SCO News Roundup

• Another new batch of filings in the Novell case. Docs #410-411 are intriguing. SCO's now asking Kimball for Final Judgement on the PSJs they lost a while back. They're just itching to file an appeal, they're rarin' to go, but they can't until Judge K. makes it all final.
  
  Doc #411, their memo in support, is rather amusing to read. SCO goes on at length about all these unresolved issues they'd like to talk to the appeals court about. It's quite a masterpiece of lameness. SCO's argument has three key points:
  A.) Letting them appeal right away would potentially save a little time and/or money, unless they manage to delay the appeals case too, and they're certainly going to try.
  B.) They've found a handful of cases to cite that indicate an appeal is not expressly prohibited under the current circumstances.
  C.) They have a short list of new, incomprehensible, Bifflike arguments they'd like to chat about with an appellate judge.
  
  Which is all a verbose way of saying they'd like a do-over, please, judge. It actually sounds like they'd prefer to jump straight to the appeal now and not bother with a trial in front of Kimball at all, if possible.
  
  
• Meanwhile, doc #412 is the parties' joint report on how long they think the Novell trial's going to take now. They both estimate it'll take 4-5 days now, down from the original three weeks.
  
  
• Over the years, whenever SCO decided to make another "dramatic" move in the courtroom, there's always been a helpful, friendly hack journalist on hand to help SCO try the case in the media. There's always someone out there who's simply thrilled to have an exclusive direct line to Darl, and they happily parrot whatever spin he offers, no matter how much their journalistic credibility suffers in the bargain. That's still true, even now. In that spirit, Paul McDougall offers us his "SCO Likely To Appeal Novell Ruling, CEO Darl McBride Says", in which we learn that Kimball's ruling must be incorrect because everyone at SCO was absolutely blindsided by it, allegedly. Nothing much to see here, just another moth to the flame. Honestly, I don't know why they do it.
  
  
• Oh, and a belated Motley Fool story about the PSJ rulings and subsequent stock implosion. FWIW.
  
  
• And SJVN's latest, "How SCO Helped Linux"
  

I like to think I sometimes perform some kind of valuable service here beyond merely linking to the latest GL stories. I do have a whole weekend's worth of GL stories to catch up on, but first a bit about the photos. The local techie bookstore here in Portland has a free bin near the entrance, with books they ended up with somehow and then realized nobody's ever going to pay a cent for. I've picked up a few SCO-related books that way over the last few years, and the latest is perhaps the most poignant. The book you see here is OldSCO's 1990 catalog of available third-party hardware and software. The thing runs nearly 1400 pages, with over 200 pages devoted just to the "Accounting - General" category. There's even a single-entry "Games" category, listing something optimistically called "SDA: Multiuser Games Vol. 1", with multiplayer, multi-tty blackjack, poker, and other games. Now just try to imagine what the equivalent book would look like today, if it existed. How the mighty have fallen.... And good riddance.

Now about those GL stories. I was away most of the weekend, and apparently there were a bunch of new filings on Friday, so PJ and the gang have spent the weekend poring over the new docs. Basically this is the part of the pretrial phase where SCO and Novell get to fight over exactly what each party is permitted to say to the jury, introduce as evidence, and so forth. The goal, of course, being to get as much of one's own stuff into the courtroom, and exclude as much of the other guy's stuff as you possibly can. Looks like SCO's putting up quite a struggle, too. There's nothing they can do to un-hit the iceberg at this point, but they seem to think it's a fine time to have a fistfight on deck, instead of heading for the nearest lifeboat. I'm starting to think they were really serious about that "to our utter destruction" nonsense.

I confess I haven't had time to digest everything yet, myself, but here are all 5 stories since Friday evening, rearranged oldest to newest (that's my meager contribution to the effort so far):

• "It's Getting Good Now - Lots of filings in SCO v. Novell - Motion to Strike SCO's Jury Demand, as text"
  
• "Motions in Limine in SCO v. Novell"
  
• "SCO's Motion in Limine - Shh! Don't Tell the Jury About IBM or 'Commentary Thereon'"
  
• "SCO Wants Novell's New Provisional Evidence Tossed --'We Played by the Rules'
  
• "Novell's Motion in Limine No. 3 to Preclude SCO's New Theory of Apportionment"
  

Meanwhile, a thread on c.u.s.m. started by some poor user who needs a C compiler on his SCO box. Alas, unlike, oh, Linux, or FreeBSD, or Mac OS X, you don't get a compiler when you buy a SCO OS. Dev tools and libraries are sold separately, as if it was still freakin' 1990 or something. Various responses disagree on whether the compiler costs $99 or $599, which suggests to me they haven't sold any lately.

Oh, and SCO pops up in this week's Spencer F. Katt column:

"This must feel similar to the end of WWII for Linux lovers," laughed the Lynx, as he envisioned the open-source crowd kissing nurses in the street, filling their freezers with meat, buying big-finned automobiles and enjoying some well-deserved leisure time.

Hey, now, that sounds like fun. Mmmm.... a freezer full of meat....

• SCO v. Novell takes another step toward trial, with a new round of amended pretrial disclosures, including proposed witness lists. In addition to a few of their own witnesses, Novell also wants to put Darl and Sontag on the stand. That ought to be interesting. They also mention, in an offhand sort of way, that they've got another 185 exhibits on top of those they disclosed in the first go-round of pretrial disclosures. Many of those will only be used if SCO keeps trying to hold on to the Sun/M$ cash. So I imagine SCO's got to be wondering exactly what kind of dirt Novell's holding in reserve. They'll probably try to keep the money anyway, regardless of what might be in those new exhibits, because they really don't have any choice in the matter. They're toast, guaranteed BK if they don't at least have a go at it. So this could get mighty entertaining before it's all over.
  
  
• ITJungle: "Court Says Novell Owns Unix, Not SCO"
  
  
• "Judge's ruling signals 'game over' for SCO"
  
  
• Today's McDougall piece: "SCO Could Face Cash Crunch After Novell Trial". He actually uses GL as a source, although without mentioning PJ by name. Oh, and he gets a quote from Didio, who admits things look pretty grim for SCO these days.
  
  
• And Murph's latest, "huh? SCO and knowing what I don't know". Go ahead, just try to figure out what point he's trying to make in that post. I dare you.
  
  
• Over on the SiliconInvestor board, SCOtt Lemon responds to a recent bit of taunting, and gets an amusing response.
  
  
• A rather sad tale over on c.u.s.m., in which an OSR 6 user posts to say he likes the OS, and his ERP software (which he's also happy with) runs on it, and everything's dandy, but he just wishes SCO hadn't gone down the litigation path. So he says he's a happy camper, but he still felt compelled to justify his choice of OSR6 to a bunch of (hopefully sympathetic) perfect strangers on Usenet, and he ended his post by saying "Just an alternative story to the doom and gloom..... "
  
  

So this is how the long, sordid SCO saga winds down: First a bang, and now the whimpering. You might've already seen Friday's Joint Status Report, in which SCO and Novell lay out the new landscape in the wake of Kimball's big ruling the previous Friday. There's still a lot of stuff they disagree on, which presumably still has to go to trial. But SCO concedes (or appears to concede) a couple of the key points. First, they don't seem to be disputing Unix copyright ownership anymore. And second, they concede that their claims against IBM, Autozone, etc., must be waived. So there isn't much left of their case against Novell, although Novell still has a bunch of live claims against SCO. And all that's left of the IBM case are those pesky IBM counterclaims. In particular, I'm crossing my fingers that Kimball doesn't decide CC10 is moot now. CC10, you may recall, is the one where IBM seeks a declaratory judgement that Linux doesn't infringe on SCO's precious IP rights. To my thinking that's the #1 issue left to be resolved, and I'm not 100% certain we'll get a definite resolution now. It would be a damn shame if we go through all this, and the bad guys still get to keep that accusation alive, just for the FUD value of it.

Kimball also laid out some more pretrial dates. So there'll be some additional filings to read soon. Probably nothing earthshaking, but possibly interesting for us non-lawyers, just to observe how all the procedures work.

I'm still not convinced SCO's given up on the litigation business entirely. More than likely they still have a few ridiculous delaying tactics up their slimy little sleeves. Nobody really believes SCO can change the overall outcome of the matter anymore, and a rational company might try to cut its losses at this point, but this is SCO we're talking about. Like most CEOs, Darl comes across as a guy who sees the world entirely in terms of sports metaphors, and it would be surprising if he's never once asked the legal team "What's our Hail Mary play?". If they were talented professionals (which is debatable), they somehow resisted the urge to roll their eyes at the client, at least not while he was looking.

Today's batch of assorted media coverage:

• The NYT's story about all the fun Wikiscanner revelations mentions SCO's self-serving edits a few months back:
  

  
  The SCO Group, a software maker in Salt Lake City, made changes to product information in its own entry this year. The company has been involved in legal disputes over the rights to some open-source software.
  
  Craig Bushman, the company’s vice president for marketing, said he had told a public relations manager to make the changes. “The whole history of SCO had been written by someone who doesn’t know the history of SCO,” he said.
  
  An hour after the changes were made, he said, they disappeared. The company e-mailed Wikipedia administrators, who replied that the changes had been rejected because of a lack of objectivity.
  

  
  
  No big surprise there, other than that SCO fessed up to it. We've all known about this for months. Still, it's nice to see it make the New York Times.
  
  
• Meanwhile, Paul McDougall has more to say about the SCO case. It reads like he's trying (or was ordered) to write a relatively unbiased article. But like the rest of the FUD brigade, and like an earlier story of his, he trots out those Microsoft patent claims and implies it's all doom and gloom from here on out. At least he doesn't have anything more to say about PJ just now. An apology would've been nice, but c'mon, you didn't really expect that, did you?
  
  
• Computerworld: "Grokking SCO's Demise", praising GL's coverage of the case.
  
  
• PC World: "Linux Users Uneasy at Ruling". I think we can chalk this one up as more FUD. It quotes both Enderle and Gartner's George Weiss (who made a name for himself back in the day, telling people to avoid Linux until the SCO case was resolved), and mentions the M$ patent FUD. And the title isn't exactly accurate either, as it doesn't actually quote or even mention a single Linux user who claims to be uneasy about the ruling.
  
  
• InternetNews: "Whither SCO?". Sean Michael Kerner's been covering the SCO follies for some time now, and he discusses what the future might hold for SCO. One of the options he mentions is McDonalds, or another large customer, buying SCO to keep the OS alive and supported. He says this is highly unlikely, but to me it seems just as likely as anyone else buying them. Not a terrible idea, if it turns out the cost of buying your own OS and maintaining it in the long term happens to be cheaper than migrating to a similar OS that has a future. Which I doubt. One option he doesn't mention is that all the valuable bit(s) and piece(s) will be carted off by various ThinkAtomic tentacles at amazing fire sale prices, and then the empty shell of SCO just sort of fades away into the pink sheets.
  

• In the latest attempt at damage control, SCO sent out a letter to their remaining partners. Darl, or whoever the real author is, paraphrases the earlier press-release-turned-8K right down to the bit about the ultra-valuable & unreleased "Gemini 64" operating system from 1996. Towards the bottom, the letter reminds readers that litigation isn't SCO's only business. Which is true, actually; it's just that they're even worse at selling products than they are at suing people.
  
  
• The stock dropped again today, closing at 36 cents. That and an nickel will get you a postage stamp. Niiiice. Total market cap is now down to $7.82M, No new all-time low today (that's still at 0.35), but we also saw the lowest-ever open (0.40), and lowest-ever high (0.44). So that's still progress.
  
  
• The big news article of the day is Matthew Aslett's piece at CBR, "Ruling suggests SCO knew it did not own Unix". That's something that's been widely suspected for years now, but when a federal judge appears to agree, that's another matter entirely. And let's not forget the conversion issue. So far SCO's ignored both issues, not even trying to put a positive spin on them. This could get awfully entertaining, if we're lucky (and SCO isn't).
  
  
• Another crop of stories, many of which read like epitaphs:
  
  • Ars Technica: "Requiem for a legal disaster: a retrospective analysis of SCO v. Novell"
    
  • InfoWorld: "SCO fans? What SCO fans?"
    
  • InfoWorld again: "Novell doesn't want to be the next SCO"
    
  • ITPro: "SCO's estranged relationship with Linux"
    
  • LinuxWorld: "Linux experts look for lessons from SCO suit"
    
  • ComputerWorld Australia: "SCO Group: Mini-Me trying to be Darth Vader"
    
  
  
  
• Paul McDougall is on the warpath for a second day, lashing out at PJ over her dissection of his earlier article. He feels he was treated unfairly, and throws quite the tantrum about it. I couldn't say whether PJ's treatment of him was perfectly fair or not, but I do think it was understandable. McDougall keeps obsessing over PJ's "real" identity, and that's got to set off alarm bells, given the past episodes with MOG and with SCO itself. Just what sort of reaction was he expecting to receive, I wonder?
  

Ahh, where to begin...

• So the bottom fell out of SCO's stock today. Down nearly 72%, closing at a pitiful 44 cents. Lowest close ever. In fact the high for the day was lower than the stock's previous all-time low -- which was back in June 2002, around the time Darl started. And the low was just 35 cents. 35 cents won't even buy you a freakin' postage stamp.
  
  For stock, um, "analysis" from a somewhat unusual corner, here's Slashdot's take on the action.
  
  
• Sunday night, a terrified SCO issued a press release about the ruling, which later appeared in an official 8K filing. It's quite a marvel of the spin-doctoring arts. They list a bunch of irrelevant copyrights they do own -- or at least ones for which the ownership hasn't been disputed yet. Among those is something called "Gemini 64", which is their code name for the never-released, never-completed operating system they worked on in the infamous Project Monterey, 11 years ago -- and they only claim to own "substantial portions" of it. Yeah, that sounds like a super-valuable chunk of IP there, guys. They go on to say they're "exploring their options" and just might file an appeal, without committing themselves to doing so. It's quite entertaining really.
  
  
• An InfoWorld piece about SCO's take on the ruling here.
  
  
• And there's GL coverage of course, exploring the Pythonesque aspects of SCO's statement.
  
  I expect the poor clueless PHBs at SCO are wondering who this Monty Python guy is, and why the "long-haired smellies" keep going on about him all the time.
  
  
• The local newspaper in Lindon has a new article on the stock tankage, which looks to be a front page story in Tuesday's print edition. This choice tidbit leaped out at me:
  

  
  Meanwhile, the overall sentiment at the Lindon company was described by one employee as one of "absolute shock," as its executive management and newly appointed public relations company, New York-based Coltrin & Associates, evaluated the situation Monday.
  

  
  
  
• And iTWire asks "Darl McBride, where are you?". And Blakey, and Didio too. (Yes, I know Blakey quit months ago. And someone else already mentioned that in the article's comments.)
  
  
• CNNMoney's coverage argues that the ruling removed a cloud over the open-source movement. Well, technically the ruling says the cloud never existed in the first place, but as long as they're saying there's no cloud now, hey, that's fine.
  
  
• Seattle's local newspaper has a blog devoted solely to all things Microsoft, and today's post explores the M$ angle of Friday's ruling, mostly devoted to email comments from PJ. The Beast of Redmond declined to comment for the story.
  
  
• Lyons has a rather neutral piece on Forbes. He naturally doesn't breathe a word about his earlier role touting SCO's idiotic claims. If you didn't know history, or have access to a search engine, you might think he was against them from day 1.
  
  
• Not all the fudsters are running for cover, though. Remember Paul McDougall? Last we heard from him, he was chiming in as part of SCO's failed anti-PJ jihad. They even used one of his articles as an exhibit, if I'm not mistaken. So in his latest bloviation, he wants to convince us that Friday's ruling is a disaster for Linux, and we're all doomed, because the Novell ruling doesn't resolve certain issues in the IBM case. That's essentially the same point "Paul Murphy" tried to make earlier, although McDougall is a bit more articulate and vicious about it. Sort of a bush-league Lyons, if you can imagine such a thing. PJ goes off on an extended rant about the McDougall piece here, and I can't blame her.
  
  With Lyons, at least you knew he had an ideological bone to pick. A silly and misguided ideological bone, but at least you knew where he was coming from. McDougall, I don't know what his angle is. Maybe he's just an especially zealous M$ fanboy -- although they usually just sit there smugly repeating that all Microsoft products are the best, and refusing to listen to reason. They tend not to get so malicious and personal about it. So your guess is as good as, or better than, mine.
  
  
• The schadenfreude-o-rama has spread to some of the more obscure forums. Check out this great post on the SiliconInvestor board responding to Scott Lemon (ex-CTO of SCO, an inconvenient fact he keeps trying to downplay). Meanwhile, the TheLion board has long been a playground for clueless bottom-feeding daytraders and shills, but today Baomike turned the lights on (so to speak) and they all ran back under the fridge, at least for the day. Might be interesting to see how that plays out. I'm not advocating bullying the poor dears, of course. But engaging in a vigorous debate about SCO's fundamentals, is another matter entirely. Ok, so they're just daytrading schmoes, but there are so few actual true believers left, and I got terminally bored with Biff about three years ago.
  
  
• Actually I'm glad I checked the minor boards, because TheLion has an interesting widget it calls an All-In-One Message Forum, which aggregates posts from IV and Y!, certain blog posts (although not SNR apparently), and the occasional minor-board post as well. And the UI is less offensive than Yahoo's native one, certainly. Interesting...
  
  
• There's even a new post on the moribund InvestorsHub board, although it's just a retread of the not overly clueful coverage at TheStreet.com.
  
  
• ComputerWorld has a roundup of posts about Friday's ruling from around blogospace. Naturally they fail to mention this humble blog. Feh. Bastards.
  
  
• Oh, and the very latest on c.u.s.m: The SCO+Darl Pants Game.
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

• More media coverage from the New York Times, InformationWeek, The Register, VNUnet, and Tech Blorge.
  
  
• SCO's "expert" witness Marc "Thousand Dollar Watch" Rochkind (or someone claiming to be him) has showed up on GL, offering lame excuses about why he's working for SCO. "Pays well" is probably a genuine reason of his, as is his desire for a career as an expert witness. He also lists "[redacted]" as a reason. Allegedly there's still some sort of super-seekrit evidence he can't tell us about, and we're all supposed to be impressed by that. Didn't work 4 years ago, why does he think it'll work now?
  
  
• He's not the only SCO shill who's freaking out over the ruling. Here's the latest from "Paul Murphy", in which he asserts the ruling has no bearing on the merits of the IBM case. Still in the denial phase, in other words.
  
  He does make one good point, though, completely by accident. Unless the courts explicitly deal with SCO's claims about IBM putting Unix code into Linux, the accusation continues to have FUD value, and IBM continues to be harmed by it. Whether SCO is permitted to continue making the claim in court, the notion is still rattling around out there in some quarters, and IBM could fairly argue the only way to undo the damage is to get the question resolved once and for all. I don't know whether that'll actually happen or not, since the courts are generally eager to dispose of issues as "moot" whenever possible. To me that's the most important thing to resolve in the whole SCO saga, and I hope IBM will keep trying to get it resolved decisively, not just tossed out over the copyright-ownership matter.
  
  
• Mr. "Murphy" is a big Solaris fan, so I'm surprised he isn't wringing his hands over the ruling causing trouble for Sun's OpenSolaris initiative, as discussed by SJVN, via Slashdot. Sun paid SCO all that cash and then open-sourced Solaris, so now that the court's decided Novell is the rightful owner, what does that mean for Sun? Are they
  
  Personally I hope Novell shrugs it off. As far as we know, Sun honestly believed SCO had the right to sell what it sold. And do we really need another round of ugly OS litigation? The way the ruling's worded, it sounds as though SCO did have the right to cut a deal with Sun (although I doubt it's the sort of deal envisioned by the APA); they just didn't have the right to keep all the cash for themselves.
  
  
• There's some discussion around the net on the bit where Kimball says SCO is liable for conversion. In other words, taking money that wasn't rightfully theirs. This could get interesting, as it's been suggested that SCO execs could be personally liable if SCO itself can't cough up enough cash to repay Novell. I'm not a legal expert and don't know for sure, but it certainly sounds promising.
  
  
• Meanwhile, here's a piece on ABC News sneering at Lyons's "Fake Steve" gig. The piece is funny and entertaining, but it has a bit of a vendetta feel to it. It seems that "Fake Steve" once went off on a rant about the article's author, so now it's payback time. The argument that it's wrong to use a pseudonym on the net is a very MSM, Old Media sort of notion, and one I disagree with for obvious reasons. Other than that, it's worth a look.
  
  
• While looking for SCO stories, I ran across a curious tale on The Inquirer, about a guy in Denver who had his thumbs surgically modified to better fit his new iPhone. The piece links to the original story at the North Denver News... but The Inq failed to notice the link to another piece explaining that the thumb-whittling article was satire, not news. You've just gotta love the tech media and the painstaking, in-depth research they always do. The tech trade press also spent a couple of years insisting that SCO had a viable case, so what does that tell you?
  
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

More media reaction to yesterday's big ruling in SCO v. Novell:

• Local reaction to the story at the Salt Lake Tribune and Provo Daily Herald.
  
  
• More tech media coverage at Wired, HTMLfixIT, Geekzone NZ and DesktopLinux.com
  
  
• And some business press coverage as well, from UPI and MarketWatch. It's worth paying extra attention to see how the story plays in the financial press, since that's where potential future bagholders get their news. So far it's being portrayed as a clearcut victory for the Linux camp, and a total defeat for SCO. No nuances, no letting a pro-SCO fudster like Enderle get the last word in. So that seems like a positive sign.
  
  
• Over on Y!, saltydogmn gets a couple of grumpy emails from none other than Andrea McBride, Darl's wife.
  
  
• The FUD brigade is out in full force already, either ranting about the ruling or trying to minimize the impact of it. MOG is outraged, as you might expect, and is even less coherent than usual. I normally don't encourage people to patronize stories by MOG, but it's a holiday, so y'all are off the hook just this once.
  
  
• A piece at 24/7 Wall St. titled "The Future of Linux is Still Dark", by one Douglas A. McIntyre. Dark, he claims, because of the continuing M$ patent FUD. There's always something, isn't there? When that gets resolved, next we'll hear that the future of Linux is dark because the sun will eventually go red giant and swallow the earth or something.
  
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

Kimball ruled, and SCO is now Officially Hosed. TuxRocks has the ruling here [Warning: 103 page PDF, but worth the wait.]

PJ's already got the story up too. Not totally surprising that she had it before I did, I mean, I'm sitting here at home with a nasty cold right now, medicated to the gills. But I wouldn't miss this for anything.

I can't wait to see what SCO has to say for itself now. That ought to be a real hoot. It's like Esker says: HAR!!!!! HAR!!!!! HAR!!!!


Updated:

• Al P. has additional sources for the ruling docs here. So load-balance, people. Thanks.
  
  
• And the inevitable Slashdot story. Although sometimes I suspect the average Slashdot reader hadn't even been born yet when this litigation circus began.
  
  
• Other stories so far from PC World, the WSJ, Computerworld, HardOCP, TechSpot, BetaNews, InfoWorld, and O'ReillyNet. That's just so far, and the stories tend to have a breathless just-off-the-wire flavor. It's fun to see everyone in such a rush, after all these years.
  
  
• The GL story's on Digg here.
  
  
• A certain Mr. Sizz was unable to restrain himself over on c.u.s.m. No replies from the denizens so far.
  
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech

I have all kinds of good excuses about why I haven't posted in a few days, even though there's been a mini-flurry of SCO news of fair-to-middlin' importance. I could take some time out and bore you with the excuses, but I won't.

• So I admit I'd completely forgotten about SCO Tec Forum 2007, which was the reason behind all those recent, fluffy, content-free press releases we've been seeing. I haven't seen any news reports about how the show was, and there's nothing in blogospace, and not even anything on comp.unix.sco.misc. But maybe it was a great conference, and the attendees just don't use the Interwebs or something. It does amuse me that SCO Tec Forum happened in the same city, at the same time, but not the same hotel, as DefCon 14. Maybe the DefCon organizers figured the hardcore "black hat" guys would all be at the SCO event and would leave everybody else alone that way. I dunno.
  
  
• I haven't covered all the new SCO press releases yet. Here's the one with their Team 1 Systems partnership on Me Inc. Seems SCO talked Team 1 (a longtime partner of theirs) into going into a whole new business segment they know nothing about. Team 1 must've figured they've gone this far with SCO, so why not take it to the next level (down)? What's the point of walking only half the plank?
  
  
• And the most recent one, on SCO's foray into Canadian politics, believe it or not.
  
  
• Meanwhile, the preliminary maneuvering continues in SCO v. Novell. The pretrial disclosure stuff happened as scheduled, but now there are Rule 26(a)(3) objections to fight over. More delay? Don't bet against it.
  
  
• Oh, and Daniel Lyons is the Fake Steve Jobs, I suppose because shilling for SCO just doesn't pay like it used to. I'm pretty sure he's visited SNR at least once, and I suppose I ought to feel honored, now that he's a famous Interweb celebrity and all that. But he's still a sleazebag. I'll grant that he occasionally has a way with words, in a vicious, juvenile, one-dimensional sort of way. That's just his nature. It's pretty much all he does. Likewise, scorpions are quite good at stinging people, because it's instinctive, it's what they do, and it's what they've always done. When they do, you don't call them clever and praise the quality of their work.
  
  

Labels: linux, open source, sco, tech