Tuesday, March 30, 2010

 

3/30/10 SNR: Victory(!?) Edition

So this blog sort of tapered off last July, and I honestly haven't been following the endless SCO saga on a daily basis for quite some time now. A great deal has happened since last July, and I'm not even going to attempt a recap. Because there's rather big news today, perhaps you've heard it already.

The jury's spoken -- unanimously -- and they've determined that SCO never owned any Unix copyrights. Which I don't think comes as a surprise to anyone but SCO, and even they ought to have known. There are still a few issues to be resolved in front of the judge sans jury, so this baby isn't quite over yet. And Mr. Cahn (who you would've heard a great deal about if I'd been posting all this time) says he still wants to go after IBM over contracts, for some reason. And it isn't clear yet (to me) whether SCO has any remaining appeal options, however ludicrous they might be, to drag this out even further.

Have I mentioned that the SCO v. Universe charade has been going on for over seven years now? Just think how long that is in tech industry years, I mean, when SCO first sued IBM there was no such thing as YouTube, or Flickr, or Facebook, or Twitter. Wild Pentium 4's stalked the earth. You could still buy boxes running IRIX or Tru64. The 2.6 Linux kernel wasn't out yet, and gcc was on version 3.2.3. Windows XP was on Service Pack 1. If you were stuck on Windows, you were probably also stuck with IE 6, since there was no such thing as Firefox. Well, there was crufty old Mozilla, but almost nobody used it, that I can recall. Google had only just acquired Blogger (home to this humble blog here), and there was still no such thing as Gmail, or Google Maps, and they hadn't even gone IPO yet.

SCO, meanwhile, repackaged a minor UnixWare update as a major OpenServer release, and dabbled in a bit of Me Inc. on the side. And that's about it for the last 7 years. I can't help but wonder, if you interviewed SCO's employees a few decades from now and asked them whether it was all worth it, blowing seven years of their (relative) youth, seven prime years of their careers, working for a small and unsuccessful parasite on the hind end of the tech industry, toiling away halfheartedly on dead-end 1980's technology, embarrassed to tell anyone who they worked for.... what would they say?

I'd want a do-over, personally.


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