Tuesday, May 15, 2007
5/15 SNR
- 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
By brx0 @ 10:45 AM 
