SCO News Roundup

Sorry about the lack of posts lately. I've been a bit busy this week. Fortunately(?) nothing truly major has happened lately, so I can still at least try to get caught up. Here's what we've seen over the last couple of days:

• Coverage of SCO's numbers, mostly quick blurbs all to the effect that "Q2 loss narrows".
  CBR Online
  Forbes
  SmallCapInvestor.com
  TradingMarkets.com
  RTTNews
  
  
• Another take on the numbers: "SCOSource dries up". Which is true, there was zero SCOSource revenue in Q2. But that was already a tiny number even before now.
  
  
• Stories about SCO's dreams of beeeeelions, from InternetNews & ITNews Australia. Darl's comments about the money owed to SCO being a "ridiculously big number" are getting a lot of play. The guy's remarkably quotable, in an "open mouth, insert additional foot" sort of way.
  
  
• Kieran O'Shaughnessy, SCO's man in Australia, has jumped ship, going to Sage Software. Oh, how we'll miss his colorful antipodean metaphors. I still don't understand that bit about "we have broken our duck".
  
  He's also the guy who once said Linux didn't exist. If he still thinks that, he's going to be in for a shock at his new employer. Yep, at least some of their products run on Linux.
  
  
• GL has eyewitness reports from Monday's SCO v. Novell hearings.
  
  
• Here's a bit about the M$ vs. TestDriven.NET ugliness. It tells you a lot about M$ that their default reaction is to start threatening people, even when the potential "danger" to its revenue stream is absolutely miniscule. Even if there was more money to be made embracing innovation than fighting it, they just won't do it.
  
  
• SJVN & GL comment on the "mixed source" announcement I covered recently.
  i've read over the announcement a couple of times and this is a case where I don't think PJ gets it right. I don't like the phrase "mixed source", and this isn't the first time Novell's used it. but at least in this case it looks like all they really mean by it is closed source apps running on Linux, which is very much allowable under the GPL. Some PHB must've taken a fancy to the term "mixed source", not realizing how inflammatory it sounds to the Linux world.
  
  
• Seems that Scott Gant of bs&f has a new book out, "We are All Journalists Now: The Transformation of the Press and Reshaping of the Law in the Internet Age". I wonder if he mentions Groklaw? I wonder, furthermore, if he mentions BS&F trying to get a gag order on Groklaw?
  
  So are we all journalists, really? Am I? It's a tough call. I like the legal protections traditionally afforded to print journalists. It's far from a settled matter whether such protections are available to mere unpaid bloggers. On the other hand, being a journalist is the next closest thing to being unpaid, you spend much of your time in grubby little bars drowning your sorrows with other journalists, and the odds of acquiring superpowers are far lower than Hollywood summer movies might lead you to believe. It would be a mixed blessing, at best.
  
  
• A judge has ordered a retrial for Julie Amero. She, as you might recall, is the teacher recently convicted of internet porn charges widely considered to be bogus. Apparently the prosecutor & jury didn't know much about the interwebs, and the scourge of pop-up ads. Or at least they were willing to convict someone else of it
  
  
• Someone's done a cute webcomic about the rumored Vista SP1. Enter the Microtrix!
  
  
• IHT: "U.S. cellphone users chafing at carriers". People are getting sick and tired of vendor lock-in with mobile phone handsets, and I think understandably so. From the article:
  
  

  
  Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor, compares today's wireless world to the U.S. landline industry of the 1950s, when consumers had to lease phones from AT&T. In 1968, the Federal Communications Commission ruled that AT&T could not decide which devices could be attached to the network, opening the phone world to competition and leading to landline innovations people take for granted today, such as cheaper phones, answering and fax machines and modems.
  

  
  
  
• Today's retrotech item: The Apple ][ is 30 years old. No, seriously, it is. 30 years. And we aren't talking Internet years either.
  
  
• And from Shiny Shiny, a piece about the new bling-laden Hello Kitty laptop. Go ahead, try to tell me this is any sillier than Enderle's Ferrari laptop.
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech