Thursday, September 27, 2007
9/27 SNR
- No news on the delisting front today, so I assume that means SCO's filed an appeal. As we learned last time SCO was in hot water with the exchange, Nasdaq hearings and related filings are not made public, unfortunately. So the next deadline to look for is October 4th. They have to pay a $4000 fee for the appeal by then, and to do that with company money they'll need permission from the BK judge.
- Creditors have now been served official notice of the BK, which we learn thanks to Al P., SCO's #1 creditor (at least alphabetically). The company providing SCO's BK services has a good info page on the case, including the current docket (although Al's been I've added it to the "Law" section of the sidebar for future reference.
The docket's up to a bewildering 65 documents so far, believe it or not. Among the latest batch, we learn there's a Meeting of Creditors scheduled for October 18th. That's in addition to the regularly scheduled Omnibus Hearings scheduled for October 5th, November 6th, December 5th, January 8th, and February 5th, and probably more where those came from. So if the pattern holds, the next hearing after that ought to be on March 4th or 5th, almost exactly five years to the day since SCO sued IBM. Which is a fun coincidence, although it means this crazy circus has gone on for five years too many. - A new Parloff piece, "SCO's Legal Strategy". Not quite as overtly pro-SCO as some of his other work, but he still talks approvingly about what SCO ought to do to avoid giving back Novell's money. I know I've said this before, but Parloff sure picked an odd time to jump on the SCO bandwagon.
- Fresh off his exclusive Darl interview just before the BK filing, Paul McDougall offers up a steaming pile of GPLv3 FUD. Seems a new study is claiming GPLv3 hasn't received universal acceptance and use in the few months it's been out. Yeah, I'm shocked too. Shocked, I tell you. Sure is funny how the trade media never tells you who's paying for all these studies. Either they don't ask, or they know but don't tell, I'm not sure which.
- CRN: "Five Ways Linux Is Better Than Vista". Only five? I expect that was an easy article to write. Stay tuned for "Twenty-Eight Ways A Poke In The Eye With A Sharp Stick Is Better Than Vista"
- On the retrotech front, you might enjoy this month's traffic on The Unix Heritage Society mailing list. There's a thread about where to find an old copy of SunOS 4.1.1, including some extended handwringing about whether the kernel source is legally distributable or not. Answer: No, it's mostly BSD but it's got a smidgen of AT&T's SysV code in it, and SCO -- or someone -- might sue you. Even though it's an OS from 1990 and the fastest box it runs on has a 33MHz 68030 cpu. The legal situation in our industry would be funny if it wasn't so sad.
On a cheerier note, someone's managed to resurrect an old tape containing Mini-Unix, from way back in 1979. It's not, y'know, useful or anything at this point, but it's nice to see a piece of history being preserved.
There are also threads about Unix System III and Cfront, AT&T's crufty old C++ front end from the distant mists of time before real C++ compilers were invented. Coincidentally, SCO claims both of them as part of its precious intellectual property. I'm pretty sure Cfront was the basis for Darl claiming to own the C++ language lock stock and barrel. And when Caldera released all those ancient Unix versions under a BSD-style license, back in the Ransom Love era, they specifically excluded System III and later OSes. So clearly someone still thinks it contains super-seekrit methods & concepts, even though it came out back in 1982 and only runs on PDP-11s and VAXen. Like I just said, it'd be funny if it wasn't so sad. - A highly astute reader alerted me to a piece on NetworkWorld: "Who will be the next Geek King?". It seems we need a new Geek King soon, because King BillG the First is abdicating come next July to pursue other interests (which I suppose will make him the Geek Duke of Windsor or something). The list of nominees is odd and unimpressive, except for Linus, and they spelled his name wrong. Seriously. Maybe they figured the Linux crowd wouldn't find it that way, so one of the other guys could walk away with the crown. Did I mention that one of the nominees is our old friend DayJet Eddie, formerly of SCO's board? It's true. Somehow they managed to spell "Iacobucci" right, but botched "Torvalds", which is spelled just like it sounds, more or less. Go figure.
FWIW, Stephen Colbert is nominated as well. While Mr. Colbert is many things, I'm afraid a Geek King is not one of them. No rightful king is afraid of a mere bear, after all.
So I was going to vote for Linus, but then I decided it was a stupid contest and voted for Esker Melchior instead. Everyone knows Esker's the One True King.
By brx0 @ 11:28 AM 
