SCO News Roundup

• Still nothing from the courts. Zero. Zilch. Nada. But SCO's stock has been climbing, in the absence of any news whatsoever. The stock manipulation theory is always a popular one, and I'm often inclined to believe it myself. But it's also reasonable to imagine SCO's attracting real, live speculators, and the recent price jumps weren't just engineered into existence. If that's true, the obvious question is "Why now?". I can think of a few reasons. First, IBM reported some great numbers last week, and people who haven't been paying attention might see a cash-rich IBM as a positive for SCO (bigger settlement/winnings, etc.). Some people really might think that, the poor saps. We're probably also seeing people effectively betting on the Novell case, buying tickets for the "Linux lottery" Darl & friends used to go on about. Sure, the odds are terrible, but apparently some clown out there thinks the ticket price is about right. There's one born every minute, you know, and if there's one thing the SCO saga has no shortage of, it's minutes.
  
  
• Matt Asay interviews Iain Gray, Red Hat's VP of Global Support Services at Red Hat. It's mentioned in passing that Mr. Gray once worked at SCO, or "SCO Group (back when it was a Unix company, not a law firm)" as the article puts it. This is one of the biggest mentions of SCO in the media over the last week, believe it or not.
  
  
• Here's another mention in passing, this time in a comment on Slashdot. When I'm linking to individual comments on Slashdot, you know it's a slow news week. The article's about dark energy and extra dimensions, actually, so the mention of SCO is just a cheap shot, not a real cameo appearance. And it's really not that clever of a cheap shot, even. But still, it's a mention of SCO, paired with M$ this time.
  
  
• Boies's son David III loses a big case.
  
  
• >Lookee here, another BS&F guy has written a book.
  
  
• InformationWeek seems to have widespread non-grokkage of GPLv3, not just the DeJean guy we've heard about already. C'mon, guys, it's not that complicated. Sheesh. It's almost as if you didn't want to understand it. But surely that can't be the case, can it?
  
  
• A piece on the latest, shiniest new Blackberry. No mention of any bundled Me Inc. apps. Ok, that was a cheap shot, and not a very clever one, but I'm trying to stay on topic, and it isn't easy in the absence of news. And seriously, Me Inc. doesn't have a future unless SCO can trick a mobile carrier or two into bundling it. As I've said before, it's pretty rare for mobile phone users to install third party apps after getting a phone, so unless you can get your app preinstalled, you aren't going to be making any money. I don't know exactly how these deals pencil out, but my guess is that the mobile app vendor typically pays the carrier in order to get preinstalled, not the other way around, and SCO just doesn't have that kind of money.
  
  
• While we're on dubious advances in telephony, here are two articles on Ooma, the "peer to peer" phone gadget announced last week. The thing seems oddly archaic, a throwback to the late dot-com era when "P2P" was a hot content-free buzzword.
  
  It's a heck of a lot of money to pay, just to maybe avoid some long distance phone charges now and then, if you're lucky. I await the inevitable article where someone figures out how to wipe the thing, put Linux on it, and use it as a firewall or a DNS appliance or something menial like that, purely for the "because it's there" points.
  
  
• Meanwhile, here's Gizmodo on ultra-tiny Linux boxen. I think I've covered some of these individually before, but hey. It's a slow news week, and I need material.
  
  
• Cringely: "Is Vista an Orphan?"
  
  
• We've gotten our hopes up before, but maybe this time patent reform could finally happen Although I ought to point out that Rep. Howard Berman, the bill's sponsor, is a big friend of the RIAA & MPAA in the copyright arena. So we oughtn't get our hopes up too high just yet.
  
  
• Speaking of the RIAA, they've got some attorney's fees to pay. It's a drop in the bucket so far as they're concerned, but it seems like a step in the right direction. Too many of these, though, and they'll just raise CD prices a bit more to compensate, and then complain when sales decline a bit further, and sue even more people. Always a cynic, I am.
  
  
• More news from last week: Xandros bought Scalix, a Linux-based competitor to M$ Exchange. Combine this with the recent M$-Xandros deal, and it's serious tin foil hat time.
  
  
• Apropos of nothing, here are Utah's 2007 regulations on amphibians & reptiles. 'P' means "Prohibited", "C" is "Controlled" and "N" is "Noncontrolled", if you're wondering. The notorious, toxic (and allegedly hallucinogenic) Cane Toad is prohibited statewide, in case anyone's wondering.
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

By brx0 @ 9:53 AM