SCO News Roundup

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.