SCO News Roundup

Ok, it's been a week. So sue me. It's not like the judges ruled on anything, or any new filings showed up on Edgar. Heck, I even checked the USPTO site this morning to see if either SCO or Ralphie's CP80/ThinkAtomic cabal have anything new over there. No dice.

• ServerWatch on the "Ghosts of Xenix Past", about M$ code that lived on inside SCO OSes long after Xenix was put out to pasture. I actually remember reading about this years ago, but people are acting like it's a big new revelation. No, it isn't new, and no, I don't think it explains the murky M$-(Old)SCO relationship. M$ wanted to impede Linux, and needed a proxy to do it. NewSCO needed money, and M$ offered them some. I don't think it's any more complex than that.
  
  
• SCO gets a rare mention as a possible threat to open source, a spin we rarely see anymore. This pops up in a consultant report that babbles on about technology in local government in the UK. The piece mentions the Birmingham library situation as a Linux "win", not mentioning how they bungled it. So someone's obviously not on the ball here. Apparently they're trying to be successful, highly compensated global consultants without reading SNR regularly. Beats me why they think that'll work out ok. With the posting traffic here of late it's not like it'd be that hard to keep up or anything. Oh, well....
  
  
• If you check Google News for "SCO", you'll occasionally see old stories pop up as if they were new. This often seems to happen if someone's just done a site redesign, for whatever reason. In any case, today's example was this 2005 NetworkWorld story, which discusses the rapid decline of SCO. And that was two years ago, and they're still declining. Asymptotically, it seems.
  
  
• If Darl's starting to think this may be a good time to change careers, I've got just the thing for him, and he won't even need to relocate. Seems that Lindon, UT needs a new mayor, as the current guy is stepping down and leaving the country. He'd better hurry, though; the deadline is tomorrow, July 11th. But if he's learned anything at SCO, it's the importance of always filing papers at the absolute last moment. Or even later than that, if at all possible.
  
  
• While I'm still in the mood to give useful advice to SCO folk, which is a rare thing, I'd like to offer them some helpful hardware hints. In the last few years they've gone on about cutting preinstall deals with white-box vendors nobody's ever heard of. Hello!? Nobody's ever heard of those guys because their puny white boxes are boring. If you want to move any product, you guys need to make like Apple and come up with hardware that reflects the OS within. And with a product like OpenServer, the "steampunk" look would be quite appropriate. The Steampunk Workshop offers several promising -- and functional -- designs, including a brass and marble flat panel monitor, and a keyboard with manual typewriter keys, among other delights. And check out this case mod gallery on Flickr, for a machine the creator dubs the "Telecalculograph". Look at it. It practically demands a SCO operating system. This is your big chance, guys. Trust me on this.
  
  
• A few local bloggers here in Portland posting about the iPhone: Jeff the Great (no, not that Jeff), ~stevenf, i, viddy, and the local paper's Silicon Forest blog
  
  
• It's almost old news now, but here's Slashdot on the MPAA spyware scandal.
  
  
• I went out and bought a Roomba over the weekend, and -- I say this at the risk of losing nerd points -- so far it remains unmodded. Right now we're still in the phase of watching it scoot around the rug, going "awwwww, it's so cuuuuuute!". Surprisingly there's only one real hit on the entire net for "LOLROOMBA" right now, and it just comes up as "Service Unavailable" at the moment.
  
  
• A bit of a setback for Steorn, the very latest perpetual motion machine that, uh, doesn't work. Actually can't work would be a better way to put it. They aren't based in Utah (surprisingly), but they do have an entertaining history of making ridiculous and unsubstantiated claims, and they've stuck around for far longer than anyone reasonably imagined they might. Sound familiar?
  
  If you get a kick out of this sort of thing, or even if you don't, you might enjoy The Museum of Unworkable Devices. Steorn isn't there yet, but it's only a matter of time.
  
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech