SCO News Roundup

• 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

By brx0 @ 7:48 AM