SCO News Roundup

• 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

By brx0 @ 10:51 AM