SCO News Roundup

• SCO loses yet another customer, understandably. Quote:
  

  
  By 2001, however, Spruce was ready for a change. Its software had been rewritten and updated as much as possible. The software’s “bones were old,” says Robert Fitzpatrick, President, Spruce Computer Systems, and updating the software again would not have been its best long-term solution. Given the relative paucity of SCO UNIX software, Spruce had to create much of the ancillary functionality for its solution itself, rather than acquiring plug-and-play applications that could complement the core functionality provided by Spruce. Perhaps because customers were also feeling the “old bones” of their SCO UNIX environments, they’d long been migrating those environments—to the Microsoft® Windows® operating system.
  

  
  
  Seems that even .NET was better, and more open, than sticking with SCO. Ouch! Oh, and they migrated with the help of DTR Business Systems, a company that's allegedly still a SCO Partner. With friends like these...
  
  I'd never be able to keep track of these things without you Astute Readers out there. Thanks again^6. You know who you are.
  
  
• SCO has a new partner in India, some outfit called "iBilt". That poor Rustaghi chump still seems to think he works for a real company, not just a publicly traded lawsuit. I almost feel for the guy, in a way. SCO must've realized that overseas bagholders are even cheaper than domestic ones.
  
  As a former British colony, it seems India's PHBs are not immune to the siren song of the golf course, a.k.a., the Scottish Disease. I realize that sounds ethnically insensitive, but I don't know how to explain this deal any other way. At least in this country it would've involved golf. And illegal Cuban cigars. And possibly a lost weekend in Vegas, if the terms were especially unfavorable. The details may vary by time and culture, but every PHB has his price, I'm afraid.
  
  More at EFYTimes.
  
  
• The photo is of a tour bus I ran across along trendy E. Burnside St. here in Portland. Because I'm not a hip-n-trendy twentysomething anymore, I've never heard of the band that sold its soul to the Beast of Redmond. You guys sold out to The Man. I hope you're happy. I hope every single pathetic Zune buyer out there (yes, both of them) buys a song of yours, tries to "squirt" it to their buddies, and runs afoul of the dire DRM consequences. Serves 'em right, the bastards.
  
  
• From c.u.s.m, a thread about hidden files in / on OSR 5.0.7. Hidden man pages in the root directory?! Feh!!!
  
  
• Via /.: Another court victory for GPLv2 in Germany.
  
  
• The president of Acer is disappointed with Vista, at least if the third-hand translations are accurate.
  
  
• A bit about the HP-Ubuntu tie-up. I'm afraid I've failed y'all here; I'll be at OSCON the next couple of days, and reporting on it over at that other blog, but I somehow forgot to register for Ubuntu Live. If that's conclusive evidence I'm a real person and not a shadowy cabal of IBM lawyers, so be it.
  
  
• From comp.unix.xenix.sco, a guy who needs help with his Xenix 2.3.4 system. I'm usually inclined to mock people who use old SCO OSes, but he uses the magic word "retro-computing", so I have to sympathize. I'm afraid to tell the guy he probably already owes Darl a few billion SCOSource dollars for daring to encroach upon the realm of SCO IP, but if you happen to know anything about Xenix, give a brother a hand, OK?
  
  Thx. Mgmt.
  
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

By brx0 @ 6:52 PM