SCO News Roundup

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....