SCO News Roundup

• As I'm sure you've heard already, there's a new stipulated pretrial schedule in the IBM case. It doesn't explicitly say so, but it appears to push the first possible trial date out into 2008. Who ever expected this stupid case could drag on so long? Not I, and I like to think of myself as a fairly cynical person.
  
  At least it means we should start seeing new documents in the case around October or so. Unless things get delayed further.
  
  
• New press release out today. They've found customer #2 for that Mobile Order app they sorta-announced through a previous press release. This time it's an Italian food distributor that claims to be America's leading olive importer. The Sopranos is off the air, so making knee-jerk mafia jokes every time one sees an Italian name is back to being un-PC again. But when someone does business with SCO, even indirectly... Well, you just have to wonder, a little. Or at least I do.
  
  
• There was another press release a couple of days ago. Seems now they're trying to sneak onboard the iPhone bandwagon. Seriously.
  
  Since there is as yet no such thing as a third-party app on an iPhone, this has to be something other than what they're implying it is. Most likely what's going on is that Genisys has slapped a web UI on top of their crufty old green-screen vertical market apps, and it just so happens that this web UI works OK in the iPhone's version of Safari.
  
  What really gets me is that the iPhone runs OS X, which is a BSD+Mach variant under the hood. Darl & Co. used to occasionally threaten to go after BSD users, which I think was a veiled (and failed) attempt to extract SCOSource money from Apple. Unless... the effort didn't fail, and the reason iPhones are so expensive is that you do get a SCOSource license when you buy one. That's a scary thought. Can't be true though; we'd have seen a SCO press release about it if it was, NDA or no NDA.
  
  
• I think I know why we've seen a flood (relatively speaking) of PR coming out of SCO lately. They have to get 'em out there while there's still a media organ that takes them seriously. And they'd better hurry, because the Weekly World News is going under! I gather that Elvis, Bat Boy, and the aliens all finally got fed up with the unwanted attention and decided to play a little hardball.
  
  
• Here's a ">positive take on the Genisys PR, from someone who's all starry-eyed about the iPhone, and knows squat about SCO.
  
  
• Here's a funny anti-iPhone rant.
  
  
• And here's a more serious negative review of the iPhone, from someone who used one for a month.
  
  
• SCO gets a quick mention over at InfoWorld. Of course it's an ancient-history mention, a funny nightmare story involving the corporate Xenix server and a clueless Unix n00b.
  
  
• Another MS-backed standardization effort, this time for the HD Photo file format they introduced in Vista. No word about patent encumbrances, licensing issues, whether you can use the format on an OS besides Vista, etc., since when MS uses the word "standard" it often means they've found a few partners to go along with their latest monopoly.
  
  One of the people quoted is the standards body rep from Hasselblad. I'm not an expert on $30,000 cameras, but something tells me that one typically shoots in RAW format with one of these bad boys, and a new compressed file format isn't going to attract a lot of interest. Even if MS insists it's the greatest thing since Windows ME. Besides, anyone who will spend that much on a camera probably hooks it up to a shiny new 8-core Mac Pro anyway.
  
  
• Linux kernel code may not be poetry, exactly, but sometimes the comments are.
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

By brx0 @ 3:26 PM