rd party software on phones or PDAs. SCO doesn't seem to have had any takers for its apps among mobile carriers, though, so I suppose this is their plan B. Just not a very promising plan B.
  
  It's kind of a shame, in a way. The suite of Me Inc. apps might actually be useful for some people. I've never tried 'em, myself, so I don't actually know for sure, but in a spirit of fairness let's suppose that might be the case. It's possible the only reason Me Inc. hasn't seen wider acceptance is due to being chained to the sinking bulk of SCO. I suppose there's no way to know for sure, at least for now. If SCO goes bankrupt, and the BK trustee finds a nice new home for Me Inc., we'll learn whether the technology sinks or swims on its own merits.
  
  
• A thread on linux.samba, in which it appears SCO's losing another customer.
  
  
• Our old buddy Lyons emits some new FUD about Dell, Linux, and the M$-Novell thing. Apparently calling open source users commies and terrorists and such wasn't working, so the pro-SCO camp is kicking the rhetoric up another notch:
  

  
  Recently, Linux supporters swarmed Dell after the company put up a Web site called IdeaStorm asking for suggestions. Like teenage girls voting for Sanjaya on American Idol, thousands of Linux fans wrote to Dell and “voted” for PCs loaded with Linux, making this the No. 1 request on IdeaStorm.
  

  
  
  You know, because accusing someone of being female is a huuuuge insult, apparently. Well, it was back in third grade anyway, and some people just stop maturing at that point. So stop using Linux, or Lyons will put a toad in your hair and make you scream.
  
  
• Speaking of toads, here's a truly fascinating interview [29mb MP3] with the Chief Scientist at Solera.
  
  
• And while we're checking in with the usual suspects, here's the latest from "Paul Murphy", "Fear and loathing in the Internet echo chamber". The echo chamber in question today is the pro-M$ blogosphere, and he attempts to draw an analogy with the political blogosphere. He even takes a stab at a bit of introspection:
  

  
  I find it hard, for example, to read many of the blogs and comments dedicated to Windows because so much of it strikes me as every bit as dishonest, technologically illiterate, and short sightedly partisan as the dailykos.
  
  And what's worse: I'll bet the Windows people have pretty much the same reaction to this blog - in other words, like Chait, I'm contributing to the same phenomenon I'm complaining about.
  
  But there is a difference: I'd like to know how to break out of the trap: how to transcend the echo chamber and get into a real conversation with the other guy - and that's something neither the dailykos nor the NRO have the slightest interest in doing.
  

  
  
  To be fair, it's true that the tech media and tech blogs are quite prone to the echo chamber effect. There's a pro-M$ echo chamber, and a pro-Linux/open source echo chamber, and a pro-Mac echo chamber. There's even a pro-SCO echo chamber, albeit a rather small one, and I've long considered "Murphy" to be part of it. So his carping about the M$ echo chamber is sort of like the crackpot calling the kettle black.
  
  
• Oh, and to round out the cast of characters today, a piece about the Dell+Ubuntu thing, with FUD from Enderle and DiDio. So it's sort of a wingnut twofer, if you're into that sort of thing.
  
  
• Utah's among a short list of states now cracking down on the sale of used CDs. No, really. They seriously are.
  
  
• Slashdot story about the used CD crackdown. One commenter mentions SCO, "Yarro's Law", and CP80, due to the whole Utah connection. In fairness, Utah isn't the only state doing this. Florida, nice, stable, non-nutty, non-dangling-chad Florida, is the other one. So far.
  
  
• Don Flexner, the F in BS&F, has been honored by Inside Counsel Magazine, whoever they are. They call list him among "The best lawyers to call in a worst-case scenario". Worst-case scenarios, eh? This kind of leads me to expect yet another pro hac vice request in the near future, if SCO can afford it.
  
  
• Survey: Only 23% of adults are down with the Web 2.0 thang. If you're reading this, you probably qualify as an "omnivore".
  
  
• NYT on the next must-have geek gadget: The 3d printer! Awesome.
  
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

• This August, SCO will hold something they call SCO Tec Forum 2007, which will be held in place of the usual SCO Forum event. The announcement is a choice example of PR spin, first saying that SCO Forum's simply been renamed to emphasize its technical focus, and later notes that a "full" SCO Forum event might be held next spring some time. From which we can gather that the August event will not be a full SCO Forum, and I imagine it's likely to be a substantially scaled-back event compared to previous years. Still at the Mirage, though, so if you get bored with the cutting-edge seminars on how to slap a GUI on top of your crufty old OpenServer app, you could go see the Cirque du Soleil's Beatles show, if you're into that. At least it'd be far less surreal than listening to SCO PHBs blathering on about the bright future ahead.
  
  
• Inquirer and CBR on the delisting letter.
  
  
• Unspam's anti-spam registry is a flop. So probably the next step will be to either make it mandatory for all Utah residents, or give the company a massive bailout at taxpayer expense, or both.
  
  
• What to do when faced with a "No Open Source" clause. Fortunately these are far less common than they were just a few years ago.
  
  
• Dell's signing up with the M$-Novell partnership. Hmm. It looks like this has to do with server hardware, and is unrelated to Dell's recent Ubuntu announcement.
  
  
• On the heels of Dell's Ubuntu thing, Toshiba's thinking about preinstalled Linux too.
  
  
• Here's a tiny lil' Linux box to go with the Olivetti TCV-250 you went out and bought after reading the previous SNR post
  
  
• A letter from The Steve about Apple & the environment.
  
  
• InfoWorld suggests that Oracle's Unbreakable Linux is gaining acceptance.
  
  
• ZDNet: "Time to lap up Linux".
  
  
• Computerworld on the Digg vs. AACS situation. Warning: Includes super-seeekrit number, visit at own risk.
  
  
• Bill Beebe writes about the AACS thing here. Warning: Includes super-seeekrit number, visit at own risk.
  
  
• Also from ComputerWorld, yet another Vista horror story.
  
  
• Vista: More secure than OS X? It's not a very convincing piece: One interviewee talks about code quality, but has he actually seen Vista source code? And another quote comes from Theo. Yeah, try getting Theo to say anything nice about any OS other than OpenBSD. Won't happen.
  
  
• The latest MS Word / ActiveX vulnerability.
  
  
• Apple's managed to attract yet another patent troll.
  
  
• And finally, the BBC reports on a toad discovered lurking on the bottom of Loch Ness. Yikes.
  
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech