SCO News Roundup

• 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

By brx0 @ 8:26 PM