Saturday, August 11, 2007
8/12 SNR
- 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