SCO News Roundup

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