SCO News Roundup

Haven't done one of these in over a month, for the simple reason that nothing of importance has happened in over a month. The SCO v. Novell trial came and went, and Kimball didn't rule from the bench at the end, and now it's over a month later and we still don't have a ruling. I suppose I ought to have anticipated this, but I seriously didn't. I figured there'd be a ruling the moment closing arguments were done. Or if not that moment, the next day, certainly. Or within a week, for sure. But no.

There was supposed to be a post-trial hearing in the BK case where SCO would unveil the shiny new reorg plan, but that didn't happen. SCO's new omnibus reason for delay is the lack of a ruling in the Novell case. Which is actually about the most reasonable excuse they've come up with in the last four years. Until Kimball rules, they don't know what they owe Novell, and they also can't appeal yet. Without knowing what their legal & financial universe looks like, there's no way for SCO to know what lies to tell next, so really there's no way for them to move forward at all.

At this point I'm more or less OK with waiting. It's not great, by any means, but the Linux community can afford to wait a lot longer than SCO can. I've never been a big fan of "winning" by running out the clock on SCO, but it looks like that's how it's going to go down, and I guess I can live with that. There's a bit of poetic justice in SCO going under like this, "running out the clock" being one of those sports metaphors Darl can't get enough of.

For old times' sake, if for no other reason, I did a news search for SCO. Here are the slim pickins:

• A Heise article dated May 30th which seems to be a belated English translation of a piece about Kimball's big ruling last August.
  
  
• SCO gets a mention in this list of Top Ten Linus Quotes.
  
  
• My eyes lit up when I saw the headline "SCO's UnixWare measures up with open source additions". For a split second I thought we might have one of those ultra-rare product-related news stories. But no dice. This piece dates to July 2004. At the time, NetworkWorld concluded that UnixWare was a decent OS, and performed better than Mac OS X 10.3 on certain benchmarks. On the other hand, UnixWare 7.1.4 is still the most recent version of the OS nearly four years later, while Mac OS X is up to 10.5.x, with 10.6 on the way.
  
  One rather poignant bit from the review:
  

  The SCO Update service (not tested, as no updates had been issued at the time we tested) connects to the host for updates from the mothership.

  
  
  And as far as I know, the update situation never improved after that. For all we know, SCO Update might be the end-all, be-all, all-singing, all-dancing Platonic ideal of software update apps, but we'll never know for sure because there aren't any updates. Oh, so sad.
  
  
• Good news for this humble blog's surprisingly large UK readership: You won't be seeing Boies & Co. on your side of the pond anytime soon. It's actually kind of a shame -- I'd really like to see Boies in a powdered wig. I wonder what sort of powdered wig would go with his dirty sneakers?
  
  
• In other Boies news, the AIG-Greenberg suit continues.
  
  
• Maybe you haven't heard, but HBO has a new movie about the 2000 election, just in time for the 2008 election. Boies is played by the one and only Ed Begley Jr. Perhaps not the most unkindest cut of all, but probably in the top ten.
  
  
• In his copious free time while he's not burning the midnight oil on SCO's behalf, Boies is also helping defend Bank of New York Mellon in a money laundering suit brought by the Russian government. Yeah, good luck with that. It's actually kind of an interesting case. In essence, the Russian side is arguing that the US federal RICO Act applies worldwide, a legal argument one doesn't often encounter outside the US.
  
  
• Another BS&F racketeering case, again defending the accused. They seem to be developing a real specialty in RICO law. Good news, Darl & Ralphie!
  
  
• Not that they've given up on appealing the judgements of the free market. Perhaps you've heard of the ConnectU vs. Facebook suit, in which ConnectU (who you may not have heard of) alleges that Facebook swiped their precious methods and concepts. Naturally, BS&F is working for the party whose service failed in the marketplace. Some things never change.
  
  
• Although some things never change, nearly everyone involved in the SCO saga has moved on. PJ mostly talks about ODF these days. Boies pretends the SCO suit never happened. IBM, Novell, and Red Hat are too busy making money off Linux to lose any sleep over SCO. Even MOG has other things on her mind these days. A number of articles such as this one now list her as "Virtualization News Desk editor" at SYS-CON. To the extent that "virtual" is an antonym of "real", this is probably a good career move for her.
  
  
• Daniel Lyons has moved on as well, and he's managing to stay busy. On the heels of his fleeting 15 minutes of fame as the "Fake Steve Jobs", he just had a cameo appearance at something called "MEFCON", a trade show sponsored by the "Mobile Entertainment Forum" in LA. The way the press release is phrased, it sounds as if Lyons appeared in character, similar to how Sacha Baron Cohen often appears as Borat.
  
  So next time you're on the bus, and there's a creepy guy across the aisle surfing pr0n on his phone and fumbling around under his trenchcoat and generally having himself a "mobile entertainment" experience, remember that Lyons is getting his cut of the proceeds.
  
  
• A Lyons article about an in-car navigation widget he's become fond of. In passing, he nonchalantly mentions he's been house hunting in Boston recently. If there's a widget that alleviates the horrors of driving in Boston, that's great and all. But actually buying a house there has very little to do with GPS coordinates and MLS listings, and everything to do with who your great-great-grandparents were. Invent a widget to overcome that little hurdle, and you'll really be on to something.
  
  Right after that little tidbit, he quotes Raymond Carver, one of the least Bostonian, and least Lyons-esque, writers I can imagine. It's not clear to me what the Carver reference adds to the piece, other than pointing out to readers (yet again) that the author knows how to make fancy-schmancy literary references.
  
  
• A piece on the glorious new Windows Embedded Standard 2009, which as it turns out is based on XP and not Vista. Which leads us to the inevitable Endroolage:
  

  
  "It will go on lower-performance systems than Vista would run on," Rob Enderle, principal analyst for The Enderle Group, told InternetNews.com. "Plus, XP is a product that people have been comfortable with for the last seven years."
  

  
  
  Over in the Rob-o-Sphere, creating Vista was an inspired act of genius, and running away from Vista is an equally inspired act of genius. The sun always shines, and the bluebirds always sing, and it's always morning in America inside the Rob-o-Sphere.
  
  
• A randomly selected bit of "Paul Murphy" word salad: "Is Java Windows for Unix?". Honestly, the only reason I can see why he has a career as an Important Tech Pundit is that he kept the negatives. And since that fateful day he's remained mired in that distant era when there were such things as negatives.
  
  
• Over on c.u.s.m., a fun thread on shell history and which shell is best. Yes, I checked, this is a new thread, not one dating to 1990 or so. Give 'em another 20 years and they might work themselves up to having a proper KDE vs. Gnome flamewar. Assuming SCO OSes exist 20 years from now, which I sincerely doubt.