SCO News Roundup

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

2010-03-30T21:05:00.000-07:00

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.

chapter 7 (?) mini-preview (?)

2009-06-14T19:21:00.001-07:00

So tomorrow there'll be a big hearing on whether to convert SCO's interminable Chapter 11 bankruptcy into Chapter 7 liquidation. The US bankruptcy trustee has requested this, as have Novell and IBM. SCO opposes the motions, for a variety of spurious, irrelevant, and ludicrous reasons. SCO's argument, in essence, is that they're just weeks away from a glorious victory on their appeal of the Novell case. (Ok, yeah, I neglected to cover the appeal here. I didn't see it as that big of a story, quite honestly, merely the latest way for SCO to drag things out a bit longer.) Anyway, they're supposedly this close to crushing Novell on appeal, and as soon as that inevitably happens they'll have countless gazillions at their disposal, so the court should grant them an extra stretch of delay, no matter what BK law technically requires. And if they get that, no doubt they'll need more delay when the case goes back to Kimball for basically a complete do-over. And for any appeals that results in, plus any appeals to the Supreme Court, plus any do-overs from there, plus delay due to any other court cases -- IBM, Red Hat, AutoZone, whoever.

I'm reluctant to make any predictions. I think I said I wasn't going to make any more predictions about what the BK court was going to do, since I don't have any insight into that particular universe. On one hand, I can't see how the court could possibly rule in SCO's favor. The BK trustee has asked for Chapter 7 conversion, and under the law these days -- as I understand it -- the judge has to either grant that or dismiss the BK case entirely. That seems about as clear-cut as federal law ever gets. On the other hand, given SCO's track record it's hard to bet against them when they're angling for further delay. It doesn't always work, but it's worked enough, such that it's mid-2009 and we've still got friggin' SCO to kick around.

One amusing aspect to SCO's opposition is the nano-deluge of letters and motions in support they've drummed up. Their filing includes a letters from a few of their remaining Unix customers, explaining that they might be inconvenienced, in theory, if SCO went away, assuming nobody buys the Unix business from the Ch. 7 BK trustee. The court also got a separate letter from Herb Jackson of Renaissance Ventures (or was it Renaissance Capital, or Renaissance Partners, I can't recall at the moment). He was a SCO true believer way back in the beginning, and apparently he's spent the last few years quietly watching his investment evaporate, but still never wavering as a SCO True Believer. Which is really sad, if you ask me. And on top of that, it seems that tomorrow we'll see an appearance, or attempted appearance, by lawyers for the latest Norris shell company, something called "Gulf Capital Partners", or something along those lines. Which, according to info on IV, employs one of the same DC frontmen as our old friends at the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute, of "Samizdat" fame. It's almost like SCO's already rolling the credits, and everyone who ever worked on their behalf gets to be in on it. I suppose next we'll hear from that analyst whose name I forget (Skiba?), still standing by his $45 per share prediction for SCO, due just as soon as they get that elusive courtroom victory. Maybe we'll see new FUD from DiDio or Enderle or even Lyons again, or possibly MOG / G2 will try to "intervene" in the case. If the current trend continues, maybe we'll even hear from Baystar, begging the court to let events play out so maybe they'll get some of their money back. Who knows?

I do suspect there will ultimately be a ruling against SCO, but it may not be tomorrow. And whenever that happens, it's still not The End. First, as you might imagine, there's an appeals process in BK court, just like there is in regular federal court. My understanding is that cases go next to a BK appeals panel of three judges, and from there to the regular US Court of Appeals, and from there to the Supremes. And (if SCO wins at the Supremes), all the way back down, and in semi-parallel the Novell case also gets appealed to the Supremes if SCO doesn't win in Denver, and in another 5-7 years it all ends up back in Kimball's lap, unless he retires before then. And if, on the other hand, the case proceeds to Chapter 7 and current SCO management is quickly kicked to the curb, we're still not out of the woods. One would assume that a rational BK trustee, like any rational person, would realize that the SCO v. Universe cases are without merit and settle them ASAP. But we don't actually have any guarantee of that. We may get a non-tech-savvy one who doesn't get it but just sees big dollar signs, and SCO v. Universe then proceeds under new management. I'd hate to see that, but I can't rule it out.

I'll try to do a post-hearing post if anything dramatic happens. It would be a shame not to, even though I'm not as wound up about the SCO saga as I once was (in case you hadn't noticed).

11/23 SNR: "Final" Judgment

2008-11-23T11:35:00.000-08:00

So, finally, we have a final judgment in the SCO v. Novell case. No big surprises here: SCO owes money it doesn't have, a bunch of their claims are gone for good, with prejudice, etcetera. The one thing that surprised me was how long it took to get to this point. The trial, after all, was early this year, and Kimball ruled back in July, and then the case entered into a sort of post-trial limbo, with Novell holding off on the final judgment until SCO caved and dismissed much of what remained of their case. That seems to have been a clever move on Novell's part, and one that nobody anticipated, least of all SCO. All this time they've been promising the world that they've got a sure-fire guaranteed victory on appeal, just as soon as the chance to appeal arises, but they just burned through another quarter of dwindling cash that they couldn't have planned on. And with all the dismissed claims, the odds of the big payday they keep promising have gotten even more remote, if such a thing is possible.

Speaking of appeals, I'm having trouble referring to this as a final judgment. Every time I try typing it, my fingers leave the keyboard and start making little air quotes. It's final in a legal sense, technically, in that the proceedings in front of Kimball are done, but I don't see how SCO can not appeal, after pinning all their hopes on it for the last few years. I don't see what their grounds for an appeal would be, but that's never stopped them before. So, in short, it's not over yet. Then there's that little matter of the bankruptcy case, and nonzero odds of the IBM and Autozone cases coming back to life at some point, sooner or later.

So the question is, what does "final" really look like, as far as SCO's concerned? At what point can PJ break out the red dress, and the rest of us can break out a nice single malt, or Bordeaux, or whatever? I'm increasingly unsure there'll be one big event signifying "The End", unfortunately. I do see a few probable semi-milestones ahead, although I'm not going to guess dates or even an order for them. The one I'm really looking forward to is when they finally run out of cash, and have to lay off their remaining employees and cease operations. That won't stop the lawsuits, unfortunately -- SCO could, in theory, continue on for years to come as a legal entity, with nothing but a P.O. box to its name. BS&F, as you may recall, is obligated to keep fighting for SCO in the various SCO v. Universe suits without getting a cent more for their trouble. If whoever's in charge of SCO wants to keep this going for another 25 years, BS&F has to keep plugging along at it, to the bitter end and beyond.

Also on the financial side of things, there's converting from Chapter 11 to Chapter 7 bankruptcy, where the goal changes from reorganization to liquidation. In other words, shutting everything down and selling off the company's remaining assets, using the proceeds to pay off creditors. This would be quite a milestone, but it's not the end either. Far from it, actually. To liquidate a company's assets, you first need to know exactly what the company does and doesn't own. That's been the core issue in the SCO saga since it began, and before that in the old AT&T vs BSD conflict. The Novell case sorted much of that out, but I doubt that all possible questions of title are now resolved. Really, I think Chapter 11 would be a much faster process for SCO than Chapter 7, if they had any realistic chance of reorganizing and becoming viable again. Which they don't.

Another possible milestone is the BK trustee booting out current SCO management, or what's left of it. This may or may not happen, but it'd certainly be party-worthy if it did. Just imagine, no more Darl or Ralphie to kick around. It's a nice thought, isn't it?

On the legal side, it's harder to see a rapid end to the shenanigans. They'll go to Denver and appeal and beg for a do-over, for starters. The court isn't obligated to hear their appeal, and they won't if there aren't convincing grounds for them to do so. There's no automatic second bite at the apple here. If that happens, I don't see how SCO goes forward from there. But I'm not going to bet on that. Let's assume that when they go to Denver and show up in front of a fresh set of judges, they sound just credible enough that the court agrees to hear the appeal. From that point, it could take years. Probably not another 5-and-change years, but years, almost certainly.

And as I mentioned, there are still a few court cases out there in suspended animation that may yet get revived. There was some action in the AutoZone case recently that I still don't understand. I think is that the court's stay expires around the end of this year, so it could conceivably go forward after that, although that would likely require the BK court's OK too. The IBM case is technically "closed" at this point but could still be reopened. And let's not forget the Red Hat case in Delaware. The key thing with all of these cases is that there's no upside for SCO in any of them going forward. Their remaining claims against IBM and AutoZone are waived, per the Novell judgment, so there are only counterclaims to resolve (I don't recall whether AutoZone filed any counterclaims, but I suppose they still could if the case proceeds.) And I don't think they'd have grounds for non-laughable counterclaims in the Red Hat case. So if any of these cases go forward, they will at the behest of the other companies involved, with SCO kicking and screaming and begging for delay the whole time. That, again, could take years.

I don't want to sound like I'm just throwing a big wet blanket over the latest events, and really I'm not trying to do that. I just think a note of caution is in order. Believe me, I'd love it if this was really over -- perhaps you've noticed I haven't posted here since July. I'm rather tired and bored of the whole thing, I have to admit. And none of the semi-milestones I see ahead seem to offer much chance to become unbored, barring a highly unexpected reversal in court, a sudden huge influx of cash, or some other surprising twist. Barring the improbable, the future means chronicling the ongoing asymptotic decline of SCO. It's not anywhere near as exciting as it once was, but I feel like I really shouldn't give up on it entirely. So, although I can't promise daily, or even weekly posts here, I'll try to see what I can do.

7/18 SNR: SCO owes $2,547,817 (plus interest)

2008-07-16T22:56:00.000-07:00

So we finally have a ruling from Judge Kimball. SCO owes Novell precisely $2,547,817, plus interest. That's not as much money as I (and I think most people) were hoping for, but hey. SCO doesn't have a lot of cash on hand anymore. Too much over $2.5M and the exact amount awarded becomes an academic exercise. A $2.5M award two or three years ago would've been serious bad news. Now, not so much.

PJ suggests the ruling was designed to discourage SCO appeals, which is an interesting notion. She doesn't elaborate, but I think I see what she's getting at. It's possible Kimball is indulging in a bit of game theory here. They can either take the current deal, fork over the $2.5M, and have Kimball's rulings stand as the final judgment in the case, or they can appeal and see what's behind door #2. It could be a better deal, but it could also be much, much worse. If he'd awarded Novell, say, $25M, there's zero chance SCO would fork over a cent voluntarily. They'd be on the next plane to Denver to file an appeal, because they'd have nothing to lose by doing so. Now, they'll have to think it over a bit more. In the end I think they'll still try to appeal, because they're a bunch of freakin' morons who won't listen to common sense, take their half-a-loaf (or pathetic-smidgen-of-a-loaf really) and go the hell away already. But it does up the odds that the appeals court will take one look at the case and decide SCO is exactly as I've just described them. $2.5M is also an amount Novell can reasonably ask the BK court to hand over, where a request for $25M probably wouldn't get a hearing.

As I've said before on numerous occasions, I don't actually care whether Novell gets a cent back from SCO, just so long as SCO doesn't have the money anymore. If it all gets spent on lawyers and accountants and various BK hangers-on, that's fine with me. The moment Novell cozied up to Microsoft, I ceased to concern myself about their continued well-being. I'm sure their new friends in Redmond will take good care of them. Or not. My main concern has always been the claims and counterclaims in the IBM case (remember the IBM case?), and putting SCO's silly Linux accusations to bed permanently. If today's ruling means SCO lives long enough to properly lose the IBM case, I'd call it a good thing.

The main downside of today's ruling is that SCO and its few remaining friends and allies (i.e. MOG) will spin it as a glorious victory. Which will inevitably suck in a new crop of clueless daytrading bagholders, create a temporary stock bubble, and allow the current bagholders to unload their shares at somewhat less of a loss. I think that's pretty much inevitable, and I can't muster a great deal of sympathy for people who rush in to buy stocks ending in ".PK" without doing any research. As far as I'm concerned Darl and friends can shill this ruling to high heaven, for all the good it'll do them. They still owe $2.5M they may or may not have at this point, and even if they do have the cash on hand they're still losing money and customers at an astonishing rate, and there's still the IBM case looming on the horizon.

Today's ruling breaks the long logjam that prevented various other matters from moving forward. So from here I think things proceed along a few tracks, possibly in parallel. Regarding a SCO appeal, I think we'll see an attempt in short order. I've heard conflicting things about whether they'll need the BK court's approval to mount an appeal or not. Even if it doesn't, the center of excitement will now move back to Delaware. The pending ruling was SCO's excuse for not filing a new reorg plan with the BK court. Now they'll need to either come up with a new plan, or a new excuse. And as for the IBM case, I don't see any compelling reason the BK court ought to leave it stayed at this point, if IBM asks to have the stay lifted.

Overall sentiment: "Yay!" Although without all-caps and with a single exlamation point. It's not an absolutely crushing victory, but I'll take it.

6/6 SNR: Crickets.wav Edition

2008-06-07T00:17:00.000-07:00

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.

5/2 SNR: SCO v. Novell, The Last(?) Day

2008-05-02T09:53:00.000-07:00

So it's day 4 of 4 in the SCO v. Novell trial, so it'll all be over some time later today. Unless they find a way to drag the thing out longer, which shouldn't be ruled out.

GL has a raft of new stories up.

Updated: GL's Report on the Last Day of the Trial in Novell v. SCO".
~~First off~~, a first look at Day 3, with SCO presenting its case (such as it is).
Transcripts for the first two days, made possible by generous GL donors.
Day 1 transcript as text.
Day 2 transcript as text.

Elsewhere on the interwebs:

Salt Lake Tribune: "SCO-Novell trial ends, judge promises decision soon"
InformationWeek: "SCO On The Stand", which begins "There are times when the jokes just seem to tell themselves."
Computerworld's IT Blogwatch: "SCO in court again: Novell wants its $19,979,561.00". Although it's really just a bunch of links to other stories you've probably already seen.
ZDNet: "SCO chief testifies: 'Linux is copy of Unix'".
Couple of Slashdot stories: "Darl McBride Takes the Stand In Novell v. SCO", and then SCO's McBride Testifies '
Linux Is a copy of UNIX'.

5/1 SNR: "Darl took issue..."

2008-05-01T09:49:00.000-07:00

From GL's now heavily-updated Day 2 story, we learn that Darl took the stand yesterday, and it sounds like it was quite a show. One courtroom observer delivers a quote for the ages:

Darl took issue with what he believed was Mr. Acker calling him a liar. Mr. Acker took exception and said he thought it had already been established that Mr. McBride tells the truth in the 10Qs.

And the morning batch of media coverage:

Ars Technica: "Deluded SCO CEO on witness stand: 'Linux is a copy of UNIX'"
OSNews: "McBride: 'Linux Is a Copy of UNIX'". Seems like Darl's star turn in the witness box isn't garnering many rave reviews. It's kind of puzzling really -- he had to have known he'd be on the stand sooner or later. And for the kind of money SCO's paying the guy, he could certainly afford some basic intro-level acting classes. But noooo. That's hubris for ya, I guess.
CIO Today reprints yesterday's Deseret News story, in case you haven't seen it.
Salt Lake Tribune: "Novell may expand its claims". Confusingly, the title refers to the possibility of Novell going after Sun and Microsoft. I actually don't see that happening, or at least I don't see those potential disputes ending up in court like this one. They'll sit down behind closed doors and work something out, the way normal companies usually do, and we'll see some PR about an exciting new partnership between various firms, the financial terms of which will not be disclosed. Happens all the time. Sometimes I think people forget just how abnormal SCO's behavior really is.
Ians-Blog: "Novell v. SCO -- PJ needs your help!" Fortunately these days "help" just means PayPal donations, as SCO appears to have gotten out of the stalking business. At least for the time being.
CelebrityPro.com: "Chris Brown News - First Word from Day 1 of the Novell v. SCO Trial". This one is probably not worth your time other than for the amusement value. Apparently there's another, R&B singing, non-courtroom-observing Chris Brown out there. It looks like CelebrityPro just aggregates all stories and blog posts containing a name. For each story, it generates a page full of cheesy youth-oriented flash ads (Axe body spray and so forth), with a link back to the original story.

At least I think that's what's going on. The other possibility is that "our" Chris Brown is the real celebrity, and he's finally getting his 15 minutes. It's unlikely, but possible -- after all, I've never heard of that other guy, so how famous could he be, really?

4/30 SNR: SCO v. Novell, Day 2

2008-04-30T15:58:00.000-07:00

So we're halfway there, wherever 'there' is. I haven't seen any courtroom reports yet, but Al P. has the official minutes here.

The minutes mention that today SCO begged for something called "involuntary dismissal", which if granted would make the case go away, never to return. No word on what grounds (if any) they think this is justified. I suspect the details will be rather amusing.

Updated: GL's coverage of Day 2 is up now. Not much detail yet, though. PJ typically updates the existing article when new info arrives, instead of creating a new article, so it's worth checking back again later.

Until we hear today's news from SLC, here are some articles about yesterday's thrilling courtroom drama. Most are from local UT media, by reporters who've been covering the SCO saga for a while now. So I'd imagine they all attended the trial yesterday.

Salt Lake Tribune: "Novell licensing beef with SCO tied to 1995 version of Unix"
Provo Daily Herald: "SCO, Novell trial underway"
Deseret News: "Novell says SCO owes it $20 million; SCO begs to differ"
Server Watch: "Enterprise Unix Roundup: Law and Order, Unix Edition". In which the SCO case gets second billing behind the Hans Reiser trial & conviction.
Lamlaw: "First Word from Day 1 of the Novell v. SCO Trial"

4/29 SNR: SCO v. Novell, Day 1

2008-04-29T17:16:00.000-07:00

At GL, the story so far.

Based on the trickle of news so far, it ounds like we haven't come to the eventful part of the trial yet. Assuming there's going to be an eventful part. I still suspect SCO's going to weasel out of this somehow. I don't know how. I don't even have any serious guesses about how. But still, I'm not sure I'll believe this is for real until there's a verdict. And maybe not even then.

Until we hear anything further, here's today's batch of trial preview stories:

InternetNews: "SCO Novell Trial Starts Today"
Slashdot: "SCO v. Novell Goes to Trial Today In Utah"
Deseret News: "Trial starts today in SCO lawsuit"
Salt Lake Tribune: "SCO Group vs. Novell: New round"
LocalNews8.com: "Novell turns tables on SCO Group"

Oh, and the Novell trial gets a quick mention in MOG's puff piece about the FranklinCovey deal. Btw, she says the FC deal is a "revenue-sharing" arrangement. Which (if true) means SCO only gets to keep a portion of any Me Inc. revenue from the deal, assuming said revenue ever exists. Somehow this is good news for SCO, though, probably because they're leveraging proactive synergies outside the box, or some damn thing.

4/28 SNR: "Could it really happen!?" Edition

2008-04-28T23:59:00.000-07:00

So unless a miracle of the bad kind happens in the next few hours, tomorrow morning will see the start of the long-awaited, long-delayed SCO v. Novell trial. I can't believe it myself, but it really does seem as if they're prepared to go through with it this time. Both sides have filed trial briefs this time, although SCO's arrived in redacted form. It's not clear to me what they hope to gain by that; anything in the trial brief will presumably show up at trial a few days later. I suppose they might try to shoo spectators out of the courtroom for parts of the trial that involve ultra-double-secret Methods And Concepts -- assuming Kimball goes along, of course.

So PJ has a preview of how the trial "should" play out. I'm still not convinced, though. I can't think of a convincing scenario in which SCO delays the trial once again. I haven't seen anyone else come up with such a scenario, either. But I still don't quite believe it's going to happen.

This is what I suspect will turn out to be the key point: Tomorrow is merely the beginning of the trial, not the end. The thing's supposed to take four days, which means it might, or might not. And after those four days, Kimball will rule on the case at some indeterminate point in the future. And once that's happened, SCO's already promised to appeal, on the grounds that the (presumable) verdict is not what they had in mind when they first sued Novell, and they'd like a do-over, please.

The best possible outcome for SCO this week is to be found liable for $0, and that would be a bit surprising. If that happens, I imagine their stock might go up temporarily, and the Norris deal might go forward, and things will seem relatively peachy for a while... until it's time to go ahead with the IBM case.

A more realistic outcome is that SCO's found liable for some or all of the $30M Novell's asking for. There's been some discussion in the last few days about whether the $30M should go to Novell, or back to Sun & Microsoft. Truth be told, I don't particularly care, so long as SCO doesn't have it. If, as seems likely, SCO can't give any money back because they've spent it all on lawyers, it's not great news exactly, but it's still $30M they don't have anymore. So that's something, I guess.

4/23 SNR

2008-04-23T23:59:00.000-07:00

Ok, this is a bit late, as usual. I got started compiling a list of news stories about the dead SNCP deal, and never quite got around to posting it. It'd be a shame for all that work to go to waste, I guess, so I'll attach that at the end in case you really feel like reading old news. But first, the new and newish stuff...

As always, whenever SCO has actual product news I try to lead off with it. It's a thing with me, I guess. It's big news even when it isn't inherently big news, just because it's so rare anymore. At this point, whenever something new or updated hits the street, there's a chance it just might be the very last product SCO ever releases. So the latest out of Lindon is the colossal, stupendous Shout Postcard 1.1. Among the thrilling new features: It would run on more mobile phones if anyone wanted to; there's an audit trail to track what these hypothetical users use the software for, if anything; and it's available in Japanese, in the unlikely event anyone in Japan would be caught dead using a big, clunky American mobile phone. Still, as I said, big, big news
In recent years there have been far more announced SCO products than released ones, so this item isn't quite as big news as the first. Seems that SCO's teaming up with Franklin-Covey for some sort of Me Inc. personal organizer / time management doodad. Eerily similar to the old DT4 app they promised and apparently never quite delivered as part of an erstwhile partnership with Day-Timers. Also eerily similar to the interweb-based Franklin Planner stuff Darl was in charge of during his own Franklin-Covey days.

This announcement has actually gotten a bit of press, believe it or not. Stories at the Salt Lake Tribune, Telecommunications Magazine, techrockies, and TMCNet. Possibly this is all because Franklin-Covey stuff is a big deal in some quarters. Ok, so the TMCNet piece strongly resembles the press release, and the techrockies blurb is short. The other two are ok, though, and tell you probably everything there is to know about the deal. Unusually, the press release does have a quote from a VP at Franklin Covey, but the SL Trib story includes the line "Representatives of FranklinCovey did not return calls Tuesday seeking comment.".
Ok, let's be honest here. You don't really care about SCO products, real or otherwise, and neither do I. Luckily there's stuff going on in the legal world too, so let's talk about that instead. In the BK case, April 21st was the cutoff date to file a proof of claim. Basically creditors were supposed to file a form stating how much money they want from SCO, or in some cases that they want an amount TBD later. You can explore all the filings here if you want to. A few highlights: Novell wants the $30M they intend to win from SCO, assuming SCO v. Novell ever goes to trial. IBM has a $0 placeholder claim for whatever they win from SCO, assuming SCO v. IBM ever goes to trial. SuSE asks for a bit over $1M over the Swiss arbitration, but says this is a preliminary number and notes the final one may be more like $50-100M. Sun (yes, Sun) also has a $0 claim, which reads as if they're threatening or preparing to sue SCO, presumably over their infamous SCOSource deal. Citi Financial wants $3M, but only if SCO stops supporting UnixWare 7.1.3. Amici (the infamous Boies tentacle) wants $440k for their usual "document handling" services. A former employee stakes a claim relating to a current age discrimination + harassment complaint. And the hits just keep on coming.
On GL, a bit about SCO's latest monthly operating report, such as it is. Several GL readers of the accounting persuasion point out various inadequacies with the latest report. Although I have to admit I don't entirely grok what they're saying, not being of the accounting persuasion myself.
The 23rd was the deadline for SCO to file its trial brief for the Novell case (Novell filed theirs back in September, prior to the original trial date). So far no sign of it, although I don't have a PACER account to check directly. Kimball's order setting the deadline & trial date mentions that filing a trial brief is optional. They may just be putting as little time and effort as possible into the case, with even the remaining optimists at SCO just hoping to get the thing over with so they can appeal and win those guaranteed gazillions, or whatever.
Oh, and they've announced SCO Tec Forum 2008, so mark your calendars. Still in Vegas, still in August, but this year it's moved from the Mirage casino to the Planet Hollywood casino. Because, well, the Mirage has a BK claim against SCO for unpaid bills relating to last year's SCO Tec Forum. Including someone's $71 room service tab, if you can believe that. So it's off to a new casino this year. The announcement claims Stephen Norris himself will appear at the event, although I imagine that all depends on whether we ever see a revised SNCP deal, and whether the BK court goes along with the deal. The original deal proposal said NewNewSCO would unveil a shiny new business plan and a shiny new board of directors at Sco Tec Forum 2008. Without the deal, the event will probably be far less interesting. Rumor has it the annual meeting of SCO users and resellers will be held in parallel with the event. In the hotel bar. Last booth on the right. Although if things go badly in the courtroom, they may move it out to the parking lot, strictly BYOB.

So here are those old SNCP links I promised. FWIW.

eWeek [SJVN]: Another SCO buyout stumbles
E-Commerce Times: SCO's plan to rise from the ashes flickers out
Daily Herald : SCO negotiating new Ch. 11 plan
Deseret News: Insolvent SCO scraps its reorganization plan.
And both last and hindmost,
MOG's spin. Feh.

4/2 SNR: $100 Million? What $100 Million?

2008-04-02T23:11:00.000-07:00

Um, as I was saying about that $100M buyout deal... well, deal's off, sorry. Seems that the chorus of vehement objections had the desired effect, and -- as it turns out -- there is actually a downside to utterly failing to meet the basic requirements of a bankruptcy reorg plan, like showing that the buyer actually has the money, and that you have some sort of business plan in hand so you won't be back in BK court again in a year's time. Stuff like that.

So they're insisting the deal isn't completely dead, and they're going to restructure it as a straight asset purchase instead of the initial intricate proposal (which I havek to admit I couldn't make head or tail of, myself). So maybe we'll hear from SNCP again. Although SCO's also never admitted that the DaimlerChrysler suit is lost for good, even though there's no longer any such thing as "DaimlerChrysler".

My personal hunch is that SNCP won't be up for another bite at the apple. Certainly not an asset purchase type of bite. The problem with any future asset purchase is the same thing that sank the York deal. SCO would have to come clean and state specifically exactly what it owns, and be able to prove it. They've gone to ridiculous lengths over the last 5 years to avoid doing that, and I doubt they'll start now. And this time around everyone's watching a bit more closely; already the BK trustee has cautioned them not to try selling anything they don't own. There's no way to spin that as a good sign, not that I can think of.

The really great thing about the deal falling through (other than, obviously, the deal falling through) is that there isn't enough time left to put a new deal together before the Novell trial. The SNCP proposal would've expired if it hadn't been approved by April 28th, the day before the trial, which suggests the numbers only penciled out if there was still some doubt about the outcome of the Novell case. If another deal appears in the future, which is far from certain, it will happen after the case is over, and Kimball decides how much SCO owes to Novell. That's going to change the whole landscape, and not in SCO's favor.

Now, if they'd filed a viable plan in a timely fashion and generally played by the rules, there might've been time to fix any deficiencies before the 29th, a.k.a. Doomsday. But instead they tried to railroad the thing through the BK court at the last minute, and now there's no time for a Plan B. Oh, well. C'est la vie.

I think SCO's main goal is to stave off the Novell trial in any way they can. That's what the BK filing was about, and that may be what the York & SNCP deals were both about. And they certainly weren't in a hurry to get the trial going before the BK filing, either. Unless they can find a way to get the BK stay reimposed in Delaware, I think the focus now shifts back to Utah, and figuring out if there's any last-minute way to game the system and push the trial date off a few more months. I'm not a lawyer (have I mentioned that yet?) so I don't know what their odds might be. My hunch is that they aren't good, though.

The news coverage of the latest twist ought to be good. I'll try to do another roundup tomorrow and cover at least the choice bits. I'm serious. Or if not tomorrow, at least some time soon, before the Novell trial at least.

2/15 SNR: $100M?! WTF?!

2008-02-15T08:05:00.000-08:00

If you've been waiting in vain for new SNR posts since December, there's a very simple reason why there haven't been any: I'd rather lost interest in SCO, and it seemed like the only bit of suspense remaining was whether the company would completely evaporate before the Novell trial date in April. There was a bit of recent news about major layoffs at the company, and I considered posting about that, but it felt like gloating over ex-employees' misfortune and I couldn't bring myself to do it.

And then yesterday we learned that some insane private equity firm and its unnamed friends want to dump "up to" $100M into SCO, and they babble on about the bright future ahead for the company. Proving once again there really is one born every minute.

So if the plan goes through, it's a whole new ballgame... to use a cheesy sports metaphor in "honor" of Darl, who apparently will get the boot under the new reorg plan. That would be one silver lining to yesterday's news, I suppose. And SCO may actually have the cash to pay back Novell after the trial. They may even survive long enough to lose the IBM case too, so that we'd finally get a definitive, favorable resolution of SCO's crazy Linux accusations. So that would obviously be a good thing as well.

Overall, though, I really just want to know what Stephen Norris and friends have been smoking. To look at SCO in 2008 and see a huge upside potential is simply bizarre. UnixWare and OpenServer have insignificant and rapidly declining marketshare, and the installed base for both continues to evaporate. And Me Inc. has been kicking around for several years now without gaining any traction whatsoever. SCO's wares aren't just niche products -- they're fringe products. It's been years since anyone's taken them seriously as a tech company, and nothing in the reorg plan suggests they have any clue how to change that, if they even intend to. In recent months they've gotten rid of quite a few employees on the technical side, some of them holdovers from the AT&T days. So if the plan is to make money by selling products, like a normal company would, they're in worse shape than ever, no matter how much cash they have in the bank.

On the legal side, all the money in the world can't make a false accusation true, and that's all SCO's got. Considering who they're up against in the courtroom, even $100M (or "up to" $100M, technically) shouldn't be enough to scare any of the falsely accused parties into settling. I expect that somewhere in the not too distant future, SNCP and friends will be completely bewildered over why they ever invested in this silly worthless company. Meanwhile Darl gets his golden parachute, and SCO becomes somebody else's problem. It just might be the only good business deal he's ever made, and then only for himself.

12/27 SNR: Delist-O-Licious Edition

2007-12-27T02:51:00.000-08:00

SCO's been officially expelled from NASDAQ, effective today. Finally. They first received the delisting letter way back in September when they filed Chapter 11, and since then it's been months of pointless appeals and procedural gamesmanship. That's finally come to an end now.

This doesn't mean the monster's finally dead, of course. They're still limping along in BK court, and there's the upcoming Novell trial (if SCO can hold out that long), and even the stock still exists in a somewhat less reputable form, assuming they switch to trading OTC after this. The venerable Yahoo SCOX board, however, may vanish in the near future. It's been sort of a nature preserve for trolls and those who feed them for quite a while now, so I can't say I'll be too broken up when it goes away. A few years ago I'd have been glum about it, but now I just think "good riddance".

In any event, Happy Holidays!

12/20 SNR

2007-12-19T22:19:00.001-08:00

Ok, I've fallen a little behind on my SCO-watching duties again. The last few weeks haven't been hugely eventful, but a few things have transpired in the last few days. And for the sake of completeness, I ought to at least mention a couple of earlier items I ought to have written about when they happened, and just sort of didn't.

[It came to my attention that I originally dated this thing 11/20 instead of 12/20. I really did get rusty at this stuff. Sheesh.]

SCO wants permission to renew their leases in Utah & New Jersey. And in Utah, they want to keep renting from Canopy, no less. Sure is funny how they managed to ask at basically the last possible moment, like they always do. It may seem unfair, and it may seem like they're railroading the BK court, but I think they'll get this one. Since they're in Chapter 11, the court's not likely to force them out of business over the cost of a lease, while they're allegedly still trying to reorganize and get back on their feet, or tentacles, or whatever. Besides, at the rate they're burning Novell's money on lawyers and cushy bonuses and such, they'll have to switch over to Chapter 7 before too much longer. Speaking of which...
They also want permission to hand out bigger bonuses than the BK court approved earlier. Seems it's becoming more and more difficult to keep employees from jumping ship, and the previously-approved caps are no longer sufficient to buy (or at least rent) the loyalty of key personnel. Which may be the absolute, unvarnished truth, come to think of it. On the other hand, I don't see how cranking up the burn rate helps SCO avoid cratering. They just want to pay current employees more to do their existing jobs. Current employees doing their existing jobs is what got SCO where it is today.
The ever-relentless Panglozz has tracked down the CP80 Foundation's recent nonprofit IRS filings, and they look a bit on the peculiar side to say the least. I'm no tax attorney or anything, but the numbers just don't seem to pencil out. Trying to explain the situation is beyond me -- go check it out for yourself if you're curious.
Sandeep Gupta is out as head of SCO Operations. He only just got the big promotion a couple of months ago, post-BK. I wonder what that was all about? I wonder if we'll ever find out? In any case, Jeff Hunsaker is the new Sandeep Gupta, except that he comes from a sales background rather than a technical one. Oh well, it's not like SCO needs technical folks anymore. Hunsaker, you might recall, oversaw a series of SCO's market triumphs, starting with Caldera Linux, then moving on to SCO's Unix OSes, and finally to Me Inc. So he's got to be the sort of guy who doesn't let bad news get him down. That ought to come in handy in his new job.
More important than any of this is last Thursday's joint statement by SCO & Novell, in which they offered Kimball several proposed trial dates. So SCO v. Novell could go to trial as early as January 11th, less than a month from now. And less than two months before the 5th anniversary of SCO suing IBM, for those of us who keep track of such things. One interesting bit is that SCO proposed a date in April that'd conflict with the still-scheduled arbitration in Switzerland. Novell didn't go along, hinting that they might try to get the BK court's stay lifted on that matter too. That ought to be fun.

While the Novell trial is eagerly awaited by all, there are really only two items there's any suspense about. First, the exact dollar value SCO owes to Novell. Second, exactly how soon afterward we'll see the inevitable MOG article proclaiming SCO the winner.
A recent Blankenhorn piece: "SCO bankruptcy was celebrated online in 2007", in which he compares SCO to notorious cartoon villain Boris Badenov, of Boris & Natasha fame. He concludes with: "In what may be the final humiliation for SCO, Groklaw’s recent posts have generally moved on to discussing Microsoft and OOXML." And yes, that's got to be a bit humiliating. Around the time SCO filed BK, Darl said something about how happy Linus Torvalds and Sam Palmisano would be about SCO's difficulties. In reality I suspect neither guy has spent much time thinking about SCO at all, in the last couple of years. Now PJ's starting to move on too. At least they've still got me to kick them around, for whatever that's worth. I mean, this blog has "SCO" in the title, it's not like I can just switch gears and start ranting full time about M$ Exchange or Vista or whatever. I probably ought to have thought of that before I began this thing. Oh, well. I've said before that the "SCO" in the title really means "Stuff i Care abOut". Meanwhile, SNR could be "Signal to Noise Ratio", "SuperNova Remnant", or (my #1 choice) "Snr: Not Recursive". I'm not sure I've convinced anyone yet, but I can keep on hoping, I guess.
Oh, and I, uh, got it all wrong about the December 5th hearing, as you might've noticed. Looks like the Cattleback deal's going through after all, and the mysterious buyer is an entity called "BlackMaple". I hope we're not witnessing the birth of a nasty new patent troll. In any case, SCO gets another ~$500k to pay back Novell with. Unless they spend it all on lawyers and such first.

12/4 SNR: Patently Absurd Edition

2007-12-04T00:25:00.000-08:00

So the next SCO BK hearing is tomorrow, and the one issue of substance on the agenda is the Cattleback patent deal. Although I don't think it's hugely important in the larger scheme of things, it's quickly becoming one of the more bizarre episodes we've seen during the long, sordid SCO saga. Let's recap, shall we?

SCO declares BK, and the filings briefly mention a new subsidiary, Cattleback Intellectual Property Holdings.
SCO files an oddly named motion asking the BK court to approve the Cattleback patent sale, despite providing almost no details, not even the name of the buyer. Most people had forgotten SCO even owned any patents, since they'd never managed to go trolling with them. (Or use them in real live products. That's pretty much a given with SCO.) It wasn't clear what the deal meant, but all that furious handwaving looked awfully suspicious.
Time passed, and other matters occupied the limelight for a while. Once SCO v. Novell was back in business, Novell filed objections to the deal. Ouch!
Another objection was filed by a previously unknown firm calling itself the "363 group", which showed up out of the blue and offered to buy the patent (or patents, plural, as they worded it) for a ~17% premium over what the original super-secret buyer agreed to pay. Ok, technically 363 didn't show up completely out of the blue. Turns out they're a division of Ocean Tomo, the firm that brokered the original patent deal. WTF!? SCO and Cattleback (its zero-asset, zero-employee subsidiary) pretend they're about to sue each other over a deal between Cattleback and Ocean Tomo. And then when the two mortal adversaries propose an amicable settlement and a hearty round of large cash bonuses, who shows up and objects but another arm of Ocean Tomo.
Oh, and the US Trustee filed an objection too. I gather that's never a good sign if you want your deal approved.
So on Monday they finalized the agenda for Wednesday's hearing, and poof, 363's gone again. If they ever hand out an award for briefest cameo in the SCO soap opera, they'll at least be one of the nominees. A little too much public scrutiny, perhaps? Didn't realize they were bidding against their own client? Mindboggling.
But not so mindboggling as the latest bit. Turns out the ultra-mysterious buyer is a client of the same law firm Novell's been employing in all matters SCO. So presumably Novell's lawyers know who the buyer is, although I gather they can't share that info with Novell

At some point, you just have to stop connecting the dots and hum a few bars of "Duelling Banjos".

One of the things you learn watching SCO is to never ascribe to malice or stupidity what you can ascribe to malice and stupidity. I suspect there's more to the recent WTF moments than we know yet. I suspect there's a plan, or at least a scheme, behind at least most of what we're seeing. That tends to be the case with SCO, it's just that it's never a very good plan. Often an intricate plan, vehemently argued (see "methods and concepts", APA hairsplitting, etc.), but always a stupid plan in the end. Strictly "12 Dimensional Chess for Dummies" type stuff. So right now I expect to see SCO scream bloody murder about the potential conflict of interest thing and try to get Novell's lawyers thrown off the case. I also expect this scheme won't work, and (as usual) they'll be dumbfounded that it didn't.

Further, I don't see the court going along with the Cattleback sale. I figured there would be objections from various parties wanting more info about the deal. SCO could satisfy those objections by explaining the deal a bit better, but so far they haven't done so. There's still time, and we may yet see them dump another pile of documents on the court an hour before the hearing. Or the court will give them a deadline to comply and fess up, which they'll do -- sort of -- exactly two minutes before the deadline. Assuming the court's still willing to cut them slack, that is, and that may not be a wise assumption after the York shenanigans.

I actually don't care that much about the Cattleback deal other than for the entertainment value. It's strictly a sideshow, almost entirely unrelated to the issues in the IBM & Novell cases. The very fact that people are arguing over it now means that they're successfully delaying the BK case, avoiding pesky details like forming a creditors committee and submitting a realistic reorg plan. They are, however, showing their true colors very early, so that they're likely to be viewed with a great deal of skepticism once it's finally time to deal with the meat of the BK case. All that trouble, all that lost credibility, all those burned bridges, all over a lousy $500k. Smooth move there, guys.

I think SCO's run into a common pitfall among bankrupt companies. If you declare BK, your fate's in the hands of a court that specializes in people just like you, and a US Trustee, and creditors' attorneys who do the same. And they've seen it all before, every last trick in the book. Even if you are as smart and clever and creative as you think you are, they've still seen it all before.

11/27 SNR II

2007-11-27T17:31:00.000-08:00

PJ's got today's ruling here.
And as you'd expect, Zen's got all of the day's docs. Note, in particular, Novell #472. Yes, Novell. Within hours of today's ruling, Novell's already informed Kimball about it. With all of the noise SCO's been making about how eager they were to proceed with the Novell case (ok, mostly it was MOG saying that), you'd think they'd have informed Kimball immediately. It must've just slipped their little minds, I guess.
Slashdot has the news too. At the moment there aren't any comments referencing Soviet Russia, Natalie Portman, Beowulf Clusters, or even "Fr1sT P0st". I know because I looked, for once. So if you hurry, you could be the first.
The GL story's on Digg here. I've never really taken the time to figure out Digg, but feel free to drop by over there and vote, or comment, or do some "social networking", or do whatever it is they do. If you're so inclined.
Coverage at TechSpot as well.
Meanwhile, the latest plague on our industry: Nigerian patent trolls. Seriously. Well, "seriously" if you think they're genuinely Nigerian and not, say, Redmondian.
A thread on c.u.s.m about converting PCX files to JPG. Yes, PCX files. Remember those, from back in the pre-Win3.1 days? This is what passes for cutting-edge technology in the SCO world. And yes, solving this problem requires ImageMagick, which is GPL'd Free Software.

11/27 SNR: The Circus Heads Back to Utah

2007-11-27T13:32:00.000-08:00

As expected, Judge Gross has unstayed SCO v. Novell, so we're finally going to see a trial after all. That is, unless SCO has another weird delay scheme up their sleeve, and it wouldn't be a total surprise if they do. At least they can't weasel out of it by declaring bankruptcy this time.

On the other hand, maybe SCO's looking forward to a trial. At least that's what MOG's been telling us for a while now, and you can totally trust MOG... to be MOG. As the spin goes, as soon as SCO loses in front of Kimball they can head to the court of appeals, where total SCO victory is a guaranteed slam dunk (to use a cheesy Darlesque sports metaphor). When MOG says stuff like that it often reflects what SCO management is thinking, as if she heard it directly from the horse's mouth. Or from some orifice of the horse, at least. So don't be surprised to see some SCO PR fluff about how stoked they are to finally get their day in court, as if this was their super-genius plan all along. And I fully expect it to work out just as well as all their other super-genius plans have so far.

So they declared BK to avoid the Novell trial, and now the Novell trial's going ahead anyway. That's got to chafe a bit, no matter how brave of a face SCO tries to put on it.

I realize this is just another intermediate milestone on the road to "SCO Delenda Est", but I'm in the mood for a steak, and this seems like a reasonable excuse to go get one. Mmmmm.... Steak.....

11/21 SNR

2007-11-21T12:15:00.000-08:00

Some coverage of the York non-deal:
- SJVN speculates at length about why the thing fell through, and is far more even-handed about it than I would've been.
- A quick bit about it at LinuxJournal.
- At InformationWeek, our old chum Paul McDougall has a short piece about yesterday's news.
- Only a brief blurb at Lamlaw so far.
Oh, and there's a new Darl interview, believe it or not. It's about what you'd expect. There are six questions total, and Darl answers three of them with cheesy sports metaphors. Then there's the boilerplate optimistic blather about exciting new mobile products. I really like the part where he says SCO will become the mobile flavor of Unix. I don't suppose he realizes that (unlike, say, the iPhone) Me Inc. doesn't actually put Unix on phone hardware. The only Unix connection at all is an OSR6 box on the back end, and that's only because SCO's trying for a bit of vendor lock-in. And good luck with that.

Darl also once again compares SCO with the Apple of a decade ago. Note that Darl said all this while trying to sell SCO's assets to York and morph the company into a pure-play litigation troll. Apple never tried to do that, it's worth pointing out. Sorry, Darl, but there's more to being Steve than not wearing a tie.
Speaking of mobile *Nix stuff, Nokia's got a new Linux widget on the market. Just in time for the holidays. Hint, hint. The N810 improves on the N800 I've gone on and on about here, sporting GPS and a 'real' keyboard. This also means they've dropped the price on the N800, and either one is stocking-stuffer-sized.

Oh, and the forever-upcoming Linux-based PalmOS runs on the N810. FWIW.

11/20 SNR II

2007-11-20T16:36:00.000-08:00

A good SJVN article on the York proposal, sadly overtaken by events. Ok, not "sadly" exactly. Creative effort, expended well in a good cause, but for naught. These things happen, I guess.
Also overtaken by events, a Deseret News piece about the Dec. 5th hearing.
From GL yesterday, the bit about SCO trying to sell Unix to IBM. The law firm's terse logs merely say IBM wasn't interested. I'd be curious to know precisely what language IBM used to convey this sentiment, but no matter. The fact that SCO even tried this is just freakin' breathtaking. What's that word I'm looking for... it's kind of like "clueless", but a few orders of magnitude more so...
CIO Magazine: "Eight Signs of Evil in High-Tech Companies".
From the "ugliness all around" department, here's MOG on the Hans Reiser case.
Over in blogospace, something called Microweb.biz offers us "SCO accuses first Linux-user". The site describes itself as "Delivering the old and new news and information on the top stories with a strong European focus". Which is obviously true. The story refers to very old news, as far as I can tell. And the European focus is obvious as well, if by that they mean the non-English-speaking part of the continent. And I quote:

The businesses ruzin already since halfway last year about rights on the source code of Unix System V. Cause for the dispute is SCO claim that Linux divide of the source code of its Unix-software contain.

Seriously, these guys make "Paul Murphy" look good in comparison.
Elsewhere, a post titled "Go, SCO, go!" is not what you think. Seems that SCO's released a daylight savings patch for its OSes, which it's generously distributing absolutely free!!! Naturally if your SCO OS is no longer supported your only option is to upgrade your OS. Or do the DST update yourself, using the tips I linked to back in March.
After months of blessed inactivity, Lyons did a couple of new posts over at Floating Point semi-recently. I just noticed them because I haven't been checking all that religiously. In one, he provides helpful links to all his stories about SCO, arranged chronologically. I'm not sure what occasioned this, but I imagine it's part of his attempt to put his SCO-shilling firmly in the past. Which is something I'm still not convinced of, btw. Even now, he often babbles on about Linux in peace-n-love hippie terms. I'm sorry, but anyone still who talks that way in 2007 is obviously a clueless marketroid who just doesn't get it and never will.
From c.u.s.m., a recent thread on running OSR5.0.7 under VMWare on a Ubuntu box. Oddly, nobody bothers to mention the guy "needs" a $699 SCOSource license to do this. Go figure.
Meanwhile over on comp.unix.sco.programmer (Yes, there really is such a thing, at least in a vestigial sense), here are a pair of recent threads about difficulties with OpenServer's License Manager. Whenever an OS comes with a "License Manager" misfeature, inevitably it errs on the side of DOS'ing you if it can't be absolutely positively certain you're paid up in full. If you're stuck with such an OS, your OS has a global single point of failure designed into it. So you'd better hope your "License Manager" is supernaturally reliable. If not, well, I'm sure your OS vendor would be delighted to explain your predicament to your pointy-haired bosses and accept the blame themselves. Or not.
And on comp.sys.sys5.r3, here's a poor soul who needs boot media for some ancient NCR Tower boxes. If you can help the guy out -- without violating the terms of your SysV license, obviously -- go give a brother a hand, ok?

11/20 SNR: Stick a Fork in York -- They're Done!

2007-11-20T11:35:00.000-08:00

It's official: SCO's mega-emergency double-panic fire sale is officially off. Just before the big deadline SCO would've had to disclose exactly what they were proposing to sell, someone -- we don't know which side yet -- pulled the plug. Just when we thought SCO would have to finally make a definite statement about what it claims it owns, after all these years, poof. It appears to me that they're unwilling to do any basic disclosure even with tens of millions of dollars on the line. If the buyer wants to look in the box and verify there really is a pony inside, SCO's just going to leave the money on the table and walk away. The obvious conclusion, one that most people drew years ago, is that there's no pony in the box.

So the immediate question in my mind is how to explain the big 28% drop in the stock yesterday. It's reasonable to wonder if somebody knew about today's news in advance and acted on it yesterday. Of course it's also true that a 28% drop in the stock translates to a whopping 7 cents, so I really don't know if that qualifies as "big" or not. I don't usually follow penny stocks like this, so a 7 cent change might just be random-ish Brownian motion. But having watched SCO for lo, these many years, I wouldn't count on it.

Updated: GL's got the story here now.

A semi-brief note on "Grokwar"

2007-11-18T21:27:00.000-08:00

Grokwar. The boards are thick with it. Everyone's talking about it. Even PJ's chimed in, somewhat obliquely. For reasons I can't fathom, the hot issue of the day is not SCO's bankrupcy case, or the latest M$ shenanigans. No, it's all about comment moderation at Groklaw, and the dogged pursuit of random personality conflicts. My usual response is to try to calm things down and distract everyone with photos of cute kittens and so forth. That doesn't seem to be working this time around. So, as sole proprietor of this little corner of the anti-SCO multiverse, I figure I ought to say a few words about the current ugliness.

I don't see any value in Grokwar. There's nothing to be gained by it. There really isn't. For the sake of argument, let's assume you're a partisan in the Grokwars, and your side finally achieves total victory, so that either a.) GL is utterly destroyed, or b.) the anti-GL crowd is utterly destroyed. What would you have you won, really? SCO would still be out there stirring up trouble, M$ would still be out there doing the same, and those who oppose them would be weak and exhausted from the endless, bitter infighting. For whom is this a desirable outcome? Who would be the real winner, in the end? Unsubtle hint: It wouldn't be you.

I'm troubled by this impulse toward fratricide (or soricide, as the case may be), this inclination to see dark conspiracies and enemies under every rock. Don't take your eyes off the ball, folks. The enemy is SCO. Anyone who's against SCO is not the enemy. It's really that simple. If someone votes differently than you, or moderates your comments in a way you don't like, or doesn't rec you, or disses your colors, or says toMAYto when you say toMAHto, just roll with it. Let it be water off a duck's back. It's not so hard.

So in case I haven't made it abundantly clear yet, this is not an anti-GL site (and I link to GL quite regularly). It's also not a pro-GL site (and I've been known to link to Al P.'s SCOFacts somewhat regularly as well). Not to invoke Godwin's law here, but if SCO's jackbooted thugs came for them, either Al or PJ (or both, if they could stand each other) would be welcome to hide in my attic for the duration, and I wouldn't rat them out. This blog exists because it seems worthwhile, most of the time, and because it's kind of fun, some of the time. My policy here (and everywhere) -- and my advice -- is to spend as little time as possible pursuing interpersonal conflicts, especially esoteric ones. Only fight over issues, not personalities, and only fight over issues when they matter. Otherwise, just freakin' shrug it off and forget about it, already. It's easy. Trust me.

11/14 SNR

2007-11-13T21:56:00.000-08:00

Turns out the 'big' hearing back on the 6th wasn't quite as big as I'd hoped. The court won't hear the fire-sale motion until the 16th, and Novell's motion to restart the Utah proceedings is still under advisement, so we've still got those to look forward to.

I suppose SCO could regard the outcome of that hearing as a win, in the sense that a temporary stay of execution is a win. I never had high expectations about the SuSE arbitration matter, and it does seem sort of reasonable to me that it would be stayed along with all the other proceedings. Which doesn't preclude SuSE/Novell from asking the judge to unstay it, of course, and I hope they at least try for that.
Right on the heels of the proposed fire sale, we learned that SCO sold one of its two patents for about $570k. This deal is what SCO's "Cattleback Holdings" subsidiary was all about. The good Mr. Blankenhorn bashes the deal here, and it's an entertaining bit of invective, definitely worth reading.

Blankenhorn does bobble the facts a bit at one point, where he asserts SCO's been suing over patents. Patents are about the only thing they haven't been suing over yet, and looking at the patent they sold it's a bit surprising they haven't. It's one of those vague and extremely broad patents so beloved by patent trolls, which is what I suspect the buyer wants it for. Maybe SCO was just too dumb to do it themselves. I mean, patent trolling is at least as odious a business as the stuff SCO's been up to, and I'm not trying to encourage that sort of thing. It's just that patent trolling often succeeds, a trait not shared by SCO's "method and concept" trolling. They could've quietly extracted mid-sized payoffs from a few key industry players and retired to the golf course, without ever attracting substantial media attention. But noooo, instead they had to declare jihad against all Linux users, and look where it's gotten them.

Nobody's filed an objection to the patent deal just yet, but I suspect it's only a matter of time. If you're operating in Chapter 11, you don't simply transfer assets to a paper subsidary and have said subsidiary sell them. If you're bankrupt, the law assumes you're bankrupt because you're no good at managing your assets, and you need adult supervision for a while. That means you aren't supposed to dispose of significant assets without asking "mother may I?" first, which is what SCO just did, in a sneaky sort of way. Stay tuned on this one.
Oh, and the US Trustee's now joined the chorus of parties objecting to the fire sale. I still don't understand BK law enough to grasp exactly what this "ombudsman" business is all about, but I gather the US Trustee is entitled to supervise the proceedings to ensure the sale proceeds fairly, and SCO's proposal doesn't provide for that.

My overall impression is that SCO declared bankruptcy without really understanding what it meant. I think Darl & Co. just saw it as a way to make the Novell suit "go away", and figured it'd be business as usual other than that. I suspect it's been one rude shock after another since then. Once they realized plan A was not to be, they came up with plan B, the fire sale, which looks to have been cobbled up in a great hurry. I can see why Darl likes the proposed deal, since he co uld divest himself of pesky things like "products" and "employees", and in return he'd get a big pile of cash so he could continue hunting the white whale. And it's a good deal for York too; they get software assets that just might be worth something, for what's basically pocket change by investment firm standards. If you aren't Darl, and you aren't York, the deal has very little to recommend it. I don't suppose they spent a lot of time figuring out how to sell the proposal to the BK court, which they're going to need to do. SCO isn't used to asking permission, doesn't really know how, and is either too dumb to hire somebody who knows the ropes, or too dumb to listen to them.
Here's an earlier InformationWeek story about IBM & Novell objecting to the fire sale. It's a Paul McDougall piece, but it looks like even he can't dream up a positive spin for this.
I think McDougall's problem is that he's just enough of a journalist (barely) that he tries to stick to facts, more or less, and merely spins them to fit his biases. Which is a rank amateur's error. Look at how the pros handle it -- take MOG for example. She isn't limited by such mundane concerns as "truth" and "accuracy". If a client, say SCO for example, is paying you tens (hundreds?) of thousands of dollars every year, the truth is precisely whatever the client says it is, no more, no less. Witness her bizarro-world account of the BK hearing on the 6th. She wasn't there, by all reports, and she doesn't claim to have been there, but she goes on and on in exquisite detail about what allegedly happened. It stands to reason she got the account from someone with SCO, and possibly improvised some details here and there. And still, absolute silence about the business arrangement between MOG and SCO. Why, full disclosure would be bad for business, of course.

And a precarious business it is. Think about it: MOG's current gig involves misleading the public (and potential SCO investors/buyers) about what's going on in BK court. But she also gets paid at the discretion of said BK court. If you ask me, it wouldn't be at all unreasonable for Novell, or IBM, or the US Trustee to try to get the payments halted as an unnecessary expense. Even if it didn't work, it'd be highly entertaining to put various people on the stand and make them try to justify what SCO's spent on G2 over the years, and explain what they've gotten in return.
A few more tidbits on the renewed litigation in Germany. A few years ago, in "round 1", SCO, or more precisely SCO's German subsidiary, promised to stop making false claims about Linux in Germany. Then just recently they went ahead and did it again, once again demonstrating the value of a SCO promise. My theory is that they figured BK nullified the previous agreement, so they were free to start lying again. SJVN covers it here, and PJ attempts to explain the vagaries of German law here. A viable alternate theory is that SCO Germany is in mid-meltdown right now, as evidenced by their unlikely new CEO, and the latest threats aren't part of a coherent strategy.
The delisting hearing was held on the 8th, so far as we know, but so far there's been no word on the outcome. Which isn't surprising at all really, because Nasdaq likes to make up its mind behind closed doors. So this is just to remind everyone that BK court isn't the only game in town.
A little product news to report. All you hardcore Shout Postcard fanatics out there will be pleased to know it runs on the new Palm Centro. Which is entirely unsurprising since Shout Postcard already ran on previous Palm gadgets, and the Centro's more or less the same thing, in a smaller case and at a lower price point. In related news, Vista runs on the new chips Intel just announced.

In case you're wondering, the Centro is not the long-promised Linux-based Palm we've heard so much noise about. It'll be fun to see how SCO reacts, assuming Palm ever goes down that route like they keep promising.

Ok, so the real bit of interest here is that the press release strongly downplays the SCO connection. Now "Me Inc." is the name of the company, it seems, and we only learn it's a SCO subsidiary down toward the very end. I suppose it's only natural that they're ashamed about being part of SCO, and since they are part of SCO it's only natural they'd try to be a little sneaky about hiding the fact.
In more thrilling product news, there's a new maintenance pack out for OSR6. Coverage at InternetNews and CNNMoney. The second bit is just the press release itself, actually. Seems the new maintenance pack brings the latest exciting advances in Xenix emulation. Yeah, yeah, I know, back when OSR6 first came out SCO was bragging about how great Xenix emulation was, and how you could run all these old 16-bit games from the Xenix 286 days. So either the maintenance pack makes Xenix mode even more perfect, or perhaps it wasn't quite as fabulous as SCO led everyone to believe back then.

In any case, the new update means that SCO's website now has a bunch of links with 'mp3' in the URL, which may be enough for them to fall afoul of the vast RIAA dragnet. Which would be a vastly entertaining spectacle.

11/1 SNR

2007-10-31T23:55:00.000-07:00

So the SCO universe is in a brief holding pattern until November 6th, when all hell is scheduled to break loose. That's when the BK court plans to hear arguments on a stack of motions from both SCO and Novell. The two biggies are SCO's petition to hold the proposed emergency fire sale auction, and Novell's to unstay the SCO v. Novell case and let Kimball sort out the conversion issue. If the BK courts worked like general-purpose courts, I'd expect all the motions to be taken under advisement, with an eventual ruling denying all the motions that might dispose of the matter one way or the other. But as PJ notes here, BK court moves fast. Maybe that's overgeneralizing; some BK cases drag on for years and years with no end in sight, but right now the SCO BK matter appears to be moving much faster than the Novell & IBM cases ever did. It's still possible nobody will come away with a win on the 6th, but it may turn out to be a very critical moment in the SCO saga. If either side gets a win, they win big, and the possible outcomes appear to be mutually exclusive, so the judge can't simply approve all the motions on the table. Either SCO weasels out of the last few years of litigation, or Novell takes a key step toward putting SCO out of business for good, or possibly neither, but definitely not both.

Oh, and there's that delisting hearing on the 8th to worry about right after that. In the event SCO's auction gets the go-ahead on the 6th, I wonder if they'll keep fighting the delisting battle or not. With the Unix biz gone, SCO would be down to the ongoing lawsuits plus a few random odds and ends, and may have no RL presence except for a mailbox at BS&F headquarters. There are plenty of OTC, pink sheet, and grey market companies operating that way, but they don't keep you on the Nasdaq if you don't have any employees anymore.

Meanwhile, the proposed sale is getting a lot of press, understandably. SCO's Unix business may be a sad remnant of what it once was, but a lot of people still care who owns it.

Stories at:

IT Jungle: "SCO to Sell Unix Wares for $36 Million?". The article briefly mentions that among the treasures York wants to buy are employees' desktop PCs and even the office furniture. Although I vaguely recall that SCO leased its office furniture from a Canopy tentacle at one time. I don't know if that's still true or not, and if I was Canopy I'm not sure I'd want my chairs back after SCO employees had been using them for the last few years. But you have to admit it'd make for an amusing court case.

The piece also speculates about a "fairy tale ending", under which the new York/JDG entity releases the UnixWare and OpenServer code under an open source license. I seriously doubt that's in the cards, but it sure makes for a nice fairy tale, at least.
CNet (Shankland): "SCO hopes selling Unix will raise $36 million"
InternetNews: "SCO puts Unix up for sale"
InfoWorld: "SCO To Sell Unix Business?"
El Reg: "SCO gets offer for Unix biz"
The Inq: "SCO wants bankruptcy court approval to sell its Unix business". This is story initially reported SCO already had approval to do the deal, a goof the author humbly apologizes for at the end. It's a good piece, and even mentions the possible ties between York and Acacia (of patent troll fame). I'm not entirely sold on that angle just yet, but I do think it's reasonable to regard York with suspicion.
VNUnetVNUNet
ComputerWorld"SCO gets 'potential' $36M offer to sell Unix business"
TechRepublic"SCO wants to sell Unix for cash to continue Linux fight"
ComputerWorld Australia"SCO Has a Buyer, Pending Bankruptcy Approval"
Provo Daily Herald"SCO Gets $36M Bid"
Linux Journal: "Someone Actually Wants SCO?"
And finally SYS-CON, i.e. MOG: "SCO Gets $16M Offer For Its Unix Business", if you're curious what ~$10k per quarter of SCO's FUD money buys these days.

And on comp.unix.sco.misc, not a single word about the proposed sale. You'd think there'd be a little "what does the deal mean for us?" speculation, but no.

I can't find the document now, but one of the recent BK docs mentions that SCO's once-vaunted "DT4" Me Inc./Daytimer app has shuffled off to the Great Bit Bucket in the Sky. The Daytimer company pulled the plug, and SCO's lawyers are considering legal action. Yeah. It'll be just like Project Monterey all over again, and SCO almost made trillions off that one, except for the losing repeatedly in court part. To the moon!!!

Meanwhile, here's a piece about SCO's mysterious litigation in Germany. The article suggests SCO's misrepresenting the case to the BK court, and they're actually trying to silence a critic of theirs over across the pond. All of that would be entirely in character for SCO. I'd like to know more about what's going on here. The redoubtable Al P. mentions the case in his recently filed "Objections of Petrofsky to the Motions of the Debtors".

And for the sake of completeness, the Salt Lake Tribune's piece on SCO's recent layoffs. I actually started a post about it, but it was all schadenfreude and gloating, and writing it felt kind of icky, so I nuked it. So just briefly and for the record, I'm just fine with the court's order sealing the names and personal details of those laid off. It's not that I buy SCO's hysterical hyperbole about ex-employees being harrassed, because I don't see that happening in real life. I just don't see it as very relevant, and the poor chumps have suffered enough already. They drank the Kool-Aid for years on end and followed the Dear Leader all the way into BK court, only to be thrown under the bus when York showed up and started flashing money around. That's got to sting a little. So if anyone's inclined to turn state's evidence, they'll do so without any prompting by well-meaning Linux supporters. It would be interesting to know which departments were affected by the cuts. I'm sure potential bidders would like to know if, for example, the layoffs were all senior Unix dev guys in the New Jersey office, or if they were just fluffy empty-suit jobs like "Community Outreach Coordinator" or "VP of Marketing".

10/23 SNR

2007-10-23T21:55:00.000-07:00

It's been a couple of weeks since the last SNR post. My pitiful excuses will have to wait until tomorrow, though, because right now we've got some big news to cover. Hell froze over today, and in related news, SCO has an actual "buyout" offer on the table. I put "buyout" in quotes because it's not quite that simple. York Capital doesn't want the whole company, just certain assets. They're buying SCO's business units, but it doesn't look like that's their real angle. Despite all that blather from MOG about SCO "modularizing", York isn't the eager Me Inc. bagholder, er, buyer we were promised. I can't really fault MOG on that for once, though. I think everyone figured that was the one appendage SCO could slice off and sell successfully. I know that's what I expected to see. But no, the tea leaves (i.e. the proposed APA) suggest York wants into the Linux litigation business. Seriously. You're probably going, wait, there is no Linux litigation business. SCO's claims were debunked years ago, SCOSource withered on the vine for lack of customers, even their media shills have abandoned them at this point, and nobody takes them seriously anymore. What on Earth could York possibly be buying? Unix? I can't see them honestly trying to turn the Unix business around, I mean, nobody's that stupid. And Me Inc., a valuable asset? It is to laugh. All SCO has left to offer is a pile of used lottery tickets, none of them winners, and somehow they hooked themselves a buyer. How is this possible?

The first thing to realize is that investment firms see the world differently than humans do. If you're a fund manager, paying $16M for something that almost certainly doesn't exist may actually seem like a good deal. Fund managers are gamblers by nature, and if you dangle a cheap lottery ticket in front of enough of them, you're bound to get a few bites. It worked on Baystar, and RBC, and Renaissance, and all the others. The difference is that York isn't content to let SCO play the Linux lottery on their behalf. They'd like the right to do it themselves, via a newly constituted entity. I suspect said entity ("NewNewSCO") will operate as a "pure play" IP troll, once they've laid off SCO's remaining engineers, sales & marketing people, and other nonessential staff. Meanwhile, "OldNewSCO", now asset-free, finally becomes the publicly traded lawsuit Baystar wanted them to become several years ago. So instead of one pack of litigious bastards, there'll be two. And I suppose when they're on the brink of losing in court, they'll declare bankruptcy again and undergo another mitosis, and there'll be four, and so on.

Speaking of multiple entities: If I'm reading the deal right, only the York entity will get to call itself SCO (assuming it wants to), since the proposed APA includes trademarks. I wonder if any of the $16M is earmarked for the name, or Darl's tossing it in as a freebie? If York gets all the trademarks, I suppose they could call the new firm Caldera instead, or maybe Vultus, names that are nowhere near as sullied as SCO's, at least not yet. I kind of hope they go with "Vultus", because it's a truly stupid name.

Back in the Baystar era SCO refused to hollow itself out and become a pure lawsuit factory, but now they're all hot for it, and they're proposing an "emergency" fire sale schedule, with an auction to be held December 5th. I think they're betting there won't be any other bidders on this dubious bill of goods. And if anyone else bids, and York loses the auction, they get a nice fat check for at least $780k. This might be a good time to point out that'd be $780k of Novell's money, just so it's clear what's going on here.

So the deal goes on about how each company will share in the other's good fortune if either hits the jackpot, and York proposes to extend a $10M line of credit to SCO. And exchange for that line of credit, York gets to muscle its way to the front of SCO's long line of creditors. Cozy! Naturally SCO, as the distressed party in the deal, has certain unfavorable terms to swallow. First, York doesn't want to buy the Novell and IBM suits. And really, why would they? I certainly wouldn't. Likewise the ongoing Caldera IPO litigation, the "former Indian distributor" case, and all other non-Linux cases still belong to SCO. If I'm reading things right, York gets the AutoZone and possibly the Red Hat cases, and the right to file additional frivolous Linux lawsuits, and (I think) the right to sue over Me Inc. too. My guess is that the last bit is what York really wants. Mobile phone companies have deep pockets and seemingly prefer to pay up instead of fight, so it just might pay to go around filing groundless lawsuits against them. Besides, of all those lottery tickets York wants to buy, Me Inc. is the only one SCO hasn't scratched yet.

This would all make a lot more sense if York was a newly minted bagholder with no prior history with SCO. But as the ever-relentless Panglozz points out, they've had money in SCO since 2004, and even had dealings with Rich Emerson, the M$ guy who arranged the Baystar deal. I'm not saying I see the black hand of Redmond behind the York deal, not yet anyway, but I do think it all looks a bit odd.

Speculating about who's really writing the checks may be a moot point. I just can't see the deal going through as it's currently worded. First, SCO wants to sell the Unix biz, with York I suppose becoming Novell's new agent, for the same 5% cut of the take, all without Novell's consent. Meanwhile, Novell gets to continue suing the eviscerated, asset-stripped husk of SCO. I have this funny feeling they won't accept that sort of arrangement. SCO also proposes to sell the right to file new Linux lawsuits. There's no way for any potential bidder to know what this "asset" is worth at present. I don't see how they could reasonably auction it until certain PSJ's in the IBM case are sorted out. If we're lucky, IBM might "helpfully" point this out and talk the court into unstaying, say, CC10 for example. All in the interest of expediting the BK proceedings, of course.

So in the end, this proposed deal just might turn out to be a good thing. Just not for SCO. The deal's weird enough that I'm going to have to stare at it a while and try to imagine what loopholes and sneaky tricks they've hidden inside of it. And I hope people who actually understand this stuff will do the same. It's a hell of a strange way to carve a turkey, that's all I can say.

10/4 SNR

2007-10-04T22:13:00.000-07:00

Another busy week in Delaware, and once again I've fallen behind in my chronicling duties, as it's also been another busy week in my humble cubicle. So here are the thrilling highlights of this last week in the ongoing SCO soap opera...

Most SCO items these days are purely schadenfreude news, but today we got one that matters. Novell just filed a motion in Delaware to lift the automatic stay on SCO v. Novell and let the case go to trial. Which it was just about to do, before being so rudely interrupted by all this BK excitement.

So that's important, but I have to say the Novell trial doesn't seem as critical as it once did. Kimball sorted out the copyright issue, and ruled that Novell could waive SCO's claims against IBM and AutoZone, and the remaining bit left for trial was about exactly how much money SCO owed Novell. The exciting part about that was wondering whether losing the case would force SCO into bankruptcy. Now we know the answer to that was "no"; the mere prospect of possibly losing the case forced SCO into bankruptcy.

What I still really want is a ruling on IBM's CC10, a judgement that Linux doesn't infringe on any Unix SysV "IP", regardless of who that "IP" belongs to. In some ways I'm not sure even that is as critical as it once was. The FUD brigade hasn't given up, of course, but these days they always talk about those notorious Microsoft patent claims, and not so much about SCO anymore.
In further rearranging-the-deck-chairs news, Bert Young is out as CFO, replaced by a temp with a background in Utah's vibrant health food industry. I imagine that anyone with a tech background would've heard of SCO already and refused the job. I almost feel bad for the guy, in a way. He probably has no idea what kind of swamp he's just waded into.
Oh, and Sandy Gupta just got a "big" promotion to President of SCO Operations. SCO Operations being SCO's wholly owned legal subsidiary nobody'd ever heard of prior to the BK filing. No word on what his duties are in the new job, or who's replacing him in charge of SCO's remaining engineering work. Possibly they just don't need anyone for that anymore.

But who cares about job duties at a time like this? The important thing is that Sandy got himself a $40k raise. That's the problem with handing out big raises, like the one Ryan Tibbitts just got. Once word gets out, everybody wants a big raise. It's a tough spot to be in if you're bankrupt, not that it's stopping SCO any.
Here's the biggest schadenfreude item I've seen in quite some time. As a bankrupt company, SCO is required to file monthly reports with the court, explaining what they're doing with their money. We just got the first one of those the other day, and (as you've probably already heard) SCO's supposed to pay $10,500 to a certain Maureen O'Gara. You know, the one who went around shrieking that PJ was a paid mouthpiece for IBM. Granted, we don't actually know what the $10.5k is for. Maybe MOG dabbles in a little VBScript coding in her spare time or something. Or it's an old gambling debt. Or they bought a used car from her, possibly. We don't actually know. But common sense suggests that the money flowing one way and favorable media coverage flowing the other are not wholly unconnected. I bet none of 'em ever figured this would see the light of day, did they? Nelson: Ha, ha!
Lost in the commotion, SCO got a second delisting notice, this time for their stock being under $1 for a month. They've been there before, and the stock magically (and temporarily) recovered a bit later. It may be more difficult now, though. This is probably not a big deal, they've got 6 months to levitate their shares over a dollar for ten days straight, and they'll probably be delisted for some other cause long before that becomes an issue. Speaking of which, there's a hearing on the earlier delisting letter (the small matter of the BK filing) scheduled for November 8th. So SCO really did manage a significant delay in being delisted. I still have trouble imagining what they'll say at that hearing, though.
Meanwhile, Darl's been giving a ton of interviews lately, always putting on a brave face and playing tough guy, like it was still 2003 or something. The latest interviews, soon to be major exhibits at a SCO v. Universe court case near you:

Salt Lake Tribune: "SCO chief confident". Apparently they have some super-exciting reorg plans in the works that we'll be hearing about Real Soon Now. No details yet, though. Film at 11.

As other people have already noted, the piece quotes an analyst named Bill Hughes, who has some nice things to say about Me Inc. It just so happens Mr. Hughes was the keynote speaker at SCOForum 2006. Not that a hefty speaker's fee from SCO would color his analysis or anything, certainly not. Heavens no. Perish the thought.

Oh, and DiDio gets a word in too. She argues SCO's mistake was in suing corporate customers. It's not made clear, but the implication seems to be that SCO ought to have gone around suing individual Linux users instead, RIAA-style, even though there's no money in it, certainly no $5 billion instant payday. Seems to me this illustrates the big difference between SCO itself and its longtime media defenders. I've always thought SCO got into the lawsuit business purely for the money. They figured IBM was the biggest bag of money around (other than Microsoft, and they'd already sued M$ back in the Caldera days), so they sued hoping for a big, quick payday. When that didn't pan out, it's been one idiotic backup plan after another. I've lost count now, but we're probably at about plan 9 by now. SCO's media shills, in contrast, tended to be blinkered ideologues (DiDio, Enderle, & Lyons, for example), people who didn't know or care much about SCO itself, and cheered simply because SCO was going to crush the smelly Linux hippies once and for all, clearing the way for our glorious all-Microsoft future, or something like that. Gentle Readers, if you ever see a story where a "successful" tech analyst has gone over the wall and become the successful CEO of a profitable, non-litigious company, let me know, ok? I've never heard of such a thing, and I suspect there's a reason why.
Oh, the other media story's just as good. From ComputerWorld, we have "SCO's McBride: Rumors of our demise are greatly exaggerated" . More of the same, basically. Here's a new bit of classic Darl for ya:

"[There's] the view out there that we're just dead and everybody's claiming victory over SCO," he said. "It's almost like the World Series is over and the only thing that hasn't happened is the victory parade. It's like the Linux faithful are lined up ... for the bad news. They've got their confetti ready to throw and everybody's all excited, and they have their floats. Sam [Palmisano, chairman and CEO of IBM] has his, Linus [Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel] has his and everybody's pitching in. Groklaw [a Web site that has been monitoring the SCO-IBM case] and their followers are all there. Everybody's saying this thing's all over and now let's have a victory parade."

There's an old Next Generation episode called "Darmok", in which the Enterprise encounters a bizarre alien species which communicates entirely in metaphors. What we're witnessing here is "Darlmok", in which we encounter a bizarre alien creature which communicates entirely in sports metaphors.

That Darl, he sure is a big athletic supporter, that's all I can say.
Meanwhile, more semi-relevant news over on the Unix Heritage Society mailing list, where someone's ported Version 7 UNIX to the x86 architecture. Version 7, you might recall, is one of the ancient Unixes released under a BSD-like license by Old Caldera. Although since Kimball ruled SCO/Caldera didn't get any copyrights in the APA, it might be Novell's code instead. Unless it's public domain and owned by nobody, which is entirely possible under the copyright laws in effect back in the 70's.

Right now the port is only known to work on 80486 and above. Being the Unix Heritage list, people are naturally wondering if there's any reason it can't run on, say, an old 4.77 MHz 8088 box, since both Coherent and [Old]SCO Xenix once did back in the day.

It's interesting how stories about nearly 30 year old OSes almost always have a SCO angle, and stories about current ones almost never do. Funny, that.
Oh, and here's a fun post at LinuxWorld: "Can SCO's mobile stuff really justify Chapter 11 instead of Chapter 7?". The author doesn't think so. I think I've said before, either here or elsewhere, that it probably would't be too hard to put together an open-source equivalent to those ultra-delectable Me Inc. apps, if anybody needed such a thing. The post sweetens the pot a bit:

Anyway, someone want to write open-source equivalants of SCO's "Me Inc." mobile apps -- none of which looks like a whole lot of work? I'll pay you for an article about it, and you can release the code under whatever license you want, and include the article as online or bundled docs. And you'll probably get a link from Groklaw, which means that if you have Google ads on your site you'll make more money from mobile development than SCO will.

That sounds promising. I'd be tempted to do it myself if I had any spare cycles, which I don't. But hey, maybe that's just as well, since I don't have Google ads here either. So feel free to volunteer, I guess that's what I'm trying to say here.
And now we come to perhaps the real reason the SCO charade has to be dragged out a bit longer. From CNet: "Windows Vista SP1 beta lacks 'wow'". So maybe they'll have this all sorted out whenever SP2, or Vista ME, or whatever, finally hits the streets. Unless that fails to impress as well, in which case SCO will have to figure out how to declare double-bankruptcy or something, thus putting the BK proceedings on hold and keeping the nonsense alive for a few years more.

9/27 SNR

2007-09-27T11:28:00.000-07:00

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.

9/26 SNR

2007-09-26T11:19:00.000-07:00

SCO's officially joined Nasdaq's list of delinquent companies now. Which means delisting may be in the cards soon -- once all the frivolous appeals and delaying tactics have been exhausted. So it may be a while yet.
PJ explores bankruptcy law here, trying to puzzle out what happens next. The answer so far: Nobody knows.
You know the old saying, "Victory has a thousand fathers, and defeat is an orphan"? Enderle's now aping Lyons in running away from SCO, sort of. Forgive me if I don't take their mea culpas at face value. Everybody knew SCO was a scam years ago. The only thing that's changed recently is that it's become a very unsuccessful scam. Do you really suppose they'd be singing the same tune if all the same evidence had come out, but SCOSource licenses were flying off the shelves anyway? I sincerely doubt that.

Enderle's bit goes on and on about being threatened by Linux criminals. I personally doubt that ever happened. I mean, if someone threatened you, would you (a) post self-pitying rants about it on the net, or (b) call the police? There's no sign he ever did (b), so we've only got his word to go on, and it's pretty clear by now what his word is worth.
As for Lyons, here's a highly unimpressed take on his Fake Steve gig and related Apple FUD.
Gartner's George Weiss, yet another erstwhile SCO shill, now says Unix will be effectively dead by 2009, all because of Linux.
ComputerWorld, a couple of days ago: SCO's Finances May Come Crashing Down"
ESR chimes in about Lyons, Enderle, and MOG: "SCO and the Three Stooges"
Glyn Moody on Enderle & friends: "SCO Long, and Thanks for All the Fish".
A thread about SCO's finances on c.u.s.m. The main concern of most posters is what happens to SCO's OSes in the future. One hardcore SCO supporter complains that the title of the thread isn't a verbatim quote. Talk about grasping at straws.
New activity in Ralphieland, turned up by the ever-relentless Panglozz:

Xymbiot.com, a new ThinkAtomic tentacle supposedly in the "packaging & container" business, which sounds like a front for something if you ask me.

Meanwhile VentureQuest -- the other new Canopy --invests in an apparently nonexistent bank
HBO's going to do a movie about the 2000 election in Florida, with Ed Begley Jr. as David Boies. I didn't realize Ed Begley Jr.'s career was in the tank quite that badly.
Speaking of Boies: On September 23rd, the day SCO got a delisting notice and announced Ryan Tibbitts's big raise, Boies was otherwise engaged. Seems that some nonprofit org invited him to join a panel discussion about Africa, in which various bigwigs wring their hands about the third world from the comfort of an ultra-luxe private club in Manhattan. Yeah, that'll fix everything. Classy!
One of many articles about the soon-to-ship Eee PC. The Eee got a blurb in the September issue of Vogue (can't find a copy online though), which referred to Linux as "intuitive". I imagine relatively few SNR readers are also regular Vogue readers, but making it into the September issue is a big deal. It's the fall fashion issue, topping out at 800+ pages, and the Eee is on about page 619 if I remember right. So as a result, now my wife's pestering me to get her one, and I probably will soon, unless the thing is a complete lemon.

A brief, sudsy interlude...

2007-09-21T15:53:00.000-07:00

I know I've mentioned the other Caldera once or twice before. Here's their tasty, tasty IPA, now available in cans. In an amusing coincidence, the price tag shown here is exactly the price of one share of SCO at the high on August 9th, the day before Kimball's big copyright ruling. So if you bought one share back then, and sold today, you'd have 16 cents now. Whereas if you bought one can of Caldera IPA, drank it, and returned the can for the deposit, you'd have 5 cents now, and possibly a mild buzz, depending on how many, uh, "shares" you decide to "accumulate". It's true that both investment strategies have a bitter aftertaste, but only one of them involves beer. Mmmmm.... beeer......

9/20 SNR

2007-09-16T23:35:00.000-07:00

Ok, I've fallen way behind here, and I hardly know where to begin. Either SCO chose the worst possible time to file Chapter 11, or my PHBs in RL chose the worst possible time to set a project deadline, take your pick. In any case, I guess I'll start out trying to recap the last few days as best I can. Enough weirdness and excitement has gone down since Friday that I'll surely forget something important. GL's probably got it covered, whatever it might be.

So yesterday we had the initial hearing in the SCO BK case. Yes, a whole new court case has ensued, this time in Delaware, and there's a whole new set of laws and terminology to brush up on. I've never had occasion to learn anything about Federal bankruptcy law, and generally speaking I think that's a positive thing, but I've ended up feeling I'm in a little over my head here. BK court is a whole new ballgame, and there aren't even BK court shows on TV to help you get a feel for how the rules work. Yesterday's hearing dealt with a few motions I understand are routine at the outset of a BK case: Getting permission to keep paying employees, utility bills, taxes, and such, for the most part. I gather those motions are routinely granted, and were in this case, with another hearing scheduled for early October. The judge obviously has a thing or two to learn about SCO.

On the bright side, Judge Gross is about to learn a great deal about the wonderful wacky world of SCO. Seems that on the 13th, the day before the BK filing, SCO's board of directors had a bout of extreme generosity towards the company's general counsel, Ryan Tibbetts. For whatever reason, they suddenly decided he needed a $50k raise and a $50k net bonus. Net, meaning $50k after taxes, so the actual amount of Novell's money SCO expends will be a bit higher than that. Paying bonuses to key people just before a BK so they won't walk is controversial but not that unusual, I understand. What's a little more unusual is not disclosing the big bonus until after the BK judge approved their motion to keep paying employees. Maybe it's just an oversight, a perfectly honest mistake anyone could've made under the circumstances. But it looks awfully suspicious, if you ask me.

So today's fun legal term is "avoidance", in which "avoid" does not mean quite what you think it means. In BK court, an avoidance claim is a creditor's attempt to compel someone associated with the debtor to give back money they shouldn't have received. El Corton explains it all much more cogently than I can, in a great post over on IV.

As others have speculated, this business with Mr. Tibbetts, Esq., and his juicy bonus check might help explain why SCO lost three of its seven accountants on Friday, with two quitting and another being fired. This is just me speculating here, but perhaps they knew it was a dodgy business and didn't want their fingerprints all over it. Which leaves SCO with those remaining four accountants, who apparently didn't see anything unusual or disturbing about the sudden bonus. The main problem I see here is the notion that someone would stick with SCO through 4+ years of legal trouble and general ridicule, and only now quit on principle. I suppose it makes sense if the principle in question is simply keeping oneself out of Club Fed. Until the BK filing, I never really believed anyone might end up in jail because of SCO's escapades. I hoped they might, sure, but I didn't think there was a real chance it might happen. Now I'm not so sure about that. I still think it's an outside chance, but it's a nonzero chance now. Or if not jail, certain individuals may end up considerably poorer as a result of their work for SCO.

The soap opera around Mr. Tibbitts is only one of today's fun stories. The other big deal is a new nastygram from Nasdaq, this time about the BK filing. Under standard Nasdaq practice, if you file Chapter 11, you are expelled from the garden forthwith (i.e. September 27th), and left to wander the barren wastes of the Pink Sheets, with much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments. SCO, being SCO, naturally plans to appeal, and naturally they aren't saying on what grounds they're appealing. Perhaps they think they're smarter than all the Chapter 11 filers who came before them, and they can just stretch the appeals process out indefinitely, like they intend(ed) to do with IBM, Novell, and the others. But, you know, if Enron's execs turned out not to be the smartest guys in the room after all, what do you suppose the odds are for Darl, Ralphie, and friends? I mean, if they're such geniuses, what are they doing in Chapter 11 in the first place?

Oh, and there was a new 10-Q the other day as well, which finally -- finally -- contains the magic words "going concern", which they've studiously avoided up until now. Plenty of boilerplate about tough markets and competitive challenges, but "going concern" is a new one. Perhaps someone of the regulatory persuasion might take an interest in how SCO avoided said phrase right up until they'd already effectively stopped being a going concern.

Oh, let's see, what else is going on out there? Well, MOG is on the warpath again, for one. Here's a piece from a few days back about Kimball denying SCO's last do-over attempt, casting all sorts of wild aspersions at the judge. The judge who wouldn't let her intervene in the IBM case, it should be recalled. The only good part of the article is yet another awful photo of Darl, glowing red eyes and all. I'm serious. Look closer if you don't believe me. And today we got an angry MOG rant about "open source zealots". And she would know all about zealotry, wouldn't she? Actually that link doesn't work anymore. I'll change it if the story reappears at another URL.

The BK filing at least might help explain why MOG's been shilling for SCO all this time. She's a creditor, or rather her G2 operation is. What precisely SCO's been paying her for is undisclosed, as is the amount of money she's still owed. Even if the cash wasn't expressly for writing puff pieces about SCO, or involving herself in the IBM case, or stalking PJ, I still think it helps explain why she's stuck with them after all their other allies ran away. And now, after all she's done for SCO, they don't want to pay up. The ingrates.

Speaking of SCO allies fleeing, here's a mea culpa from Daniel Lyons, in which he actually comes out and says he was wrong about SCO all these years. Which I suppose is better than being paid by SCO all these years, a charge he vehemently denies. Now that he's hit the big time with his Fake Steve gig, there's really no point in his continuing with this SCO business, is there? You know how every big Hollywood actor has an embarrassing early movie or two, back before they were famous? They're embarrassed about these films now, because they can finally afford to be. What we're seeing with Lyons is a lot like that. He can't very well say he's proud of his work on the SCO story, any more than Arnold Schwarzenegger can say he's proud of his work in Hercules in New York. Doing so would raise serious questions about one's judgement.

Not all the news is bad for SCO these days. PCPro Magazine just came out with a very positive review of HipCheck 1.0.3. So it appears they have at least one theoretically valuable asset, if the review is to be believed. That won't be enough to keep SCO's creditors at bay, but it's possible, just maybe, that Me Inc. could see greater success once the BK court finds 'em a new home.

For a more comprehensive treatment of recent events, you can't go wrong with the recent BK-related stories on GL. Although reading them all will take a while, even if you skip the comments.

"The Bankruptcy Docket & All Filings - Hearing on Tuesday in Delaware"
"The Media on SCO Bankruptcy"
"In 'Foxes Petition to Guard the Henhouse' News ..."
"SCO Asks Court to Let it Hire Accounting Temps - Half of its finance dept. fired or quit"
"SCO's Bankruptcy Hearing Tomorrow Changed to 8:30 AM - Updated"
"Looks Like Novell Will Be There Tomorrow - The Fleet Has Arrived"
"Darl's Declaration in Support of 1st Day Pleading, as text; AutoZone, Red Hat courts informed"
"Red Hat Tells the Court All About SCO's Woes"
"SCO 10Q: Doubts It Can Remain a "Going Concern" If It Has to Pay Novell Significant $$"
"First Word From the Bankruptcy Court Hearing - Update 2Xs - Meeting Darl, New Filings"
"More Details On What Happened At the Hearing -- New Filings, New Report"
"SCO Receives Nasdaq Notice Letter, Gives Tibbitts Raise and Bonus 1 Day Before Filing for Bankruptcy"

And while we're at it, a piece on Lamlaw: "Bankruptcy Hearing on Tuesday - updated"

... and now you're up to date, for the moment. There's a bunch of media coverage out there too, as you might expect, but it'll have to wait for the time being.

One interesting bit is in the "First Word From the Bankruptcy Court" story. A GL reader who attended the hearing managed to talk to Darl in the hall, and Darl said something about being surprised at the impact the case has had on his family. Well, he shouldn't be all that surprised. His brother, his wife (via "EdgeClick"), and even a couple of his kids (via their band "Kid Theodore") are all SCO creditors. They're bound to feel a little aggravated about that.

9/14 SNR II: SCO files for bankruptcy! Finally!

2007-09-14T13:56:00.000-07:00

Woohoo! SCO just filed for Chapter 11, finally, which is what the earlier halt to trading was all about. It's the moment (ok, one of the moments) we've been awaiting for years now. Soon we'll all have to sit down and figure out how this changes the legal landscape, but right now I'm happy to just sit back and watch the news stories roll in...

The press release is here.
GL has the wonderfully gory details here. As PJ notes, SCO owes over half a mil to Amici LLC. Amici's the shady document management firm owned by Boies's kids. I've discussed Amici on a few past occasions, and I've always wondered if they had their tentacles wrapped around SCO as well. And now we know for sure. It's all so.... beautiful. It's like Christmas in mid-September.
Stephen Shankland has a good piece about the filing on his CNet blog. He notes that the Novell case is stayed by the Chapter 11 filing, so the trial won't start on Monday after all. So SCO's found a way to delay the case again after all -- but at what cost?
ComputerWorld's got a good article up too, with enjoyably scathing comments from a couple of analysts.
Slashdot's got the news here, wherein we learn that in Soviet Russia, Chapter 11 files you.
Paul McDougall has an unusually subdued take on the news here. He ends by referring to his recent Darl interview, where Darl said SCO could easily raise whatever money it needed for an appeal. As if a Darl quote trumps a Chapter 11 filing.
That Parloff guy has a just-the-facts post about the filing here. Perhaps he's wondering now if he really picked the best time to start shilling for SCO. He does express a hope that SCO will get the Novell stay lifted, so they can get moving on that appeal they promised us. Which proves beyond any doubt that Parloff hasn't been watching close enough, and isn't familiar with SCO's MO. If they were so eager to have the trial go forward, they could've waited just one more week before filing Chapter 11, and they didn't. That should tell you something.
A news brief about the filing at the Salt Lake Tribune.
A post at ZDNet, giving an overview of the story so far.
Coverage at TheStreet.com.
A discussion thread at the Provo Daily Herald.

9/14 SNR

2007-09-13T17:03:00.000-07:00

Breaking: Reports that trading has been halted in SCO's stock. More as soon as I know more.
ComputerWorld on the fast-approaching SCO v. Novell trial, which starts Monday, and should be over by this time next week. Can you believe it?
SCO has retained a new firm to administer its 401(k) plan. The "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic" metaphor has been chronically abused over the years in connection to SCO, but I can't think of a better one right now. Someone on the boards mentioned that Enron did this just before cratering, presumably so employees would be locked out of their accounts until all their savings had vaporized.
A CBR piece about Kimball denying SCO's fast-track appeal effort
An odd article at CIO Insight: "Battle Over Linux: When a Win May Not be a Win". It puts a scary-face spin on a small set of things that are technically true, such as the fact that Kimball hasn't ruled on the infringement claims in the IBM case, and the nonzero possibility that SCO might have better luck on appeal. It then wanders off into a spiel about why software copyrights are bad. I happen to disagree with that: Without copyrights, I'm not convinced you can have an enforceable free/open software license. You'd have to go hog-wild with software patents, while for the unpatentable stuff the only way you could protect your "IP" would be as a trade secret, which couldn't be any more incompatible with F/OSS if it had been deliberately designed that way.
On GL, SCO's doing a little supplemental whining for a do-over, in support of the previous begging they did a few days back. Yeah. Good luck with that.
Also on GL: A couple of days ago PJ had a piece rounding up SCO news coverage since August 10th, with a great chronological table. It's quite an interesting read.

One of the things I attempt to do here is observe and critique how the media covers the SCO saga. It's been a real goldmine over the years if you enjoy making fun of clueless journalists, which I do for some reason. Somebody's got to play "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" with those bozos, and for some reason I can't recall I decided to volunteer. Possibly there was beer involved. And now PJ's gone and done a better job of it than I've been doing all this time (if you ask me). Honestly, sometimes I wonder why I even bother with this SNR business.
I've never understood the animosity some people feel towards PJ, usually over extremely small and silly matters. A comment of theirs gets deleted or lost on GL, and they seethe about it for years afterward. I don't get it. Take, for example, the very latest anti-PJ jihad, this time by Jem Matzan, proprietor of something called the "JEM Report". He's searching high and low for people who've had comments nuked on GL and want to whine about it. PJ got wind of this and wasn't happy, and neither was SJVN, and now Matzan's convinced there's a vast conspiracy out there to suppress this story. He explains himself further in a thread at his TJR forums, where he goes by the nym "Valour". He's insisting he has only the noblest and purest motives at heart, and just wants to get the Truth out there about this super-important Scandal of the Century. I'm not convinced it's a scandal. The fact that someone exercises their own discretion about comments on a site they administer isn't even newsworthy, much less scandalous.

But then, the fact that I strongly disagree probably marks me (in his mind) as a co-conspirator in this nefarious global cabal he obsesses over. Ok. Cool. Count me in, then. I've always wanted to be part of an elite global conspiracy. Just don't call me a journalist, because them's fightin' words...

9/10 SNR

2007-09-10T09:09:00.000-07:00

Not much legal action today, but the trial-in-the-media continues.

Another day, another Darl interview. The guy's everywhere right now, shilling the same set of lame talking points we've heard I don't know how many times before. Blah, blah, noncompete, blah, blah, we were shocked by the ruling, blah, blah, Project Monterey. The guy could really use some new material. Although I do like the part where he suggests all the bad publicity he and SCO have gotten is the result of a vast conspiracy by SCO's enemies. If the SCO charade goes on much longer, and Darl keeps blabbing to the press, we may start hearing about Area 51 and black helicopters.

Among its inaccuracies, the article is the second one to assert that SCO's already filed an appeal. One instance of that looks like carelessness. Two, and it starts to look like a pattern of deception.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks the photo in that piece looks like a mugshot. Maybe it's just wishful thinking, I dunno -- but what I'm really wishing for is to see the latest batch of interviews show up as Novell or IBM exhibits, just like Darl's previous ones have. The guy just doesn't learn.
The Inquirer, on the Wired interview: "SCO's Darl McBride remains defiant". It's worth a read, as it's one of those rare articles that dares to call a spade a spade. For example:

He continues to conflate New SCO with Old SCO, which is by now a tiresome verbal sleight of hand, and he repeats the rationale that Santa Cruz Operation must have gotten all those UNIX copyrights from Novell, simply because it paid Novell $149 million. In other words, for all that money, SCO must have gotten a nice pony. Oh yawn.
Well, ok, there were a couple of filings today, just nothing earth-shattering. Just Novell opposing SCO's whining for another do-over. Zen's got the goods here.
A deeply peculiar FUD piece on the Fortune/CNNMoney "Legal Pad" blog, ranting on at great length -- mind-numbing, Bifflike length -- about how Kimball's copyright ruling is a terrible injustice. Roger Parloff (the blogger) has written about SCO before, way back in May '04. The article is quite detailed coming from someone who hasn't been covering SCO regularly. Did he just come up with all of this stuff on his own, or did someone at SCO or BS&F lend a friendly helping hand?

And, btw, why exactly is it "Linux-mob justice" when individuals are merely speaking their minds about issues they're concerned about. Labeling it "mob justice" implies such behavior ought to be illegal. Maybe I'm making too much of that, but it troubles me when media types are unclear on the concept of free speech. It's not reserved just for mainstream Old Media reporter types, you know.

I think I'm going to have to add the guy to the "Pro-SCO" column in the sidebar here.
SJVN on Friday's no-jury ruling. SJVN also shows up in the comments to the Parloff article, disputing the guy's goofy claims.
The one and only Dvorak chimes in about the Parloff piece. He's just phoning it in, though. A couple of quick sentences, followed by an extended quote from Parloff. Dvorak: Clueless doofus, or skanky page-view ho? Discuss.
Ars Technica piece about Friday's rulings.
There's also a piece about the rulings at Global Toad News. No, really, that's the site's actual name. I swear I'm not making this up.
And the inevitable Slashdot story, in case you're curious about the "In Soviet Russia" angle on the latest news.
A post on MSDN's Channel 9 rolls its eyes at SCO. About Darl's silly "get knocked down seven times, get up eight" comment, it responds "I think somebody has been watching too many Rocky movies!". You know you're completely out of friends when even the fanboys on MSDN make fun of you.
Boies is quoted in a recent WSJ piece, "
Lawyers Gear Up Grand New Fees", about lawyers' rates breaking the $1000/hour barrier. Boies gets all sanctimonious about it:

"Frankly, it's a little hard to think about anyone who doesn't save lives being worth this much money," says David Boies, one of the nation's best-known trial lawyers, at the Armonk, N.Y., office of Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP.

So expect to see them raise their rates in the near future.

The article also quotes a guy from Andrews Kurth, another of SCO's law firms. Not one, but two top-dollar law firms, and what does SCO have to show for it?
SCO's famous celebrity lawyer shows up briefly in a suburban NY-NJ paper. It just says his clients include the New York Yankees and American Express. What, not a word about SCO? Shocking!
This isn't a political blog, but when one of the SCO saga's dramatis personae wanders into the political arena, I've got to at least pass the item along. And here's a good one. You've heard about that Norman Hsu guy, right? The fugitive fundraiser? Seems that he recently cohosted a fundraiser with Boies. And get this, the fundraiser was for a Kennedy.
A recent article on Unix history at Roughly Drafted, with a focus on the SCO saga. A post on comp.os.linux.advocacy claims the piece is in reponse to FUD by Lyons.
And from comp.unix.sco.misc, the sad tale of a guy whose Vista printer won't talk to his SCO box. Insert pithy remark about poetic justice here. And this after all SCO's done for Microsoft. Talk about ingratitude...
And from comp.unix.sys5.r4, an amusing recent thread where a guy asks which OS is the best: SVR4 or BSD. Like it was still freakin' 1989 or something.

9/8 SNR

2007-09-07T09:43:00.000-07:00

Good news, everyone. Another Friday, another tasty batch of decisions in the Novell case. Zen's got 'em here. It's actually just one document, Novell-453, which covers a bunch of recent pretrial motions.

The important bits:

No jury trial, the thing I was just wringing my hands about the other day. Seems that the few remaining parts of the Novell case render it a case in equity (~~"common law"~~) [see user comment below], not in statutory law, which means SCO isn't entitled to a jury trial, if I understand correctly.
No immediate appeal. By declining to enter his prior PSJ rulings as Final Judgements (you gotta love that name) for now, Kimball prevented SCO from appealing while the current case is still ongoing. SCO's current goal, I gather, is to keep its claims in the IBM and AutoZone cases in a permanent state of quantum indeterminacy, neither won nor lost, neither waived nor affirmed. Kimball's having none of that, though. He hasn't collapsed their wave packet just yet, but at least he reserves the right to do so in the (hopefully near) future.
Contrary to SCO's wishes, Novell will be allowed to mention the IBM case, or GL, or this humble blog for that matter, if they think it'll help.
The one bright spot for SCO is that they're allowed to introduce (i.e. invent) new theories about what all that M$/Sun money was supposed to be for. So they have another chance to make some lame, non-credible excuses, which Kimball can then dismiss. I'm starting to think he's just toying with them now.

There were also a few motions yesterday, with each party objecting to the other's proposed jury instructions, and SCO objecting to Novell's proposed witness list. Nothing really earth-shattering there. It'll be interesting to see if SCO tries to revisit their witness list, now that there won't be a jury trial. Bringing in random people to say "Look, a Wookie!" isn't going to work as well when your only audience is a federal judge.

Now to the media coverage. Surprisingly, the Deseret News already has a piece about Friday's rulings.

ComputerWorld has an interview with Darl, titled "Q&A: McBride says SCO isn't dead yet, despite legal loss", in a case of exquisitely poor timing. It's classic Darl, loaded with corny sports metaphors (boxing, surfing, football, etc.) and a few "did he really say that?" moments. He says they have a shot at 20% of an $80B market, which would give SCO annual revenue about 3 orders of magnitude greater than the present-day value of the entire company. He also claims SCO's poised for an Apple-like comeback. If we're playing historical analogies, and comparing present-day SCO to the Apple of 1997, that would make Darl the new Gil Amelio -- who as you might've noticed is no longer CEO at Apple. SCO's tangled corporate history makes it hard to figure out who gets to be Steve, though. Ransom Love? Doug Michels, maybe?

Over at IT Jungle, Timothy Morgan also argues the Novell case is still very much alive. Again, not the best timing. If you're going to write an article saying SCO has even the remotest shred of hope going forward, it's best not to write the article on a Friday, because that's when Kimball usually rules.

Oh, and Affinity Technology (remember them?), Kevin McBride's other IP-troll client, is losing money by the boatload. Net loss of $476k, on revenues of just $8k, and total liabilities running around 10x of total assets. Their forward-looking statements go on and on about all sorts of pending appeals they feel really super-optimistic about. Sound familiar?

9/5 SNR

2007-09-05T08:26:00.000-07:00

In the long-stalled IBM case, the parties told Kimball what they think his Novell ruling means for SCO v. IBM. IBM says SCO's case is dead, SCO begs to differ, film at 11. SCO's entire strategy at this point is to assume a successful second bite at the Novell apple, so they're not going to concede anything voluntarily, just in case. In other words, both parties agree SCO's got a house of cards going, with the Novell case at its base. IBM argues that since the base has collapsed, the whole house of cards falls down, because that's what houses of cards do. SCO disagrees, and would prefer to freeze the IBM cards in midair while attempting to insert replacement Novell cards beneath them.

Okay. Yeah. Let us know how that works out for ya.

There's a CBR story, and naturally GL's coverage includes all the filings and such.
SCO's been making noises about an appeal. As we've discussed earlier, they can't file one until the rulings they want to appeal are Officially Final, but that isn't stopping them from waving it around for the PR/FUD value. A reporter at MarketWatch picked up the story, mistakenly reporting that SCO had already filed an appeal. The mistake is sort of understandable; companies usually don't put on a big song and dance about appealing without actually filing anything.

The story does mention that Novell is Darl's former employer, an angle you don't see discussed very often. The clear implication is that there's some sort of personal vendetta going on. There's no way to know if that's true without peering into the twisty little passages of Darl's mind, of course, but I'm pleased the notion is occurring to people out there. SCO's dumping all of its resources into the irrational pursuit of a lost cause, and it's only natural to wonder why. In the beginning, outside observers could've reasonably concluded SCO was fighting for its legal rights as it perceived them, or at least that it was trying to maximize shareholder value by landing a big settlement or buyout deal, or something. Now, not so much. Unless the stars realign dramatically on SCO's behalf in the near future, they aren't getting a single red cent out of either Novell or IBM, and that's not even slowing them down. The case was filed out of greed, but continues (if you ask me) because of denial and the fragile male ego, and not much else.
Also on the appeal front, Paul McDougall interviewed Darl the other day. McDougall lobs him a few sofball questions so he can shill the appeal angle. Basically the same stuff they've been offering since Kimball ruled: Optimism about the noncompete with Novell, a non sequitur about the Monterey source code, all kinds of excitement about SCO's products, etc. He does say SCO might sell the Me Inc. "business" to raise cash if they need to. I think I've said this before, but if it happens, look for it to be a less-than-arm's-length arrangement. Depending on how the cases are going, the buyer might pay a premium as a way to pump more cash into SCO, or the buyer might pick it up for a song, if they're trying to strip the assets out of the company prior to BK and/or final judgement in the courtroom.

At the end, Darl tries to talk tough:

If you get knocked down seven times, you get up eight. We took a knock down, but it's not in our DNA to stay down.

Well, duh. If you're a fan of cheesy B monster movies like I am, you know the creature never stays down the first time. It might be short a couple of paper mache tentacles, but it always pops up again, just long enough for the heroine to scream a little more, and then our hero dispatches it with a little help from the modern miracle of DDT, or uranium, or some such.

But good luck finding a judge who allows eight do-overs. Ain't gonna happen, no matter how gritty and determined you think you are.
Going to the court of appeals isn't the only way to get a do-over. As with all other adverse rulings, they're begging Kimball to reconsider. Because that's worked out so well for them in the past, I guess.

The arguments they present are basically the same ones they want to talk to the appeals court about. I suppose it looks a little better on appeal if you at least tried to get your arguments in front of the first judge at some point. That's what I think this is really all about; they can't seriously think Kimball will buy their latest spin, can they?

There's a CBR story about this move too.
The parties are even fighting over jury instructions now. SCO essentially proposes to ignore the recent PSJ unpleasantness, and would like the jury to consider whether they owe Novell any money or not, even though Kimball already ruled that they did.

Of course, all of this hinges on whether there's a jury trial or not. I think at this point I'd prefer there wasn't one, if for no other reason than a jury trial is what SCO's been hoping for all this time. I think they're hoping they'll get a low-quality, ultra-gullible jury, full of people who'll rule in favor of whoever they like the most, or whoever puts on the best dog and pony show, regardless of what the law says or what the facts are. That's the only way SCO has a chance, after all. I don't think most juries are quite that bad, even in Utah, but there's a nonzero probability of ending up with one. So why risk it, if you don't absolutely have to?
Couple of other GL articles, so we're up to date: A boatload of filings last Friday, plus more yesterday
One theory about the current appeals nonsense is that it's the only way to keep the SCO saga going until Vista SP1 finally ships, currently set for Q1 next year. In the linked article there's an unintentionally revealing quote that illustrates the M$ worldview:

"Frankly, the world wasn't 100 percent ready for Windows Vista," Corporate Vice President Mike Sievert said in an interview at Microsoft's recent partner conference in Denver.

Oh, riiiight, it's all the world's fault.
One of the best Vista slams I've seen, from PC Magazine oddly enough, in which the OS is likened to the wares of the Sirius Cybernetics corporation. "Share and Enjoy!"
On the Linux gadget front, the latest word is that the Palm Foleo won't see the light of day after all. That's disappointing. A lot of critics bashed the thing, but I still say if Apple had brought out a device with the exact same specs the media would've danced in the streets.

The Palm execs say they still believe in the concept and hope to someday introduce a Foleo-like gadget, but without giving even a vague timeline for when that might happen.

8/30 SNR

2007-08-30T00:24:00.000-07:00

Another new batch of filings in the Novell case. Docs #410-411 are intriguing. SCO's now asking Kimball for Final Judgement on the PSJs they lost a while back. They're just itching to file an appeal, they're rarin' to go, but they can't until Judge K. makes it all final.

Doc #411, their memo in support, is rather amusing to read. SCO goes on at length about all these unresolved issues they'd like to talk to the appeals court about. It's quite a masterpiece of lameness. SCO's argument has three key points:
A.) Letting them appeal right away would potentially save a little time and/or money, unless they manage to delay the appeals case too, and they're certainly going to try.
B.) They've found a handful of cases to cite that indicate an appeal is not expressly prohibited under the current circumstances.
C.) They have a short list of new, incomprehensible, Bifflike arguments they'd like to chat about with an appellate judge.

Which is all a verbose way of saying they'd like a do-over, please, judge. It actually sounds like they'd prefer to jump straight to the appeal now and not bother with a trial in front of Kimball at all, if possible.
Meanwhile, doc #412 is the parties' joint report on how long they think the Novell trial's going to take now. They both estimate it'll take 4-5 days now, down from the original three weeks.
Over the years, whenever SCO decided to make another "dramatic" move in the courtroom, there's always been a helpful, friendly hack journalist on hand to help SCO try the case in the media. There's always someone out there who's simply thrilled to have an exclusive direct line to Darl, and they happily parrot whatever spin he offers, no matter how much their journalistic credibility suffers in the bargain. That's still true, even now. In that spirit, Paul McDougall offers us his "SCO Likely To Appeal Novell Ruling, CEO Darl McBride Says", in which we learn that Kimball's ruling must be incorrect because everyone at SCO was absolutely blindsided by it, allegedly. Nothing much to see here, just another moth to the flame. Honestly, I don't know why they do it.
Oh, and a belated Motley Fool story about the PSJ rulings and subsequent stock implosion. FWIW.
And SJVN's latest, "How SCO Helped Linux"

8/26 SNR

2007-08-26T22:02:00.000-07:00

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):

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....

8/23 SNR

2007-08-23T08:15:00.000-07:00

SCO v. Novell takes another step toward trial, with a new round of amended pretrial disclosures, including proposed witness lists. In addition to a few of their own witnesses, Novell also wants to put Darl and Sontag on the stand. That ought to be interesting. They also mention, in an offhand sort of way, that they've got another 185 exhibits on top of those they disclosed in the first go-round of pretrial disclosures. Many of those will only be used if SCO keeps trying to hold on to the Sun/M$ cash. So I imagine SCO's got to be wondering exactly what kind of dirt Novell's holding in reserve. They'll probably try to keep the money anyway, regardless of what might be in those new exhibits, because they really don't have any choice in the matter. They're toast, guaranteed BK if they don't at least have a go at it. So this could get mighty entertaining before it's all over.
ITJungle: "Court Says Novell Owns Unix, Not SCO"
"Judge's ruling signals 'game over' for SCO"
Today's McDougall piece: "SCO Could Face Cash Crunch After Novell Trial". He actually uses GL as a source, although without mentioning PJ by name. Oh, and he gets a quote from Didio, who admits things look pretty grim for SCO these days.
And Murph's latest, "huh? SCO and knowing what I don't know". Go ahead, just try to figure out what point he's trying to make in that post. I dare you.
Over on the SiliconInvestor board, SCOtt Lemon responds to a recent bit of taunting, and gets an amusing response.
A rather sad tale over on c.u.s.m., in which an OSR 6 user posts to say he likes the OS, and his ERP software (which he's also happy with) runs on it, and everything's dandy, but he just wishes SCO hadn't gone down the litigation path. So he says he's a happy camper, but he still felt compelled to justify his choice of OSR6 to a bunch of (hopefully sympathetic) perfect strangers on Usenet, and he ended his post by saying "Just an alternative story to the doom and gloom..... "

8/19 SNR

2007-08-19T21:47:00.000-07:00

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.

8/15 SNR

2007-08-15T00:50:00.000-07:00

In the latest attempt at damage control, SCO sent out a letter to their remaining partners. Darl, or whoever the real author is, paraphrases the earlier press-release-turned-8K right down to the bit about the ultra-valuable & unreleased "Gemini 64" operating system from 1996. Towards the bottom, the letter reminds readers that litigation isn't SCO's only business. Which is true, actually; it's just that they're even worse at selling products than they are at suing people.
The stock dropped again today, closing at 36 cents. That and an nickel will get you a postage stamp. Niiiice. Total market cap is now down to $7.82M, No new all-time low today (that's still at 0.35), but we also saw the lowest-ever open (0.40), and lowest-ever high (0.44). So that's still progress.
The big news article of the day is Matthew Aslett's piece at CBR, "Ruling suggests SCO knew it did not own Unix". That's something that's been widely suspected for years now, but when a federal judge appears to agree, that's another matter entirely. And let's not forget the conversion issue. So far SCO's ignored both issues, not even trying to put a positive spin on them. This could get awfully entertaining, if we're lucky (and SCO isn't).
Another crop of stories, many of which read like epitaphs:
- Ars Technica: "Requiem for a legal disaster: a retrospective analysis of SCO v. Novell"
- InfoWorld: "SCO fans? What SCO fans?"
- InfoWorld again: "Novell doesn't want to be the next SCO"
- ITPro: "SCO's estranged relationship with Linux"
- LinuxWorld: "Linux experts look for lessons from SCO suit"
- ComputerWorld Australia: "SCO Group: Mini-Me trying to be Darth Vader"
Paul McDougall is on the warpath for a second day, lashing out at PJ over her dissection of his earlier article. He feels he was treated unfairly, and throws quite the tantrum about it. I couldn't say whether PJ's treatment of him was perfectly fair or not, but I do think it was understandable. McDougall keeps obsessing over PJ's "real" identity, and that's got to set off alarm bells, given the past episodes with MOG and with SCO itself. Just what sort of reaction was he expecting to receive, I wonder?

8/13 SNR

2007-08-13T08:01:00.000-07:00

Ahh, where to begin...

So the bottom fell out of SCO's stock today. Down nearly 72%, closing at a pitiful 44 cents. Lowest close ever. In fact the high for the day was lower than the stock's previous all-time low -- which was back in June 2002, around the time Darl started. And the low was just 35 cents. 35 cents won't even buy you a freakin' postage stamp.

For stock, um, "analysis" from a somewhat unusual corner, here's Slashdot's take on the action.
Sunday night, a terrified SCO issued a press release about the ruling, which later appeared in an official 8K filing. It's quite a marvel of the spin-doctoring arts. They list a bunch of irrelevant copyrights they do own -- or at least ones for which the ownership hasn't been disputed yet. Among those is something called "Gemini 64", which is their code name for the never-released, never-completed operating system they worked on in the infamous Project Monterey, 11 years ago -- and they only claim to own "substantial portions" of it. Yeah, that sounds like a super-valuable chunk of IP there, guys. They go on to say they're "exploring their options" and just might file an appeal, without committing themselves to doing so. It's quite entertaining really.
An InfoWorld piece about SCO's take on the ruling here.
And there's GL coverage of course, exploring the Pythonesque aspects of SCO's statement.

I expect the poor clueless PHBs at SCO are wondering who this Monty Python guy is, and why the "long-haired smellies" keep going on about him all the time.
The local newspaper in Lindon has a new article on the stock tankage, which looks to be a front page story in Tuesday's print edition. This choice tidbit leaped out at me:

Meanwhile, the overall sentiment at the Lindon company was described by one employee as one of "absolute shock," as its executive management and newly appointed public relations company, New York-based Coltrin & Associates, evaluated the situation Monday.
And iTWire asks "Darl McBride, where are you?". And Blakey, and Didio too. (Yes, I know Blakey quit months ago. And someone else already mentioned that in the article's comments.)
CNNMoney's coverage argues that the ruling removed a cloud over the open-source movement. Well, technically the ruling says the cloud never existed in the first place, but as long as they're saying there's no cloud now, hey, that's fine.
Seattle's local newspaper has a blog devoted solely to all things Microsoft, and today's post explores the M$ angle of Friday's ruling, mostly devoted to email comments from PJ. The Beast of Redmond declined to comment for the story.
Lyons has a rather neutral piece on Forbes. He naturally doesn't breathe a word about his earlier role touting SCO's idiotic claims. If you didn't know history, or have access to a search engine, you might think he was against them from day 1.
Not all the fudsters are running for cover, though. Remember Paul McDougall? Last we heard from him, he was chiming in as part of SCO's failed anti-PJ jihad. They even used one of his articles as an exhibit, if I'm not mistaken. So in his latest bloviation, he wants to convince us that Friday's ruling is a disaster for Linux, and we're all doomed, because the Novell ruling doesn't resolve certain issues in the IBM case. That's essentially the same point "Paul Murphy" tried to make earlier, although McDougall is a bit more articulate and vicious about it. Sort of a bush-league Lyons, if you can imagine such a thing. PJ goes off on an extended rant about the McDougall piece here, and I can't blame her.

With Lyons, at least you knew he had an ideological bone to pick. A silly and misguided ideological bone, but at least you knew where he was coming from. McDougall, I don't know what his angle is. Maybe he's just an especially zealous M$ fanboy -- although they usually just sit there smugly repeating that all Microsoft products are the best, and refusing to listen to reason. They tend not to get so malicious and personal about it. So your guess is as good as, or better than, mine.
The schadenfreude-o-rama has spread to some of the more obscure forums. Check out this great post on the SiliconInvestor board responding to Scott Lemon (ex-CTO of SCO, an inconvenient fact he keeps trying to downplay). Meanwhile, the TheLion board has long been a playground for clueless bottom-feeding daytraders and shills, but today Baomike turned the lights on (so to speak) and they all ran back under the fridge, at least for the day. Might be interesting to see how that plays out. I'm not advocating bullying the poor dears, of course. But engaging in a vigorous debate about SCO's fundamentals, is another matter entirely. Ok, so they're just daytrading schmoes, but there are so few actual true believers left, and I got terminally bored with Biff about three years ago.
Actually I'm glad I checked the minor boards, because TheLion has an interesting widget it calls an All-In-One Message Forum, which aggregates posts from IV and Y!, certain blog posts (although not SNR apparently), and the occasional minor-board post as well. And the UI is less offensive than Yahoo's native one, certainly. Interesting...
There's even a new post on the moribund InvestorsHub board, although it's just a retread of the not overly clueful coverage at TheStreet.com.
ComputerWorld has a roundup of posts about Friday's ruling from around blogospace. Naturally they fail to mention this humble blog. Feh. Bastards.
Oh, and the very latest on c.u.s.m: The SCO+Darl Pants Game.

8/12 SNR

2007-08-11T21:52:00.000-07:00

More media coverage from the New York Times, InformationWeek, The Register, VNUnet, and Tech Blorge.
SCO's "expert" witness Marc "Thousand Dollar Watch" Rochkind (or someone claiming to be him) has showed up on GL, offering lame excuses about why he's working for SCO. "Pays well" is probably a genuine reason of his, as is his desire for a career as an expert witness. He also lists "[redacted]" as a reason. Allegedly there's still some sort of super-seekrit evidence he can't tell us about, and we're all supposed to be impressed by that. Didn't work 4 years ago, why does he think it'll work now?
He's not the only SCO shill who's freaking out over the ruling. Here's the latest from "Paul Murphy", in which he asserts the ruling has no bearing on the merits of the IBM case. Still in the denial phase, in other words.

He does make one good point, though, completely by accident. Unless the courts explicitly deal with SCO's claims about IBM putting Unix code into Linux, the accusation continues to have FUD value, and IBM continues to be harmed by it. Whether SCO is permitted to continue making the claim in court, the notion is still rattling around out there in some quarters, and IBM could fairly argue the only way to undo the damage is to get the question resolved once and for all. I don't know whether that'll actually happen or not, since the courts are generally eager to dispose of issues as "moot" whenever possible. To me that's the most important thing to resolve in the whole SCO saga, and I hope IBM will keep trying to get it resolved decisively, not just tossed out over the copyright-ownership matter.
Mr. "Murphy" is a big Solaris fan, so I'm surprised he isn't wringing his hands over the ruling causing trouble for Sun's OpenSolaris initiative, as discussed by SJVN, via Slashdot. Sun paid SCO all that cash and then open-sourced Solaris, so now that the court's decided Novell is the rightful owner, what does that mean for Sun? Are they

Personally I hope Novell shrugs it off. As far as we know, Sun honestly believed SCO had the right to sell what it sold. And do we really need another round of ugly OS litigation? The way the ruling's worded, it sounds as though SCO did have the right to cut a deal with Sun (although I doubt it's the sort of deal envisioned by the APA); they just didn't have the right to keep all the cash for themselves.
There's some discussion around the net on the bit where Kimball says SCO is liable for conversion. In other words, taking money that wasn't rightfully theirs. This could get interesting, as it's been suggested that SCO execs could be personally liable if SCO itself can't cough up enough cash to repay Novell. I'm not a legal expert and don't know for sure, but it certainly sounds promising.
Meanwhile, here's a piece on ABC News sneering at Lyons's "Fake Steve" gig. The piece is funny and entertaining, but it has a bit of a vendetta feel to it. It seems that "Fake Steve" once went off on a rant about the article's author, so now it's payback time. The argument that it's wrong to use a pseudonym on the net is a very MSM, Old Media sort of notion, and one I disagree with for obvious reasons. Other than that, it's worth a look.
While looking for SCO stories, I ran across a curious tale on The Inquirer, about a guy in Denver who had his thumbs surgically modified to better fit his new iPhone. The piece links to the original story at the North Denver News... but The Inq failed to notice the link to another piece explaining that the thumb-whittling article was satire, not news. You've just gotta love the tech media and the painstaking, in-depth research they always do. The tech trade press also spent a couple of years insisting that SCO had a viable case, so what does that tell you?

8/11 SNR

2007-08-11T11:07:00.000-07:00

More media reaction to yesterday's big ruling in SCO v. Novell:

Local reaction to the story at the Salt Lake Tribune and Provo Daily Herald.
More tech media coverage at Wired, HTMLfixIT, Geekzone NZ and DesktopLinux.com
And some business press coverage as well, from UPI and MarketWatch. It's worth paying extra attention to see how the story plays in the financial press, since that's where potential future bagholders get their news. So far it's being portrayed as a clearcut victory for the Linux camp, and a total defeat for SCO. No nuances, no letting a pro-SCO fudster like Enderle get the last word in. So that seems like a positive sign.
Over on Y!, saltydogmn gets a couple of grumpy emails from none other than Andrea McBride, Darl's wife.
The FUD brigade is out in full force already, either ranting about the ruling or trying to minimize the impact of it. MOG is outraged, as you might expect, and is even less coherent than usual. I normally don't encourage people to patronize stories by MOG, but it's a holiday, so y'all are off the hook just this once.
A piece at 24/7 Wall St. titled "The Future of Linux is Still Dark", by one Douglas A. McIntyre. Dark, he claims, because of the continuing M$ patent FUD. There's always something, isn't there? When that gets resolved, next we'll hear that the future of Linux is dark because the sun will eventually go red giant and swallow the earth or something.

The Post You've All Been Waiting For

2007-08-10T16:54:00.000-07:00

Kimball ruled, and SCO is now Officially Hosed. TuxRocks has the ruling here [Warning: 103 page PDF, but worth the wait.]

PJ's already got the story up too. Not totally surprising that she had it before I did, I mean, I'm sitting here at home with a nasty cold right now, medicated to the gills. But I wouldn't miss this for anything.

I can't wait to see what SCO has to say for itself now. That ought to be a real hoot. It's like Esker says: HAR!!!!! HAR!!!!! HAR!!!!

Updated:

Al P. has additional sources for the ruling docs here. So load-balance, people. Thanks.
And the inevitable Slashdot story. Although sometimes I suspect the average Slashdot reader hadn't even been born yet when this litigation circus began.
Other stories so far from PC World, the WSJ, Computerworld, HardOCP, TechSpot, BetaNews, InfoWorld, and O'ReillyNet. That's just so far, and the stories tend to have a breathless just-off-the-wire flavor. It's fun to see everyone in such a rush, after all these years.
The GL story's on Digg here.
A certain Mr. Sizz was unable to restrain himself over on c.u.s.m. No replies from the denizens so far.

8/9 SNR

2007-08-01T12:44:00.000-07:00

I have all kinds of good excuses about why I haven't posted in a few days, even though there's been a mini-flurry of SCO news of fair-to-middlin' importance. I could take some time out and bore you with the excuses, but I won't.

So I admit I'd completely forgotten about SCO Tec Forum 2007, which was the reason behind all those recent, fluffy, content-free press releases we've been seeing. I haven't seen any news reports about how the show was, and there's nothing in blogospace, and not even anything on comp.unix.sco.misc. But maybe it was a great conference, and the attendees just don't use the Interwebs or something. It does amuse me that SCO Tec Forum happened in the same city, at the same time, but not the same hotel, as DefCon 14. Maybe the DefCon organizers figured the hardcore "black hat" guys would all be at the SCO event and would leave everybody else alone that way. I dunno.
I haven't covered all the new SCO press releases yet. Here's the one with their Team 1 Systems partnership on Me Inc. Seems SCO talked Team 1 (a longtime partner of theirs) into going into a whole new business segment they know nothing about. Team 1 must've figured they've gone this far with SCO, so why not take it to the next level (down)? What's the point of walking only half the plank?
And the most recent one, on SCO's foray into Canadian politics, believe it or not.
Meanwhile, the preliminary maneuvering continues in SCO v. Novell. The pretrial disclosure stuff happened as scheduled, but now there are Rule 26(a)(3) objections to fight over. More delay? Don't bet against it.
Oh, and Daniel Lyons is the Fake Steve Jobs, I suppose because shilling for SCO just doesn't pay like it used to. I'm pretty sure he's visited SNR at least once, and I suppose I ought to feel honored, now that he's a famous Interweb celebrity and all that. But he's still a sleazebag. I'll grant that he occasionally has a way with words, in a vicious, juvenile, one-dimensional sort of way. That's just his nature. It's pretty much all he does. Likewise, scorpions are quite good at stinging people, because it's instinctive, it's what they do, and it's what they've always done. When they do, you don't call them clever and praise the quality of their work.

8/1 SNR

2007-07-26T15:26:00.001-07:00

Ok, lemme see if I can get caught up on recent SCO event(s) here. Shouldn't be too hard, I expect.

As I'm sure you've heard already, there's a new stipulated pretrial schedule in the IBM case. It doesn't explicitly say so, but it appears to push the first possible trial date out into 2008. Who ever expected this stupid case could drag on so long? Not I, and I like to think of myself as a fairly cynical person.

At least it means we should start seeing new documents in the case around October or so. Unless things get delayed further.
New press release out today. They've found customer #2 for that Mobile Order app they sorta-announced through a previous press release. This time it's an Italian food distributor that claims to be America's leading olive importer. The Sopranos is off the air, so making knee-jerk mafia jokes every time one sees an Italian name is back to being un-PC again. But when someone does business with SCO, even indirectly... Well, you just have to wonder, a little. Or at least I do.
There was another press release a couple of days ago. Seems now they're trying to sneak onboard the iPhone bandwagon. Seriously.

Since there is as yet no such thing as a third-party app on an iPhone, this has to be something other than what they're implying it is. Most likely what's going on is that Genisys has slapped a web UI on top of their crufty old green-screen vertical market apps, and it just so happens that this web UI works OK in the iPhone's version of Safari.

What really gets me is that the iPhone runs OS X, which is a BSD+Mach variant under the hood. Darl & Co. used to occasionally threaten to go after BSD users, which I think was a veiled (and failed) attempt to extract SCOSource money from Apple. Unless... the effort didn't fail, and the reason iPhones are so expensive is that you do get a SCOSource license when you buy one. That's a scary thought. Can't be true though; we'd have seen a SCO press release about it if it was, NDA or no NDA.
I think I know why we've seen a flood (relatively speaking) of PR coming out of SCO lately. They have to get 'em out there while there's still a media organ that takes them seriously. And they'd better hurry, because the Weekly World News is going under! I gather that Elvis, Bat Boy, and the aliens all finally got fed up with the unwanted attention and decided to play a little hardball.
Here's a ">positive take on the Genisys PR, from someone who's all starry-eyed about the iPhone, and knows squat about SCO.
Here's a funny anti-iPhone rant.
And here's a more serious negative review of the iPhone, from someone who used one for a month.
SCO gets a quick mention over at InfoWorld. Of course it's an ancient-history mention, a funny nightmare story involving the corporate Xenix server and a clueless Unix n00b.
Another MS-backed standardization effort, this time for the HD Photo file format they introduced in Vista. No word about patent encumbrances, licensing issues, whether you can use the format on an OS besides Vista, etc., since when MS uses the word "standard" it often means they've found a few partners to go along with their latest monopoly.

One of the people quoted is the standards body rep from Hasselblad. I'm not an expert on $30,000 cameras, but something tells me that one typically shoots in RAW format with one of these bad boys, and a new compressed file format isn't going to attract a lot of interest. Even if MS insists it's the greatest thing since Windows ME. Besides, anyone who will spend that much on a camera probably hooks it up to a shiny new 8-core Mac Pro anyway.
Linux kernel code may not be poetry, exactly, but sometimes the comments are.

At OSCON

2007-07-25T16:03:00.000-07:00

I've been at OSCON 2007 the last couple of days, so I haven't put together the usual long list of news items. My full(ish) OSCON report is over on that other blog, if you're interested. It's not really the most sober, comprehensive, or journalistic piece you'll read about the event, but hey. Nobody paid me to write it, and you aren't paying to read it. If you just want to look at the pictures, they're on Flickr here.

7/24 SNR

2007-07-24T18:52:00.000-07:00

SCO loses yet another customer, understandably. Quote:

By 2001, however, Spruce was ready for a change. Its software had been rewritten and updated as much as possible. The software’s “bones were old,” says Robert Fitzpatrick, President, Spruce Computer Systems, and updating the software again would not have been its best long-term solution. Given the relative paucity of SCO UNIX software, Spruce had to create much of the ancillary functionality for its solution itself, rather than acquiring plug-and-play applications that could complement the core functionality provided by Spruce. Perhaps because customers were also feeling the “old bones” of their SCO UNIX environments, they’d long been migrating those environments—to the Microsoft® Windows® operating system.

Seems that even .NET was better, and more open, than sticking with SCO. Ouch! Oh, and they migrated with the help of DTR Business Systems, a company that's allegedly still a SCO Partner. With friends like these...

I'd never be able to keep track of these things without you Astute Readers out there. Thanks again^6. You know who you are.
SCO has a new partner in India, some outfit called "iBilt". That poor Rustaghi chump still seems to think he works for a real company, not just a publicly traded lawsuit. I almost feel for the guy, in a way. SCO must've realized that overseas bagholders are even cheaper than domestic ones.

As a former British colony, it seems India's PHBs are not immune to the siren song of the golf course, a.k.a., the Scottish Disease. I realize that sounds ethnically insensitive, but I don't know how to explain this deal any other way. At least in this country it would've involved golf. And illegal Cuban cigars. And possibly a lost weekend in Vegas, if the terms were especially unfavorable. The details may vary by time and culture, but every PHB has his price, I'm afraid.

More at EFYTimes.
The photo is of a tour bus I ran across along trendy E. Burnside St. here in Portland. Because I'm not a hip-n-trendy twentysomething anymore, I've never heard of the band that sold its soul to the Beast of Redmond. You guys sold out to The Man. I hope you're happy. I hope every single pathetic Zune buyer out there (yes, both of them) buys a song of yours, tries to "squirt" it to their buddies, and runs afoul of the dire DRM consequences. Serves 'em right, the bastards.
From c.u.s.m, a thread about hidden files in / on OSR 5.0.7. Hidden man pages in the root directory?! Feh!!!
Via /.: Another court victory for GPLv2 in Germany.
The president of Acer is disappointed with Vista, at least if the third-hand translations are accurate.
A bit about the HP-Ubuntu tie-up. I'm afraid I've failed y'all here; I'll be at OSCON the next couple of days, and reporting on it over at that other blog, but I somehow forgot to register for Ubuntu Live. If that's conclusive evidence I'm a real person and not a shadowy cabal of IBM lawyers, so be it.
From comp.unix.xenix.sco, a guy who needs help with his Xenix 2.3.4 system. I'm usually inclined to mock people who use old SCO OSes, but he uses the magic word "retro-computing", so I have to sympathize. I'm afraid to tell the guy he probably already owes Darl a few billion SCOSource dollars for daring to encroach upon the realm of SCO IP, but if you happen to know anything about Xenix, give a brother a hand, OK?

Thx. Mgmt.

7/23 SNR

2007-07-19T09:53:00.000-07:00

Still nothing from the courts. Zero. Zilch. Nada. But SCO's stock has been climbing, in the absence of any news whatsoever. The stock manipulation theory is always a popular one, and I'm often inclined to believe it myself. But it's also reasonable to imagine SCO's attracting real, live speculators, and the recent price jumps weren't just engineered into existence. If that's true, the obvious question is "Why now?". I can think of a few reasons. First, IBM reported some great numbers last week, and people who haven't been paying attention might see a cash-rich IBM as a positive for SCO (bigger settlement/winnings, etc.). Some people really might think that, the poor saps. We're probably also seeing people effectively betting on the Novell case, buying tickets for the "Linux lottery" Darl & friends used to go on about. Sure, the odds are terrible, but apparently some clown out there thinks the ticket price is about right. There's one born every minute, you know, and if there's one thing the SCO saga has no shortage of, it's minutes.
Matt Asay interviews Iain Gray, Red Hat's VP of Global Support Services at Red Hat. It's mentioned in passing that Mr. Gray once worked at SCO, or "SCO Group (back when it was a Unix company, not a law firm)" as the article puts it. This is one of the biggest mentions of SCO in the media over the last week, believe it or not.
Here's another mention in passing, this time in a comment on Slashdot. When I'm linking to individual comments on Slashdot, you know it's a slow news week. The article's about dark energy and extra dimensions, actually, so the mention of SCO is just a cheap shot, not a real cameo appearance. And it's really not that clever of a cheap shot, even. But still, it's a mention of SCO, paired with M$ this time.
Boies's son David III loses a big case.
>Lookee here, another BS&F guy has written a book.
InformationWeek seems to have widespread non-grokkage of GPLv3, not just the DeJean guy we've heard about already. C'mon, guys, it's not that complicated. Sheesh. It's almost as if you didn't want to understand it. But surely that can't be the case, can it?
A piece on the latest, shiniest new Blackberry. No mention of any bundled Me Inc. apps. Ok, that was a cheap shot, and not a very clever one, but I'm trying to stay on topic, and it isn't easy in the absence of news. And seriously, Me Inc. doesn't have a future unless SCO can trick a mobile carrier or two into bundling it. As I've said before, it's pretty rare for mobile phone users to install third party apps after getting a phone, so unless you can get your app preinstalled, you aren't going to be making any money. I don't know exactly how these deals pencil out, but my guess is that the mobile app vendor typically pays the carrier in order to get preinstalled, not the other way around, and SCO just doesn't have that kind of money.
While we're on dubious advances in telephony, here are two articles on Ooma, the "peer to peer" phone gadget announced last week. The thing seems oddly archaic, a throwback to the late dot-com era when "P2P" was a hot content-free buzzword.

It's a heck of a lot of money to pay, just to maybe avoid some long distance phone charges now and then, if you're lucky. I await the inevitable article where someone figures out how to wipe the thing, put Linux on it, and use it as a firewall or a DNS appliance or something menial like that, purely for the "because it's there" points.
Meanwhile, here's Gizmodo on ultra-tiny Linux boxen. I think I've covered some of these individually before, but hey. It's a slow news week, and I need material.
Cringely: "Is Vista an Orphan?"
We've gotten our hopes up before, but maybe this time patent reform could finally happen Although I ought to point out that Rep. Howard Berman, the bill's sponsor, is a big friend of the RIAA & MPAA in the copyright arena. So we oughtn't get our hopes up too high just yet.
Speaking of the RIAA, they've got some attorney's fees to pay. It's a drop in the bucket so far as they're concerned, but it seems like a step in the right direction. Too many of these, though, and they'll just raise CD prices a bit more to compensate, and then complain when sales decline a bit further, and sue even more people. Always a cynic, I am.
More news from last week: Xandros bought Scalix, a Linux-based competitor to M$ Exchange. Combine this with the recent M$-Xandros deal, and it's serious tin foil hat time.
Apropos of nothing, here are Utah's 2007 regulations on amphibians & reptiles. 'P' means "Prohibited", "C" is "Controlled" and "N" is "Noncontrolled", if you're wondering. The notorious, toxic (and allegedly hallucinogenic) Cane Toad is prohibited statewide, in case anyone's wondering.

7/17 SNR

2007-07-16T13:13:00.001-07:00

We'll get to the photo in a moment, but first we have some actual court-related news for once. Three new docs in the IBM case to be precise. IBM-1072 is IBM asking for a 30-ish day extension of of those alleged "pretrial deadlines" they agreed on back in May. IBM-1073 is SCO opposing the motion, and IBM-1074 is Kimball quickly granting IBM's motion.

The funny part about this episode, besides the fact that it's another minor defeat for SCO, is that IBM's proposed schedule conflicts with the Novell trial. They say they'll be happy to stipulate a further extension if needed, it's just that SCO hasn't told them when they expect the Novell trial might be over. SCO naturally couldn't take IBM's "yes" for an answer, and objected to the motion, while insisting they too would be delighted to stipulate to a further extension. They didn't make a concrete counterproposal about the dates though. So Kimball went ahead and granted IBM's motion, and unless there's a further stipulation SCO will soon be fighting on two fronts at once.
It looks like Biff finally got himself banned from the Y! SCOX board. The offending post has been deleted, but it's been saved for posterity here in all its vileness and malice. The guy had no redeeming qualities at all. Good riddance.

...or is he really gone? This post by a brand-new nym has a certain bifflike style to it. Although it also might be a second-rate Biff impostor, and if so, how would we be able to tell?
Oh, and about the photo: It's a page from a peculiar little book called "A Day With Biff". It looks like a children's book about the adventures of a small black dog named Biff, but in fact it's meant as a showcase for clip art by a pair of Bay Area graphic designers. There's a Mac-formatted floppy in the back full of EPS versions of various illustrations in the book, along with a restrictive EULA, appropriately enough. So if you want to see any of the illustrations for yourself, you'll need to check your local library / used book shop, or Amazon if neither of them have it. In case you're really that interested, I mean.
Panglozz on an OOXML standards "committee" being packed with M$ pawns.
A new interview with PJ, in which she insists she isn't a superhero. Which, of course, is exactly what they all say when asked about it directly. C'mon, everybody knows that.
I forgot to post this last time, and GL's already covered it now, but here's that clueless anti-GPL fud piece by that David DeJean guy. If you read it when it first came out, you might want to take another look. He's given the pig's lipstick a touch up, backpedalling about what he said about SCO earlier, while leaving his GPL 2 vs. 3 drivel intact. The comments section is rather... entertaining, as you might expect.

I swear, I think the less scrupulous parts of the trade press (i.e. all of them) have figured out that nothing drives page views like an ignorant doofus columnist spouting off about issues he doesn't have a clue about. Dvorak perfected that way back in the dead-tree days, and it works even better on the interwebs. Sure, what DeJean generated was a tidal wave of geeks showing up to taunt the guy, but that still meant a big pile of banner ad revenue.

7/13 SNR

2007-07-10T17:15:00.000-07:00

There's a pretrial schedule for the Novell case now, so events should finally start ramping up in the near future. If the schedule is to be believed, at any rate. There's a bit more about the schedule in a recent GL article.
We got a new SCO press release yesterday. It looks like another boring Me Inc. "customer win" tale, but hidden cleverly within it we learn about a brand new Me Inc. app SCO hasn't mentioned before, something called "Mobile Order". (SCO's marketing guy(s) must've worked overtime on that name.) The fine print indicates "Mobile Order" is a custom-built app requiring

Atlas Paper makes paper bags, btw. Insert clever "bagholder" joke here.
Enderle gets quoted in an article about rising concert ticket prices. Wearing his ill-fitting music industry guru hat, bemoans how kids these days aren't loyal to favorite bands anymore, not like it was back in his day when everyone picked a band and followed it to the bitter end. As a grumpy ol' boomer, he might be pleased to know that not one but two competing versions of Jefferson Airplane/Starship are still touring and putting out new material. Wikipedia says one of them was on the Today show a couple of weeks ago. I suppose that's a step up from doing the county fair circuit, which is where Night Ranger is these days, touring in support of their latest (2007) album. They'll be at the Umatilla County Fair out in Hermiston OR (pop. 15,030) on August 10th. Tickets may still be available.

Remember, kids, be very, verrrrry careful when you pick a favorite band, because then you're stuck with 'em forever, at least if Enderle has any say in it.
The trademark troll Leo Stoller gets a smackdown, delivered with wit and style. Meanwhile we're still waiting for any word from Utah. Maybe Kimball's trying to deliver something like the Stoller ruling and came down with a bad case of writer's block or something. It makes as much sense as all the other theories do.
Sony sues its own rootkit vendor. I've seen this movie before. The plan goes awry, and then the perps turn on each other. Sort of like Reservoir Dogs.

7/10 SNR

2007-07-05T18:55:00.000-07:00

Ok, it's been a week. So sue me. It's not like the judges ruled on anything, or any new filings showed up on Edgar. Heck, I even checked the USPTO site this morning to see if either SCO or Ralphie's CP80/ThinkAtomic cabal have anything new over there. No dice.

ServerWatch on the "Ghosts of Xenix Past", about M$ code that lived on inside SCO OSes long after Xenix was put out to pasture. I actually remember reading about this years ago, but people are acting like it's a big new revelation. No, it isn't new, and no, I don't think it explains the murky M$-(Old)SCO relationship. M$ wanted to impede Linux, and needed a proxy to do it. NewSCO needed money, and M$ offered them some. I don't think it's any more complex than that.
SCO gets a rare mention as a possible threat to open source, a spin we rarely see anymore. This pops up in a consultant report that babbles on about technology in local government in the UK. The piece mentions the Birmingham library situation as a Linux "win", not mentioning how they bungled it. So someone's obviously not on the ball here. Apparently they're trying to be successful, highly compensated global consultants without reading SNR regularly. Beats me why they think that'll work out ok. With the posting traffic here of late it's not like it'd be that hard to keep up or anything. Oh, well....
If you check Google News for "SCO", you'll occasionally see old stories pop up as if they were new. This often seems to happen if someone's just done a site redesign, for whatever reason. In any case, today's example was this 2005 NetworkWorld story, which discusses the rapid decline of SCO. And that was two years ago, and they're still declining. Asymptotically, it seems.
If Darl's starting to think this may be a good time to change careers, I've got just the thing for him, and he won't even need to relocate. Seems that Lindon, UT needs a new mayor, as the current guy is stepping down and leaving the country. He'd better hurry, though; the deadline is tomorrow, July 11th. But if he's learned anything at SCO, it's the importance of always filing papers at the absolute last moment. Or even later than that, if at all possible.
While I'm still in the mood to give useful advice to SCO folk, which is a rare thing, I'd like to offer them some helpful hardware hints. In the last few years they've gone on about cutting preinstall deals with white-box vendors nobody's ever heard of. Hello!? Nobody's ever heard of those guys because their puny white boxes are boring. If you want to move any product, you guys need to make like Apple and come up with hardware that reflects the OS within. And with a product like OpenServer, the "steampunk" look would be quite appropriate. The Steampunk Workshop offers several promising -- and functional -- designs, including a brass and marble flat panel monitor, and a keyboard with manual typewriter keys, among other delights. And check out this case mod gallery on Flickr, for a machine the creator dubs the "Telecalculograph". Look at it. It practically demands a SCO operating system. This is your big chance, guys. Trust me on this.
A few local bloggers here in Portland posting about the iPhone: Jeff the Great (no, not that Jeff), ~stevenf, i, viddy, and the local paper's Silicon Forest blog
It's almost old news now, but here's Slashdot on the MPAA spyware scandal.
I went out and bought a Roomba over the weekend, and -- I say this at the risk of losing nerd points -- so far it remains unmodded. Right now we're still in the phase of watching it scoot around the rug, going "awwwww, it's so cuuuuuute!". Surprisingly there's only one real hit on the entire net for "LOLROOMBA" right now, and it just comes up as "Service Unavailable" at the moment.
A bit of a setback for Steorn, the very latest perpetual motion machine that, uh, doesn't work. Actually can't work would be a better way to put it. They aren't based in Utah (surprisingly), but they do have an entertaining history of making ridiculous and unsubstantiated claims, and they've stuck around for far longer than anyone reasonably imagined they might. Sound familiar?

If you get a kick out of this sort of thing, or even if you don't, you might enjoy The Museum of Unworkable Devices. Steorn isn't there yet, but it's only a matter of time.

7/3 SNR

2007-07-03T14:59:00.000-07:00

Still nothin' from the Utah Courts, of course. It's at the point where I'm getting concerned that the PSJ backlog will hold up the Novell trial date. September 17th is just about 10 weeks away, and both sides are going to want some prep time for the case once PSJ decisions are handed down, whenever that ends up being.

I suppose we could still see filings today, but I wouldn't bet on it.

In the meantime:

Just one recent mention of SCO to report this time around. SCO makes yet another cameo as the canonical bunch of litigious bastards, in a recent Slashdot story about the RIAA.
It's a shame SCO weaseled its way off delisting watch, but here's a small bit of consolation. The French company SCOR, which traded under the ticker symbol "SCO" (leading to much confusion over the years) is undergoing an eye-popping 10x reverse split, while also changing to the ticker symbol "SCR". Today's the day the old "SCO" shares were officially delisted from the Paris stock exchange. It's fun to imagine that their low stock price and ticker symbol change are due to confusion with "our" SCO, but that's probably giving Darl & Co. far too much credit.
Although I'm sure Boies is spending most of his waking hours right now feverishly prepping for the Novell trial of the century (ok, maybe the centicentury, or the nanocentury at the very least), he's still managing to find a few spare moments to party with Kennedys and hedge fund billionaires. It sounds like nobody put an arm through a Picasso this time around, so that's something, I guess.
EETimes has a detailed piece about the innards of an iPhone. I just played with an iPhone today, down at my friendly neighborhood Apple store. They're lucky they designed the things to be drool-proof. I used to think my Blackberry was a cool gadget, and all of a sudden it just seems impossibly old and clunky. I can only imagine what those poor saps with Windows Mobile phones must think.
Naturally people are already tinkering with the thing. Some early results here and here.

When I was playing with that iPhone, I pointed the browser right here at SNR to see how it looked. It looked fine, if a bit on the small side. It identifies itself as Mac OS X, with the browser string Safari 2.0 Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3. The screen resolution is reported as 320 x 396, 32-bit color. FWIW.
And the weird open source metaphor of the day, which doesn't concern computers at all. No, it's about junk food and obesity:

The FDA doesn't have to give you permission to not enter the drive-through. The U.S. Patent Office doesn't have to put its seal on your decision not to supersize. It's here, it's free, it's open-source. It's dietary Linux. It doesn't discriminate by race, gender, religion, or income.

And it couldn't be simpler:

All you have to do is eat something besides junk food.

Dietary Linux, eh? Which reminds me, McDonalds is still a SCO customer, right? So every time you avoid buying a Happy Meal, you owe Ronald McDonald another $699, I guess. And come to think of it, can it really be a coincidence that the names "Ronald McDonald" and "Darl McBride" are so similar? They even possess the same impeccable fashion sense. And as far as credibility in the tech industry goes, it's a dead heat between the two guys. It can't be pure coincidence. It just can't, I tell you.

6/28 SNR

2007-06-26T09:52:00.000-07:00

The SCO news drought continues, although tomorrow promises to be a big day in Somewhat Related News.

First, the finalized GPL v3 will be unveiled tomorrow. GL has a story about the big event. In it, PJ mentions she was part of the GPL v3 process, which I'm not sure I was aware of before. Here's an InternetNews piece about the new license. The author says he was convinced there'd be no new GPL version until the SCO cases were resolved, due to SCO's claim the GPL was unconstitutional.
Oh, and the iPhone comes out tomorrow, too. Here's David Pogue's review, if you haven't seen it already. (Interesting side note: The review was for the New York Times, one of those registration-required news sites. But most of the NYT's interesting articles also appear on the International Herald Tribune's site, which is a wholly-owned NYT subsidiary these days, and the IHT's site doesn't ask you to register. Something to file for future reference, or whatever.)
Seems people are already lining up to buy an iPhone. Which is more than a little silly, of course. But refresh my memory, does anyone remember people lining up to get a copy of Vista? Or a Zune? Or any SCO product in all of history?
Regarding SCO's gigantic Madhya Pradesh announcement a few days ago, MSN Money asserts that it caused the latest wobble in SCO's stock. You could blame that on the obvious M$ connection, but TheStreet drew the same conclusion. This is a great example of the eternal post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. The stock's been rattling around like this, back and forth, ever since the still-unexplained pump back over a dollar, but now there's news of a sort, so suddenly they play connect the dots. They probably have unpaid interns writing these things or something. At least you'd hope nobody got paid to write that silliness.
Over on IV, hashkekan is busy researching the Madhya Pradesh news. The story so far: [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4].
During the talk around the new announcement, SCO's long-promised DT4 Daytimer app has come up repeatedly. BritTim has a good roundup of SCO's DT4 PR here. Funny how that expected ship date just gets later and later all the time...
Also on IV, Al P. points us at a great ruling in an unrelated case, in which the parties were involved in endless discovery disputes (sound familiar?) The judge finally got sick of it all and ripped them new ones (sound unfamiliar?)
The new Top500 supercomputing list is out, and IBM dominates the list again. Many of the top machines are Linux clusters, so it's kind of fun to read down the list and tally up all the SCOSource revenue SCO isn't getting.
Elsewhere in BS&F Land, here's the latest on the AIG / Greenberg case (they're countersuing now), and the Michael Moore / Cuba situation (they're making loud noises trying to ward off the Feds).

They're also involved in the Amaranth Advisors fiasco, although oddly not on behalf of the bad guys for once. And a BS&F guy speaks up about backdated stock options although it looks like he's just speaking in a pundit capacity, not on behalf of a client, at least not yet.

Less interestingly, they're involved in a private equity deal to buy Water Pik.
And here's the latest reorg at Baystar / LRG, for whatever it's worth.
Here's a piece about the Feds' recent takedown of a few big bot herders. I mention this because the guy from UnSpam is quoted briefly. FWIW.
Now here's a bit of fun irony. Brent Hatch recently accepted an award from the Utah branch of the American Heart Association. Ok, technically he accepted on behalf of his parents, Senator & Mrs. Hatch. Still, seeing his name and the word "heart" in the same sentence is good for a brief snicker or two.
I don't remember where I saw the link to this first (the boards, probably), and it's not exactly on-topic here, but check out this embroidered plush Nintendo NES. Damn, I wish I had that kind of free time...
In a new nightmare for SCO and M$, researchers have discovered fossils of a huge prehistoric penguin. I've said this before elsewhere, but I think "Icadyptes" would be a great name for a new distro. Not that the world needs yet another new distro, but if there has to be one more, this would be a good name for it.

6/25 SNR

2007-06-25T07:42:00.000-07:00

As I suspected, nothing major happened in my absence. So at least it'll be fairly simple to get caught up, I suppose.

Just today, SCO announced what on the surface looks like a huge Me Inc. deal with the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. There's always less than meets the eye with SCO PR, and a few paragraphs into the piece you finally see the key phrase "pilot project".
Another of those rare beasts, PR that mentions SCO. Discusses a healthcare company choosing Ericom's web-based terminal emulation software. I suppose this is what you do when you rely on legacy green-screen apps on your SCO box. You can be pretty sure these apps won't ever be updated with a modern UI (if the vendors even still exist), and you almost certainly don't have the source to do the job yourself, either.
Mandriva isn't joining the M$ patent parade. This may have something to do with being based outside the US with our goofy patent laws.
I saw the headline "U.S. Public Wi-Fi Networks Suffer Political, Technical Setbacks" and figured it might at least mention the CP80 jihad, but no.
Linux PCs from Venezuela? It's true. Whatever you think about Mr. Chavez (a topic which would be OT here anyway), this looks like an interesting initiative.
Linux in space? Also true, in 2009. Here's NASA's site about the Space Technology 8 mission, if you're interested.

BRB

2007-06-20T00:39:00.000-07:00

I'll be out of Series Of Tubes range for a few days, taking a mini-vacation from all and sundry. I'm very much aware that SCO is an evil that does not sleep, but it's been a while since anything really momentous has happened on the SCO front. Odds are things will be exactly as they are now when I get back. And if not, hey, that's great (probably). Last time I was out of town, I said something to the effect that my inability to cover SCO would somehow make the company implode. Well, no such luck, so I'm not going to make a similar prediction this time. So: Same bad time, same bad station, Friday, or Saturday at the latest, unless it ends up being Sunday. So here's one vote for holding the SCOpocalypse no earlier than next Monday, but as soon as possible after that.

Until I get back, I've got a couple of pics of yesterday's mini-roadtrip here, in the unlikely event that you're interested.

6/17 SNR

2007-06-13T15:04:00.000-07:00

So here's what's happened in the last few days in the ongoing SCOap opera. What didn't happen, once again, is a ruling on any of the pending PSJ's in the Novell & IBM cases. Non-rulings

The latest 10-Q is out. At one point SCO asserts they have enough cash on hand to stay in business through Halloween. I wouldn't necessarily bet on them going out of business the next day, but it would be appropriate, somehow.
it's official, SCO's on the Russell Microcap deletions list. I've stopped trying to predict how SCO stock responds to news, since it just doesn't follow a logical pattern of any kind. Which is fine with me really; I don't have any money riding on it, and it's more of a fun spectator sport this way.
SCO and BS&F have at least temporarily abandoned their get-PJ strategy for now , since the deposition deadline passed with no deposition taken. I don't think the matter's really over, given Darl's unhealthy obsession with PJ, and SCO's, um, relaxed attitude towards other court-imposed deadlines.
However that turns out in the end, the fact they tried in the first place will be remembered for a long time. In the last post I mentioned the new book praising internet journalism, written by a guy at BS&F. I haven't read the book, but I gather it argues that it's fabulous when people report on current events on the net. Well, unless they criticize one of your clients, in which case they must be silenced by any means necessary. That struck me as a tad hypocritical, and I'm not alone, if the book's Amazon reviews are any indication.

They can praise the first amendment all they want, but talk is cheap, even at ~~$26.00~~ $17.16. Have grandmas stopped telling kids that actions speak louder than words, or what?
On GL, the Novell hearing transcripts from a couple weeks ago.
Linspire jumped on the M$ patent bandwagon. Looks like all the also-ran commercial distros are signing up, probably hoping to achieve what they couldn't in the marketplace.
CP80 editing its own Wikipedia article. It's surprising what people think they can get away with sometimes.
SCO's one of several firms involved in a weird trademark lawsuit by one Wayne Grey. Sk43999 has more on Mr. Grey's trademark shenanigans here. I wouldn't go so far as to actually root for SCO in this case, but it's kind of funny to see them getting a taste of their own medicine for once.

It's a curious thing about the tech industry. You often see the industry described as a "food chain", and I'm sure I've used that metaphor here on occasion. But it's an unusual food chain in that it has no apparent lowest rung. As soon as you think you've found the bottom, another rung soon appears, even further down in the murk and slime.
Meanwhile, Nintendo's attracted a patent troll.
Trademarks aren't always a bad thing. Sometimes trademark law can be a great tool to keep shoddy or unsafe counterfeit goods off the market. Here's a current case where a number of dollar stores in the Eastern US were found to be selling fake Colgate toothpaste from China. Turns out the stuff contains diethylene glycol, a component in antifreeze. Yow.
Speaking of China, the 10-Q had a bit about SCO's mysterious Chinese subsidiary.
Jonathan Schwartz's open letter to Linus. FWIW.
Microsoft's latest idea: beating spammers... with kittens! Ok, sure, it's not an original idea, but that's M$ for ya. Still, kittens!

6/12 SNR

2007-06-08T15:35:00.000-07:00

The recent bubble in SCO's stock means they're off delisting watch. For all the good that's going to do 'em. Coverage at InternetNews, Earthtimes, TechRockies & RTTNews
SCO's still trying the ol' sandbag trick in the Novell case, and Novell's fighting back. You might just consider this gross misconduct born of desperation, but SCO signaled from the very beginning that they were going to try to withhold evidence. Not real smart to cue people in advance that you're going to try a stunt like this.

The fundamental problem here is that there are no serious penalties for gaming the system, nothing sufficient to deter this kind of behavior. If your courts are full of people who are incapable of feeling embarrassed over their own behavior, your only alternative is strict sanctions, rigorously enforced. By rule, and by tradition, the courts just don't do that in this country. At least not yet.
A mildly belated piece on SCO's Q2 numbers from IT Jungle
A piece on the USDOJ siding with M$ in its current fight with Google.
Another ugly example of telco astroturfing.
A note of skepticism about the recently announced "WiTricity" thing.
A review of Parallels 3.0 on OS X, in case you're interested.
A controversy over the patenting of "synthetic life". The patent angle actually worries me more than the "synthetic life" thing. Does that make me a geek?
Another piece on the Julie Amero circus, blaming the whole episode on Windows.
Slashdot on patenting security patches for other companies' products. a good way to win very few friends indeed in the IT industry.

It's getting harder every day to pick out a single poster child for patent reform. there's just so many volunteers.
A new controversy over whether Vista really supports "Turbo Memory" or not. Sony says it doesn't, which is why they aren't shipping
A sort of IP issue from space, regarding the use of raw Cassini images of Saturn by "amateurs". A whole community's grown up around looking at raw NASA images as they come in, speculating about them, and sometimes doing a bit of homegrown image processing. Mission scientists are used to having dibs on raw data, and aren't too keen on getting scooped by outsiders, so there's a bit of tension going on right now.
Slashdot on the recent RIAA raid here in Oregon. The local TV news coverage showed a number of people going around in gear that looked just like regular SWAT team gear, but the lettering on the back said "RIAA" instead of "FBI" or "DEA". It's like they fancy themselves an arm of the government now. Or more to the point, they fancy that the government is one of their arms now.

6/8 SNR

2007-06-06T10:49:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the lack of posts lately. I've been a bit busy this week. Fortunately(?) nothing truly major has happened lately, so I can still at least try to get caught up. Here's what we've seen over the last couple of days:

Coverage of SCO's numbers, mostly quick blurbs all to the effect that "Q2 loss narrows".
CBR Online
Forbes
SmallCapInvestor.com
TradingMarkets.com
RTTNews
Another take on the numbers: "SCOSource dries up". Which is true, there was zero SCOSource revenue in Q2. But that was already a tiny number even before now.
Stories about SCO's dreams of beeeeelions, from InternetNews & ITNews Australia. Darl's comments about the money owed to SCO being a "ridiculously big number" are getting a lot of play. The guy's remarkably quotable, in an "open mouth, insert additional foot" sort of way.
Kieran O'Shaughnessy, SCO's man in Australia, has jumped ship, going to Sage Software. Oh, how we'll miss his colorful antipodean metaphors. I still don't understand that bit about "we have broken our duck".

He's also the guy who once said Linux didn't exist. If he still thinks that, he's going to be in for a shock at his new employer. Yep, at least some of their products run on Linux.
GL has eyewitness reports from Monday's SCO v. Novell hearings.
Here's a bit about the M$ vs. TestDriven.NET ugliness. It tells you a lot about M$ that their default reaction is to start threatening people, even when the potential "danger" to its revenue stream is absolutely miniscule. Even if there was more money to be made embracing innovation than fighting it, they just won't do it.
SJVN & GL comment on the "mixed source" announcement I covered recently.
i've read over the announcement a couple of times and this is a case where I don't think PJ gets it right. I don't like the phrase "mixed source", and this isn't the first time Novell's used it. but at least in this case it looks like all they really mean by it is closed source apps running on Linux, which is very much allowable under the GPL. Some PHB must've taken a fancy to the term "mixed source", not realizing how inflammatory it sounds to the Linux world.
Seems that Scott Gant of bs&f has a new book out, "We are All Journalists Now: The Transformation of the Press and Reshaping of the Law in the Internet Age". I wonder if he mentions Groklaw? I wonder, furthermore, if he mentions BS&F trying to get a gag order on Groklaw?

So are we all journalists, really? Am I? It's a tough call. I like the legal protections traditionally afforded to print journalists. It's far from a settled matter whether such protections are available to mere unpaid bloggers. On the other hand, being a journalist is the next closest thing to being unpaid, you spend much of your time in grubby little bars drowning your sorrows with other journalists, and the odds of acquiring superpowers are far lower than Hollywood summer movies might lead you to believe. It would be a mixed blessing, at best.
A judge has ordered a retrial for Julie Amero. She, as you might recall, is the teacher recently convicted of internet porn charges widely considered to be bogus. Apparently the prosecutor & jury didn't know much about the interwebs, and the scourge of pop-up ads. Or at least they were willing to convict someone else of it
Someone's done a cute webcomic about the rumored Vista SP1. Enter the Microtrix!
IHT: "U.S. cellphone users chafing at carriers". People are getting sick and tired of vendor lock-in with mobile phone handsets, and I think understandably so. From the article:

Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor, compares today's wireless world to the U.S. landline industry of the 1950s, when consumers had to lease phones from AT&T. In 1968, the Federal Communications Commission ruled that AT&T could not decide which devices could be attached to the network, opening the phone world to competition and leading to landline innovations people take for granted today, such as cheaper phones, answering and fax machines and modems.
Today's retrotech item: The Apple ][ is 30 years old. No, seriously, it is. 30 years. And we aren't talking Internet years either.
And from Shiny Shiny, a piece about the new bling-laden Hello Kitty laptop. Go ahead, try to tell me this is any sillier than Enderle's Ferrari laptop.

6/5 SNR II: Mini-CC edition

2007-06-05T14:30:00.000-07:00

So the Q2 numbers were the usual mild ugliness, and there were no significant announcements during the call. So you really have to wonder what today's trading was all about.

Like I usually do, I posted on IV as I was listening to the call. It's a 3-parter this time: Intro, The Darl & Bert Show, and Question Time.

The last one's pretty short, since there weren't any questions this time. Not a single freakin' question. I may have linked to this before, but the Free Sound Project has a large collection of cricket sounds. Even better, the clips are available under a Creative Commons license, one of those dreaded open-source things SCO gets all worked up over. Nice.

So other than the absence of questions, the call was a pretty humdrum affair. Yawn.

While SCO's busy "eagerly awaiting" their September 17th trial date with Novell, BS&F is staying busy. Here's the latest on the AIG/Greenberg and Tyco situations. And now Boies has a new gig working for Michael Moore. About a month ago, BS&F announced the hiring of two top patent & trade secret litigators. Although this should't affect the SCO case, since SCO has no patents or trade secrets. Oh, and they've got a new office in Orlando (FWIW, and I realize this is sort of a Mickey Mouse item.)

And here's some PR about a new Novell partnership, which uses the hair-raising phrase "mixed source".

6/5 SNR

2007-06-05T12:41:00.000-07:00

SCO's Q2 earnings are out now. (Press release here.) Ouch! Ok, so the numbers aren't quite as bad as they used to be, but they're still losing money even after all those layoffs, and first half revenue declined close to 17% compared to first half '06.

At least they'll last until the cases go to trial, if the present burn rate holds. If you're like me, and you'd much rather see SCO lose decisively in court instead of going bankrupt and leaving matters unresolved, these numbers are pretty much ideal.
SCO's Q2 conference call is coming up in an hour or so. The audio will be here, for anyone who feels like listening.
The stock was wayyyy up again today. I don't get it. I really don't.
SJVN: "Why did Microsoft and Sun support SCO?"
Forbes: "Microsoft's Protection Racket?"
CP80 is making a cameo at the G8 summit, of all places. Seems there's a nice glossy "G8 Magazine" that gets produced every time they hold one of these meetings, and it's distributed free to a select group of elite decision makers. Oh, and members of Congress, too.

So on top of all the other benefits of being among the rich & powerful, you also get all the birdcage lining you'll ever need, absolutely free. It just isn't fair, I tell ya.
Someone else might be in the "Clean Internet Port" biz.
Scooter Libby just got 30 months in the slammer. This would be completely OT, except that during the trial Boies chimed in to insist Libby shouldn't have been prosecuted. (This appeared on SNR here, back in March.) Apparently the judge didn't see it quite that way.
The trolls on Y! have been making "TO TEH MOON" noises all day, but that's hardly ambitious, is it? NASA's MESSENGER probe is flying past Venus later today on its way to Mercury. Cool photos to follow, probably.

6/4 SNR

2007-06-04T14:26:00.000-07:00

Today was day 2 of the current round of SCO v. Novell hearings. No word yet on the day's excitement, since it looks like nobody from the anti-SCO community was able to attend this time. Here's a GL article about the then-upcoming hearings, with a cute cartoon. If you don't get the "Spartacus" reference, well, Netflix has it, so what's your excuse?
In other news, M$ has cut a Novell-ish deal with Xandros. You know, Xandros, one of those second-tier commercial distros. They inherited what used to be Corel's distro, if I'm not mistaken. I don't like the look of this, but as a practical matter, well, when was the last time you used Xandros? For me, the answer's "never", and I don't know anyone else who uses it, either. I rather suspect those numbers aren't going to improve anytime soon, given today's news.

Here's PJ's take on the latest ugliness. As she notes, the terms of the deal are not identical to the Novell deal. PJ thinks it's because of the draft GPLv3, but I don't think M$ is nimble enough to respond to a fast-moving target like that. I suspect it's just that Xandros was in a weaker negotiating position, so M$ could pretty much dictate its terms.

It's a sad reality of the business world that you can never, ever admit you were forced to sign a contract against your will. Customers would hate that, and investors would hate it even more. So no matter how disadvantageous the terms are, you have to put on a brave face and act like the whole thing was your idea from day one, and you're absolutely thrilled about your new "partnership". There aren't a lot of downsides to being an extravagantly compensated C-level PHB, but this has got to be one of them.
Still, there may be a way to profit off Microsoft's latest anti-Linux strategy, provided that you're sufficently cynical and avaricious. If that describes you -- and there's no need to be bashful here -- why not try a bit of "reverse patent trolling"?
An interesting piece from the NZ Herald: "Forget the iPhone, buy a smartphone". So, ok, the iPhone won't be available in NZ anytime soon, so you could dismiss this as sour grapes. And hey, they already have great scenery, and fascinating wildlife (hobbits included), and wine grapes are quite happy there, and it's pretty much nirvana for sailboats, and the country isn't involved in any wars at the moment, so really you'd think the lack of iPhones wouldn't be that big of a deal, all things considered. But still, it's an interesting article.
The RIAA loses a major case. Seems that allegations without any proof don't (always) equal $$$ in the courtroom after all.
A nice setback for software patents in the UK.
Yet another piece debating the future of Palm. Today the company announced it's selling 25% of itself to a private equity firm, which boosted the stock a bit. But even with that, and the Foleo, and some high-profile new hires, the company's long-term outlook is still anyone's guess.

Personally I hope they stick around. Think of all the poor tech journos who'd be unemployed if the "Whither Palm?" beat ever goes bust. Ok, I might count that as an upside really, but my point stands. They've ventured into making potentially interesting Linux gadgets, and that's a thing to be encouraged.
I don't link to E! very often here, but here's a bit about the US 2nd Circuit Court second-guessing the FCC over the new "indecency" guidelines. The court seems to think the occasional F-bomb is not a big deal, or at least not something that merits a stiff fine from the feds. No word from Ralphie and his CP80 chums about this yet, but they've got to see this as a bit of a setback. Broadcast media have always been the most restrictive in terms of what you can and can't legally say, so if you don't have a free hand to censor TV, what can you censor?

6/3 SNR

2007-06-03T11:44:00.000-07:00

Two more stories on GL, covering some new exhibits in the Novell case. Seems a GL volunteer picked 'em up at the courthouse while attending the hearings on the 31st:
- First, we get "Deposition of Darl McBride in Novell: Dreaming of Billions From Linux". PJ covers it first "because I know it's the one you'd read first", which is true, of course. If you want to jump straight to the source material, the doc is here. The fun bit is how SCO could've gotten maybe $50M from HP, and a few tens of millions from Google, if only they hadn't gotten greedy and demanded a much bigger pile of cash. The matter dragged on and on, until the copyright dispute with Novell put an end to the negotiations.
  
  It's really kind of a sad spectacle, and is a great example of SCO's unique flair for gross miscalculation. Every successful swindler, from small-time slip-n-fall scammers up to the most high-profile patent troll, knows that the trick is to demand an appropriate sum of money, such that the target decides it's cheaper to settle up instead of fight. This is especially important when you can't back up your claims in the courtroom. And now... well, it's a bit late to come up with a Plan B, isn't it?
- Second, there's "More Novell Exhibits: We Find Out What MS & Sun Paid SCO For". PJ thinks the new docs make Sun look really bad. Perhaps I'm biased (and yes, I do have a Sun box sitting under my desk here), but the new docs just detail what SCO claims it sold to Sun under the deal, and SCO's always insisted it was a SCOSource arrangement... well, except when Novell asked for their 95% cut. In any case, nothing fundamentally new here, I think.
  
  Some of the other exhibits look interesting, like Exhibit 46, a spreadsheet of companies SCO sent demands to, with responses given if the company bothered to respond. I haven't gone down the whole list yet, but I noticed that in the cases of both Intel and Apple, SCO sent their demands to a branch office, not headquarters. SCO says Apple responded anyway, with a letter saying they were in compliance (i.e. not using Linux), and SCO apparently didn't pursue the matter any further. OS X is based on BSD, not Linux, and apparently SCO didn't have a problem with that, despite their occasional anti-BSD FUD. I don't know if that's significant or not, but it's an interesting data point.
From Slashdot, the latest unfortunate development in the M$-Novell partnership. Apparently the F/OSS community is second in line behind M$ when it comes to getting documentation from Novell, according to the terms of the deal. It would be interesting to learn exactly what M$ threatened Novell with to get them to sign on to the deal's terms. It's just been one PR black eye after another ever since the thing was announced. I guess I'm trying to understand what got them on board. I've never seen any cause to assume malice on Novell's part, and while stupidity is possible, I'm not sure anybody's that stupid. So until I learn otherwise, I'm going to assume it was good old fashioned duress that made them sign up.
In other news, a piece on the controversial, upcoming RealPlayer 11, which will supposedly let you save streaming video to a local file and burn it to a DVD. I guess you can't blame 'em for trying to differentiate their product, but it's going to take a lot more than that to grab my interest. Over the years, every time I've given in to short-term necessity and installed the then-current RealPlayer release, I've always ended up nuking it in short order. Maybe the new version will be different, and not be a steaming pile of infuriating, gimmicky bloatware. But I'm not holding my breath.

5/31 SNR III: Under Advisement Again

2007-05-31T18:47:00.000-07:00

Everything taken under advisement, no rulings from the bench, like always. Big surprise there. GL's got the early reports here, although nothing really juicy yet.

We do know that SCO's last-minute submissions were simply ignored today, at Kimball's order. I wonder how much cash SCO just wasted on those new expert reports? After years of smug stalling tactics, it's nice to see they've switched over into frantic flailing mode. That'll probably mean even more delay, but at least it's more enjoyable to watch.

5/31 SNR II

2007-05-31T13:33:00.000-07:00

Nothing from the courtroom yet, but check out this latest zaniness. Seems that SCO's been watching too many old Perry Mason reruns, and thought they could introduce new materials right before today's hearing, giving Novell no opportunity to read it properly, much less any time to respond. Novell, understandably, is Not Happy.

I expect that made for highly entertaining hearings today, the kind of thing professional diplomats call a "frank exchange of views".
Here's an outdoor activities calendar for the Lindon area. Seems that someone with SCO would like to invite you on an evening hike to a remote canyon off in the desert. Yeah, that sounds like a great idea. Yikes.
An uninformative bit on SecurityFocus about a vulnerability within OpenServer's audit facility. It's actually an old vunerability from 2005, but shows up because the bug report was just updated. I can't tell what was updated, though. The bug report says the problem still hasn't been patched.
Good news out of Seattle, for once: They've busted one of the top 10 "Spam Kings". Something tells me this'll just drive more of the spam "industry" offshore, but hey, it's a start.
If you like open source software, you'll love open source beer. Mmm.... Beer....
In gadget news, the AppleTV gets a bigger HD, and now you don't have to do it yourself.
A bit about Google Maps' new "Street View" feature, currently debuting with a bunch of cities that I'm not interested in. Amazon used to do this with their late, lamented A9 Maps, and I found it surprisingly handy. Knowing the street address of your destination is nice, but you can't beat knowing what the building actually looks like.

I was kind of hoping A9 would pull it off, since the whole all-Google all-the-time thing is starting to grate on me a little. But Amazon bailed on it, so I guess Google Maps it is. Sigh.
David Pogue's take on the M$ "Surface" beastie, @ NYT.
A bit about yesterday's Gates + Jobs mano a mano.

5/31 SNR

2007-05-30T12:28:00.000-07:00

Another round of hearings in the Novell case today, with leftovers heard on June 4th. No news yet, obviously, but I'll link to it when I hear anything.
Right on the heels of that second hearing, SCO's Q2 earnings call will be held after the markets close on June 5th.
Yesterday was the 3rd consecutive close over a dollar for SCO's stock. Another seven days of that and they'll be off delisting watch, for all the good it'll do 'em.
You might've seen the oohing and aahing over M$'s new "Surface" coffee-table computer. I'm dubious, myself, and not just because it's a Microsoft product. What happens the first time you spill a brewski on the surface, it interprets the spill as a "gesture", and deletes all your files? Great. Just great. Oh, and coffee tables tend to sit right in the middle of a room, and now you'll need to run a power cord and maybe a network drop to it, giving you a couple more things to trip over on your way to the fridge for a replacement brewski.

Besides, it isn't even new. Think of Dillinger's cool desk in Tron, for one thing. You may recall that Dillinger was the bad guy, and made his fortune swiping other programmers' innovations. Hmm. Remind you of anyone?

As you might expect, the Mac community is skeptical. I imagine it's more than the eternal Mac vs. Windows thing this time, too. If the stereotype holds any water at all, a substantial number of Mac folks are affluent design-geek types, and it's unlikely they'll want to redecorate their living rooms around an ugly coffee table from Redmond, even if they do redecorate often enough to keep up with the usual PC obsolescence cycle.

Rumor has it that SCO's already hard at work on a competing product, the OpenServer bidet. The target market remains unclear right now, but at least it fits in with the company's core competencies.
CRN says Vista isn't more secure than WinXP. Film at 11.
The M$ patent FUD is still generating copy. Here's an unintentionally hilarious screed from an M$ fanboi. M$ Word already flags grammar issues with a green underline. Wouldn't it be nice if it could do that for illogical, poor-quality writing, too?
PC World on the brave new world of Web 2.0 security, or more precisely, the lack thereof. Yikes.
On the same day the Surface surfaced, Palm unveiled a decidedly non-palm-sized device, the new Palm Foleo. It's sort of a Linux subnotebook device with flash instead of an hd. I think it looks kind of cool, although mine seems to be a minority opinion. The cool kids at Engadget aren't impressed, for one thing.

This isn't the only gadget of its kind. Most coverage of the Foleo mentions Nokia's N800, and I seem to recall that Sharp had/has a similar Linux-based Zaurus gadget, which they only sold in Japan. And let's not forget the late, lamented Psion gadgetry of years past. Oh, and word on the street is that we may see a flash-based subnotebook from Apple sometime later this year. Call me a cynic, but something tells me that the same people who say they just don't get it coming from Palm will dance in the streets when the Apple version ships. That's just how the industry works, I'm afraid.

5/29 SNR

2007-05-29T12:21:00.000-07:00

The stock's up again today, for still-unknown reasons. No news of any kind, still, not even any more content-free Me Inc. PR. So I lean towards the shorts covering / short squeeze hypothesis. I suppose it could be some sort of collusive insider scheme, but I always tend to favor alternatives that don't require a conspiracy. It's not that I don't think they'd try it, it's just that I don't think they'd have suddenly become competent at pump-n-dumping after all these years. If you ask me, the very "success" of the runup argues against anyone at SCO having a hand in causing it.
A SYS-CON piece about Novell, M$, EFF, patents, etc. The byline is ".NETDJ News Desk", but it sure reads like a MOG piece. Blech.
More assorted articles about SCO, M$, Novell, the EFF, patents, etc., at InfoWorld, ZDNet, InformationWeek, Ars Technica. These probably all deserve more analysis than I'm giving them, but it's a busy day, and it's sunny outside (a rarity here in Oregon), and so I'll just pass the links along for your enjoyment. GL has sort of a roundup of recent media coverage around the whole mess. The gist of it all is that SCO is/was just the opening act in Microsoft's anti-F/OSS jihad, and the main event is still to come.
SCO & M$ both get a mention in this piece about another company spewing patent fud.
Comments from Moglen about his stepping back at EFF. The proposed SCO gag order gets a quick mention.
A product announcement that mentions SCO OSes briefly. No, I don't think this accounts for today's big runup.

5/25 SNR II: No Dice (Yet) Edition

2007-05-25T18:43:00.000-07:00

Well, I said I'd update you if I heard anything about why SCO closed up nearly 30 cents today. Nothing so far. Nada. There are a few inconsequential (and sealed) filings on Pacer, but that's nowhere near enough to account for today's financial excitement. A number of theories are floating around right now, suggesting it's due to shorts covering, or fear of SCO getting booted from the Russell Microcap Index, or investor confusion due to great numbers from the French firm Scor SA (ticker symbol "SCO"). But no obvious candidate stands out yet, and I'll happily defer to the financial experts on this item. What we do know is that the courts didn't do anything interesting today, unfortunately. On the bright side, this means we -- or those of us in the US, anyway -- can spend the 3-day weekend outside doing something unproductive, instead of poring over legal PDFs. It's a great relief, let me tell you. For those of you outside the US, as you were. Y'all get, like, six months of paid vacation every year, required by law. Don't begrudge us our piddly little 3-day weekend, ok? Thanks.

In lieu of any long-awaited rulings, here's a great example of what not to do in court, if you're an attorney.

And for your Memorial Day weekend enjoyment, you might enjoy this video clip of The Kill -9 Song.

5/25 SNR

2007-05-25T11:43:00.001-07:00

The stock's way up today for unexplained reasons. No press releases, and nothing on EDGAR so far. Maybe there'll be some news after the markets close. Good news, bad news, I really couldn't guess at this point. It's strange, either way.

Yesterday the court scheduled some more PSJ hearings in the Novell case. That news made it to Slashdot -- and Groklaw, of course -- but that's not the sort of news that would make the stock jump 25% percent in a day, which is what's happening right now.

Updates if/when we learn what the heck is going on....

Updated: A comment on GL mentions a new IBM filing, but it's just a further stipulated extension of time on various deadlines. So we still don't have our explanation, I think.

5/24 SNR

2007-05-24T10:43:00.000-07:00

Couple of new press releases from Lindon today. Product-related and everything. The first one: " The SCO Group, Inc. and Genisys Software, Inc. Announce the Availability of a Mobile Workforce Automation Solution for Equipment Rental and Point of Sale Software". Me Inc. PR about a custom app they cooked up for a partner of theirs. I don't know enough about the equipment rental software segment to know whether this is a useful development or not. I didn't even know there was such a thing as equipment rental software, quite honestly, so I suspect SCO's pursuing an exceedingly small niche. Maybe the equipment rental biz will go hog-wild for this stuff, for all I know. But even if they do, I don't expect we'll see a blip on SCO's bottom line.

Genisys Software's press release page doesn't mention the big announcement. So clearly it's bigger news for SCO than it is for them. This seems to happen a lot with SCO. Almost always, in fact. Funny, that.

The announcement does get a quick mention here, on a page that indicates the equipment rental software segment is far more crowded than I ever would've anticipated.
The other PR for today informs us of the arrival of HipCheck 1.0.3. This isn't really the newest of news; I linked to a story about the upcoming release exactly a month ago. In a way, I really feel for the HipCheck team. They added support for Solaris, UnixWare 7.x, and Win2k, so adding Linux would probably be a no-brainer from both a technical and a sales standpoint. It's just that Darl, Ralphie and the other PHBs won't allow it, for purely ideological reasons. That kind of behavior usually isn't the hallmark of a company with a future, is all I'm saying.
A bit about Ralphie's pro-CP80 documentary. The post itself is just the press release, which we've seen already, but there's a short & somewhat interesting user comments section discussing the merits of the proposal.
Those tasty Dell Linux boxes go on sale today.
A WSJ event next week promises to deliver Bill Gates & Steve Jobs together on stage. Enderle pipes up with the super-useful observation that the two guys are like night and day. I guess that's why he makes the big bucks.
As you may have heard, Jack Thompson (you know, the video game lawyer from Florida) has declared jihad against Microsoft over Halo 3.
Someone's come up with a proof-of-concept OpenOffice worm. Yow. At least it hasn't been seen in the wild so far, unlike all the M$ Office worms out there. The funny part is that depending on the OS it runs on, it drops additional proof-of-concept script viruses on the machine. On Linux, the "malware" is coded in Perl and Python, and on OSX you get two naughty Ruby scripts. So clearly somone had a lot of fun putting this thing together, and had nothing better to do with their time.

Sky: still not falling.
HP just landed a big $5.6B deal with NASA, to supply machines with "Linux and Unix capabilities", as the story puts it. By Unix they probably mean HP-UX, although HP does still have a bit of a partnership with SCO. I've never heard of NASA using SCO OSes for anything, but I suppose it's possible. Maybe once the promised moon colony is up and running, a decade or so from now, they'll eventually need a McDonalds of their own, and a SCO box to run it. It's like the pro-SCO trolls used to say: "To the moon!!!"

5/22 SNR

2007-05-22T22:51:00.000-07:00

One thing I ought to have mentioned yesterday is that among the pile of SCO filings was an unsealed declaration by one G. Gervaise Davis III. Discussion at Groklaw and Lamlaw.

He's a semi-retired IP lawyer, and he tries to explain what agreements like the OldSCO-Novell APA deal "usually" mean. Novell came up with the people who actually negotiated the deal, and they explained quite clearly what they had in mind at the time. SCO just has a guy who had nothing at all to do with the deal, but who has an extremely long resume. They appear to be arguing, now, that Novell accidentally transferred the copyrights, despite their intentions, and despite the plain wording of the asset purchase agreement. It's a stupid and nonsensical argument, but it's all SCO's got at this point.
It's important to see the Davis declaration in context. SCO's using it to try to fend off a looming PSJ motion. To do that, they don't actually have to prove that the copyrights really did transfer. They just have to convince the judge there are disputed facts around the issue, and the truth of the matter can only be resolved by a jury. That's all they need to accomplish right now, but even that might be a hard sell. Davis's argument is all about legal opinions, not disputed facts.

That's a strange bit, by the way. Davis is a lawyer, and he offers his professional legal opinion in his declaration. Yet SCO presents him as an expert witness, not as another attorney working on SCO's cases. I'm no lawyer, but this seems like dirty pool. They're making a nutty argument, and not really taking responsibility for it. Is this really SCO's position in the case, or isn't it?

After reading the declaration, one has to wonder who this Gervaise guy is. Well, details are starting to emerge. Over on IV, a great bit of research by Spanishinquisition brings some fun details to light. Gervaise Davis has been around the block a few times, and happened to work for Digital Research back when they failed to land the OS contract for the original IBM PC. Seems he argued against signing an NDA with IBM, for some reason, which was a bit of a dealbreaker. Then he convinced DR not to sue Microsoft for substantially cloning their CP/M operating system.

There may be even more to that. In his declaration, Davis also says he worked on DR-DOS for Digital Research. DR was eventually bought by Caldera, and Caldera soon launched their well-known suit against M$. M$ ended up coughing up a large pile of cash to make the suit go away. And now Caldera is [New]SCO. I don't know what that might mean. Just that there's prior history between Davis and one of SCO's predecessors-in-interest. Hmmmm...

5/21 SNR

2007-05-17T10:29:00.000-07:00

Not a lot going on in the SCO universe right now. Seems like everything's stuck in a holding pattern, waiting for news, waiting for something to happen. Hopefully the thing we're all waiting for will be a nice, tasty PSJ ruling, and/or a BK filing, and/or indictments. In any case, news is this blog's middle name, so I'll be all over it whenever that happens. In the meantime, here's the catch of the day. Ok, the last few days:

SCO filed a big steaming pile of docs in the Novell case. And -- big surprise -- they're all sealed. We know they're playing defense in these docs, trying to ward off Novell PSJ motions, but we don't know exactly what howlers they're telling to accomplish that, at least not yet.
A rather anachronistic piece titled "Navigating the Legal Risks of Open Source", complete with a bunch of OSRM-will-save-us babbling. You remember OSRM, right?
Continuing the theme somewhat, InfoWorld asks "How risky is open source?". The word "overstated" appears right off the bat. Like most other pieces about the M$ patent circus, SCO gets prominent billing.
New PR from Linspire about new virtualization offerings that supposedly make it easier to migrate away from SCO, among other things.
Regarding the M$ patent fud, here's yet another Joe McCarthy analogy. Last week I offered a Golden Cookie for the best original analogy to describe M$ and its patent FUD. The three nominees were: Stalin, Godzilla, and Joe Isuzu. Godzilla won the popularity contest, going by recs received, but I'm going to have to go with Joe Isuzu, because it's a really obscure pop culture reference, and it fits pretty well. And for bonus points, the Darl <--> Joe Isuzu analogy is even better.
Here's the inevitable Enderle spin on the M$ FUD. Like everyone else, he talks about SCO a lot. Being Enderle he still tries to hold out a glimmer of hope that SCO might have a case, but he does make one useful point: The SCO case changed how the industry views people who make allegations and refuse to back them up. Someone in Redmond should've thought of this before they started financing SCO v. Universe.
M$ wuvs ODF now, allegedly. Call me skeptical if you like. Mistrustful, even.
They also wuv UOF, a third competing doc format backed by China.
What you can't do with Windows Home Server. WinHS is yet another Windows variant, basically Win2k3 for Closets.
Much wailing & gnashing of teeth about the promised & undelivered "Halo 3" beta. Because not getting beta software from M$ is a bad thing to some people. Or so I gather.
Say "hi" to the Copyright Alliance, the folks behind Gonzo's new IPPA proposal. I expect we'll be hearing a lot from these guys over time.
Vista's copy protection seems to have been broken already. Color me uninterested; Even if it was legal, which it isn't, a "free" copy of Vista is still far too expensive, so far as I'm conncerned.
IBM just launched its new POWER6 cpu. I usually don't start writing Dear Santa letters in May, but I may have to make an exception. Naturally Forbes is Not Impressed, since it's not a Microsoft product.
You thought the bit about a guy getting banned from the US after a border guard googled his name was bad. Here's a case where someone got in immigration hot water because of his Wikipedia bio. Yow!
You might've noticed that Google changed some things around over the last few days. The "search engine marketing" folks (i.e. people who get paid to game the system) are outraged. Really, really outraged.
If you haven't seen it already, here's that Medieval Helpdesk skit again.

5/17 SNR

2007-05-16T20:26:00.000-07:00

Ok, did I say it was a slow news day a couple of days back? It's even slower now, at least SCO-wise. Nothing on GL, nothing on Pacer, nothing on Edgar, the stock's been wedged at 84 cents and minimal volume for days now. There isn't even any pro-SCO babbling from the usual suspects.
Over on comp.unix.sco.misc, there's a fun thread about running OpenServer 5 & 6 under VMWare. One poster reports success with OSR 5.0.7, running VMWare on Vista. Now that's a marriage made... somewhere. And in the Unnatural Acts Dept., someone else asks if anyone's had success running OpenServer under Parallels on an Intel Mac.
A blog search doesn't pull up much of interest either. A diarist at DailyKos just now found out about the delisting warning letter, and thinks it means SCO's hosed. Which illustrates the dangers of getting one's tech news from a political blog, or one's political tidbits from a tech blog like this one.
A CERT vulnerability that mentions SCO, along with a whole list of platforms, since it's an issue with libpng. It occurs to me that in a weird way, CERT advisories are a measure of a platform's aliveness. If CERT stops checking whether you're vulnerable or not, or your OS is so obsolete it doesn't have the library with the newly found hole (i.e. even your OS's bugs are obsolete), you can be really sure you're a goner. So SCO's OSes aren't completely dead just yet.
You may recall the 2004 controversy that erupted after a certain well-known individual tried to buy the rights to all of Linux for just $50k. That got people wondering what the kernel might actually be "worth", and a subsequent study estimated it at about $176m. Turns out there was a subsequent study that put the number even higher, at around $612m. I don't remember seeing that study, although I might have and then forgotten about it. In any case the second study shows up (in English) on this Korean blog post. The post comments about the study, but in Korean, which I can't speak or read a word of. If anyone out there can translate, feel free to post it as a comment here. TIA.
SCO gets a quick mention in a post titled "My Current News Obsessions". It's down the page, after the RIAA rant.
Here's something rare. The website of a firm in India, one of those virtual-office / office hotel kind of things, and their main page includes a testimonial from SCO's Indian division:

SCO Software India Pvt. Ltd.

Though OCBC, as a business center the name is a new one in the corporate business space in Kolkata, but still the kind of services the management provides are sufficient enough and help us to concentrate in our jobs only. Hope to see OCBC to become a landmark in the Corporate Hospitality & Business Space very soon.
And an audio-visual services company in India that openly claims SCO as a client.
M$ only just announced that Longhorn's official name will be Windows Server 2008, and now we learn that there's already a Win2k8 Release 2 in the works for 2009
Washington Post on Amazon's new DRM-free music store.
Guardian article on the net being carved up into "information plantations", a few megasites that get the lion's share of web traffic. Heck, Blogspot blogs like this one are outposts of the Google empire.
A Guardian piece on AACS: "How many freedoms will we give up to help business get richer?"
Shankland: Experts say Microsoft's patent quest won't go far.

You see a lot of people expressing doubts about the quality and validity of Microsoft's patents, the usual argument being that if they really had a solid case, they'd have laid it on the table a long time ago. There's another angle to this I haven't seen anyone comment on. If they really were constantly inventing all sorts of genuinely new and original stuff, you'd expect to see some of these advances showing up in innovative and exciting new Microsoft products. But when was the last time that happened? The scrolly-wheel mouse, maybe?
A post at capslock for coffee talks about Linus's response to M$, and includes a genuine photo of a FUD Van. You did realize FUD is delivered in vans, right?
It seems like everyone's comparing microsoft's patent insanity to SCO. It's unavoidable. See LJ's "The Microsoft FUD Campaign vs. the Customer" for a good example. Since SCO's pretty much the baseline analogy anymore, some writers are looking further afield for novel comparisons.

An InfoWorld piece looks to Greek mythology, sort of, asking "A Microsoft Pyrrhic victory?". Although even the victory part isn't at all clear at this point.

A post at Wired is the second to compare Microsoft and its secret list of patents to Sen. Joe McCarthy. Actually it points at comments by Tim O'Reilly, so it's the third. The Blankenhorn piece I linked to the other day was the first. Like the SCO analogy, this is a fairly obvious comparison. It's what you drag out when comparing someone to Darl just isn't enough.

And Sam Varghese at ITWire really goes for the jugular, with "Microsoft: shades of Saddam Hussein". And he compares them to SCO later on. Wow. That's just harsh. Much more of this and we'll have to start handing out Godwin points or something. Those Aussies really know how to play it close to the edge.

Haven't seen any WMD analogies yet, although the handwaving about top-secret evidence looks pretty similar. So I volunteer to be the first on that one. I don't mean that in a partisan way, just in a phony-secret-evidence, unsupported-accusation way. In the interest of bipartisanship (or multipartisanship, if you're outside the US), I think it'd be fair to draw another analogy: These outrageous allegations from M$ are part of an intimidation campaign to bully the tech industry around, one which takes a page straight from Al Sharpton in his heyday.
Cockpit software on jetliners tends to be a conservative field, basically the very last place in line when trends percolate through the industry. The Boeing 777 marked the first usage of any Unix in an aircraft cockpit, and it was a weird variant, VenturCom's Venix EDS. Yes, Venix, which I mentioned as a retrotech item back in March. It's been been around in some form or other since slightly after dirt was invented. I'd thought it was long departed to the great bit bucket in the sky, but apparently it found a low-profile ecological niche and hung on, coelecanth style. Who knew? I can't find much on the net about it now, so it doesn't appear to be actively marketed these days. But still, next time you fly on a 777, there'll be a weird *Nix helping out up front.

Venix EDS doesn't show up much on the net, but it does appear on this Canonical List of Operating Systems That Suck. Along with every other OS you've ever heard of, probably.
The iPhone isn't out yet, but McSweeney's has a fun User's Guide up for your perusal...

5/15 SNR

2007-05-15T10:45:00.000-07:00

New filings in both the Novell & IBM cases. Novell-292 is the main event today, and it's a pretty big deal. In it, Novell explains exactly why SCO never got any copyrights. We've seen some of that before, but this doc goes into much more detail than we've seen before. Some tasty bits:

In the OldSCO -> Caldera deal, OldSCO included a caveat indicating its ownership of copyrights was uncertain: Assignor may not be able to establish a chain of title from Novell Inc.. Novell goes on to detail precisely how this caveat got into the document during the negotiations.

Next, Novell provides a timeline showing that SCO kept hassling them to transfer the copyrights, over and over again. It really makes you feel for them, having to deal with Darl, Sontag, and Ralphie repeatedly like that. They repeatedly quote Darl as saying stuff like “SCO needs the copyrights", and “the asset purchase agreement excluded copyrights from being transferred”, and We only need you to amend the contract so that we can have the copyrights.”, on multiple occasions.

It goes on from there, but those are a couple of bits that stood out immediately.
Updated: PJ analyzes the new filings at length. You'll probably want to go read that at some point and get a real analysis of the docs, instead of the simple vgrep I'm qualified to perform.
El Reg on Linus on Microsoft. You didn't really think Linus would mince words and make nice, did you?
El Reg on Schwartz on Microsoft. Whatever you think of Schwartz, or Sun generally, he doesn't mince words either this time around.
SCO gets a quick mention in this ITJungle piece about Unisys. If anyone out there is an expert about Unisys mainframes, perhaps you'd care to post a comment and explain what's going on here. It seems like a deeply weird hardware and software platform, with Xeon plugin boards running either Windows or a SCO OS, virtualized mainframe OSes running on top of Windows, and all kinds of oddness. TIA.
Motley Fool has a piece on investing locally in the Salt Lake area, and they chose to mention SCO as a "high risk, high reward" stock, as if it was still 2003 or something. Sure, they also call SCO "much-maligned", and link to a story about Wells gutting SCO's case, but stuff like that is just red meat for would-be contrarian investors, people who may not have heard of SCO before. So don't be totally surprised if we see a new crop of penny-ante daytraders showing up on the boards in the near future.
From Juha Saarinen's blog on Geekzone.co.nz: M$'s Bill Hilf (which sounds like a made-up name but apparently isn't) says Linux doesn't exist anymore.

Saarinen responds:

Hilf needs to work on his FUD-slinging as well. The hippie Love, Peace and Harmony is hardly what Open Source is about in 2007, thank goodness.

Hear, hear. It's just freakin' software, already. Software that lets you get the job done without locking you into proprietary file formats and protocols, intrusive DRM, increasingly ridiculous EULAs. It's like the old NASA slogan, "better, faster, and cheaper". How hard is that to understand?
A product head-to-head that mentions SCO briefly. So briefly that I usually wouldn't mention it at all, but the article itself is kind of interesting. Ok, well, I thought so anyway. YMMV.
Enderle's take on the Simpsons. No, really.

5/14 SNR: Sur-Surreal Edition

2007-05-14T10:51:00.000-07:00

Late Friday, SCO filed a pair of sur-surreply memos begging the court to let it use all the "evidence" it didn't bother to disclose by the Final Disclosures deadline. There are two stories on GL about the filings, so it's not exactly breaking news anymore. They're a bit more slick than SCO's usual work, so perhaps these docs weren't farmed out to BS&F interns for once. I don't see why they went to all the trouble. At the point where you're doing sur-surreplies on motions for re-re-reconsideration, it's a tad late to start bringing the (relatively speaking) heavy hitters.
Some stories about the new Microsoft patent FUD. This isn't the top story because they're still just making noise at this point. I think it's pretty clear at this point that the sad SCO saga is just the opening act in the M$ war against everyone who isn't M$. Many of the stories mention SCO, because the parallels are so freakin' obvious that even the trade press can't ignore 'em.
- Fortune: "Microsoft takes on the free world"
- PJ's take on the Fortune piece.
- Blankenhorn: "Why Microsoft hasn’t sued (yet)"
- ZDNet UK: "Microsoft's Linux stance threatens self-harm"
- Matt Asay @ InfoWorld: "Making sense of Microsoft's open source fetish"
- ComputerWorld: "Microsoft 'desperate,' says patent target OpenOffice.org".
- E-Commerce Times: "What Does Microsoft Want From the Free World?"
- PC World: "Microsoft Patent Claims Hint at Internal Issues"
As noted by the ever-relentless Panglozz, Royce has given Jonathan Cohen the boot. Cohen, as you might recall, was one of the earliest and most vocal SCO supporters within the investment community. We'll probably never know for sure whether there's a connection between that and the termination, but a lot of people have lost a lot of money betting on SCO, and losing money typically isn't a career-enhancing move in the investment biz.
Some new-hire PR about a Caldera alum:

Cottle started his career in 1990 marketing large technology brands for companies such as Iomega, Infocus, and Adaptec at Dahlin Smith White. He left DSW to start his own marketing company, Oxygen Studios, which was later sold to Caldera (now SCO). Cottle helped Caldera go public, acquire SCO and grow to over 600 employees. He left SCO to launch a health publishing company which was acquired in 2003.

600 employees. Wow. Those were the days, huh?

The only mention of Oxygen Studios I can find is this article from 1999. Sounds like they were a web design firm, and one of the company's founders became Caldera's "creative director". Betcha they don't have anyone with that job title anymore. But they do still own the OpenLinux.org domain until next August, although there's no server behind the name anymore. They don't redirect you to the SCOSource license purchase page (which doesn't exist anyway), they don't even send you to PR about why OSR6 is the OS you really want. Nope. Netcraft indicates the site went dark last June.

Archive.org doesn't have much of interest about the OpenLinux.org site, and last pinged it back in 2001. But there was a mention of Caldera OpenLinux for SPARC & UltraSPARC, which I'd never heard of before. Here's a 1999 Register story about it. One of SCO's many peeves about IBM is that they made Linux supposedly "enterprise-worthy" by helping port it to the 64-bit Itanium architecture. Well, um, UltraSPARC chips are 64-bit too, and this port came years before the first Itanium saw the light of day. Surprised? Me neither.
Jeremy Allison writes about his unhappy experience with Vista & Office 2007. Ironically, he ended up needing the OpenXML plugin to OpenOffice, a product of the M$-Novell deal that caused him to quit Novell.
InformationWeek's Microsoft Blog asks "
Why Doesn't Microsoft Have A Cult Religion?". Admit it, you giggled when you read the title, out of the question's pure absurdity. Sure, there's probably still plenty of M$ fanboys out there, but they keep a lower profile these days.
An interesting piece on LinuxWorld: "What the IT Media learned from the SCO case (or should have)". It's the first time I've seen a suggestion within the trade press that they mishandled the SCO situation early on, and bought into the lies Darl & friends were spewing without asking any tough questions. If you've read SNR for any amount of time, you're probably aware of my utter contempt for the trade media. I expect that most (not all, but most) of them got into the field when they couldn't hack it in the mainstream media. We get all our tech news from people who weren't talented, principled, or diligent enough to land a job lying to us about WMDs. Think about that for a minute.
As if visitors to the US didn't have enough unpleasantness at the border, now border agents are Googling visitors to the US looking for any dirt on 'em. Even dirt from forty years ago. That's enough to get you permanently excluded from the country, period. Talk about sur-surreal.

5/11 SNR

2007-05-10T12:29:00.000-07:00

"Paul Murphy" is extremely upset that everyone's (supposedly) ignoring him over the SCO thing. So naturally he gets top billing on SNR today.

Ok, fine, fine, it's a really slow news day.
Over on the Y! SCOX board, there's a long thread about Murph's self-pitying rant. This makes two Murph items in a single day, sort of. Did I mention it was a slow news day?
In today's non-"Paul Murphy" news, Ralphie gets a Buffalo Chip from his local paper.
The strangest use of the DMCA yet: A little company out of Santa Cruz, CA is sending out cease-and-desist letters to big companies for not using their DRM technology. Apparently they aren't joking, either. Here's an IV post of mine with more about these weirdos.
Almost as strange, spoon-bending "psychic" Uri Geller used the DMCA to take down a 3 second YouTube clip that portrays his "talent" as a simple parlor trick. Now the EFF's suing him for abusing the law to stifle criticism.
A bit on Red Hat's new slimmed-down desktop distro.
And here's Red Hat's PR for their new "Red Hat Exchange" program.
One more RHAT item and we're done with 'em for today. They're teaming up with IBM to enhance mainframe Linux (which is one of Murph's pet peeves, btw). The current announcement deals with multilevel security, aimed primarily at government customers. The piece reads like the author didn't really grasp that part, which isn't too surprising. Multilevel security is a strange and esoteric subject indeed.

A fun bit from the article:

The vendors stressed security in their announcement, saying "the mainframe's fortress-like security is legendary."

Which is true, of course. Seems like every week you hear horror stories about lost or stolen laptops full of critical data, but when was the last time someone misplaced a mainframe?
Yet another article full of handwringing over Palm's OS roadmap. By now, everyone figures the future has something to do with Linux, but what, exactly, and when? So far, they ain't sayin'.
An article on the DVR industry in China. It caught my eye because at least one runs embedded Linux, although most use proprietary OSes (VxWorks, etc.) If you read closer, you'll notice these aren't entertainment DVRs, they're CCTV recorders for security cameras. Enhanced security cameras in an undemocratic country aren't anything to cheer for. The GPL doesn't restrict how you can employ GPL'd software, and even if it did, there'd be no way to enforce the restrictions in a case like this. But I'm still not happy about it.
EE Times piece hoping this is finally the year for patent reform. Biotech/pharma is the industry opposed to reform, they like the rules just the way they are, thank you. Ok, fine, why not just treat them differently, so tech doesn't suffer?
A contrarian opinion: Patent trolls are good for open source. As the argument goes, open source projects have no money, and thus are uninteresting to patent trolls, who will go after the moneybags closed-source big boys instead. Hmm, it's an interesting notion, certainly. I'm not sure I buy it. It's quite the cynical strategy, too. Sort of like letting vampires loose in the office because you heard somewhere they prefer a different blood type than yours, so that they'll chow down on your workplace rivals first and maybe they'll be full before they notice you. Not a great plan, if you ask me.
PR for an allegedly fun and educational video about patent trolls.
Wired interviews the guy at the center of thee AT&T/NSA domestic spying controversy.
More on the FAA's worries about Vista.

5/10 SNR

2007-05-09T07:48:00.000-07:00

More coverage, again from India, about SCO's custom Me Inc. business. I'm starting to think Me Inc. only exists in India these days, if the company's PR is any indication. From reading the media coverage, it appears that India's tech trade press is fine with just paraphrasing someone's press release, just like the tech trade press everywhere else.
Some dirt on "Datadiscovery", a new corporate tentacle financed under Ralphie's new VentureQuest "canopy". Some earlier rumors about the company here.
Novell's top Linux guy has moved to Google. The article speculates whether this has to do with the M$ deal. Which is possible, although since nobody's commenting, it could just as easily be all about the Benjamins.
The Old Media's desperate war against New Media gets even uglier:

"The Googles of the world, they are the Custer of the modern world. We are the Sioux nation," Time Warner Inc. Chief Executive Richard Parsons said, referring to the Civil War American general George Custer who was defeated by Native Americans in a battle dubbed "Custer's Last Stand".

"They will lose this war if they go to war," Parsons added, "The notion that the new kids on the block have taken over is a false notion."

That's perhaps not the best historical analogy he could've used. Besides being in rather poor taste, he might want to go back and look at who won the battle, and who ultimately won the war.
Not to be content with picking a fight with Google, Time Warner's also declaring war on Canada.
BIFF, everyone's least favorite persistent pro-SCO troll, has a new blog. Ok, not really. I think.
Patch Tuesday is still with us, mostly Office, no Vista this time around.
This week also marked Patch Tuesday for your Xbox 360, except they call it "Spring Update". In addition to the patches, you also get MSN Messenger. Nice bit of vendor lock-in there.
El Reg covers Sun's JavaOne conference. The JDK really is open source now, and they've got some sort of new web technology called JavaFX they're all stoked about.
BusinessWeek's JavaOne coverage refers to Java as "dated". And sure, it might seem that way if you think it's just for doing web page applets.
"Paul Murphy" asserts that Linux is not Windows Lite, to which I can only say, "Well, duh...".

There's a small glimmer of a reasonable idea drowning in all that word salad, at the point where Murph attempts to complain about OpenOffice looking too much like M$ Office. Trying to clone M$ products is not a winning strategy, something most people figured out years ago. Firefox looks nothing like IE (although IE7 sure tries to change that), and it's had a fair bit of success. Apache is nothing like IIS, thankfully, and that doesn't seem to be scaring folks away.

So sure, Murph's flogging a dead horse. Big surprise there. But at least he's starting to suspect the object he's flogging might be shaped something like a horse, which I suppose is the first step.
A blog post on ZDNet asks whether 2008 will be the Year of Mobile Linux. I usually regard all "Is X the year of Y?" stories as lazy journalism, which they are. But he does mention the Nokia N800, which counts for something, I guess.
Today's bizarro IP litigation: This famous yoga guru's "copyrighted" a set of yoga positions, and sues anyone who teaches yoga that resembles his unless they take an expensive class and get certified. Is this really what the founding fathers had in mind when copyright law was created?
It seems someone's finally created a working Apple Lisa Emulator, after all these years. This is not an entirely OT item either, since at one time there was a version of Xenix for the Lisa, undoubtedly chock full of advanced methods and concepts. If you could locate a copy of that (a 100% legal copy, of course), the project website indicates you could actually run the thing.

Although once you've got a SCO OS up and running, you're just begging for SCO to sue you. I've never understood quite why they think suing their own users is a wise strategy, but I guess that's why they make the big bucks and I don't...

5/8 SNR

2007-05-07T13:35:00.000-07:00

More Me Inc. PR from India, and a trade press mention of same. Seems they'd like to custom-build a Me Inc. "solution" for your small or medium business. While I'd give the SCO India guys some credit for apparently thinking and acting as if they worked for a real company (the poor saps), I question their business model. The only proven way to make money in mobile apps is to get mobile phone carriers to preinstall them, since it's quite rare for users to install 3rd party software on phones or PDAs. SCO doesn't seem to have had any takers for its apps among mobile carriers, though, so I suppose this is their plan B. Just not a very promising plan B.

It's kind of a shame, in a way. The suite of Me Inc. apps might actually be useful for some people. I've never tried 'em, myself, so I don't actually know for sure, but in a spirit of fairness let's suppose that might be the case. It's possible the only reason Me Inc. hasn't seen wider acceptance is due to being chained to the sinking bulk of SCO. I suppose there's no way to know for sure, at least for now. If SCO goes bankrupt, and the BK trustee finds a nice new home for Me Inc., we'll learn whether the technology sinks or swims on its own merits.
A thread on linux.samba, in which it appears SCO's losing another customer.
Our old buddy Lyons emits some new FUD about Dell, Linux, and the M$-Novell thing. Apparently calling open source users commies and terrorists and such wasn't working, so the pro-SCO camp is kicking the rhetoric up another notch:

Recently, Linux supporters swarmed Dell after the company put up a Web site called IdeaStorm asking for suggestions. Like teenage girls voting for Sanjaya on American Idol, thousands of Linux fans wrote to Dell and “voted” for PCs loaded with Linux, making this the No. 1 request on IdeaStorm.

You know, because accusing someone of being female is a huuuuge insult, apparently. Well, it was back in third grade anyway, and some people just stop maturing at that point. So stop using Linux, or Lyons will put a toad in your hair and make you scream.
Speaking of toads, here's a truly fascinating interview [29mb MP3] with the Chief Scientist at Solera.
And while we're checking in with the usual suspects, here's the latest from "Paul Murphy", "Fear and loathing in the Internet echo chamber". The echo chamber in question today is the pro-M$ blogosphere, and he attempts to draw an analogy with the political blogosphere. He even takes a stab at a bit of introspection:

I find it hard, for example, to read many of the blogs and comments dedicated to Windows because so much of it strikes me as every bit as dishonest, technologically illiterate, and short sightedly partisan as the dailykos.

And what's worse: I'll bet the Windows people have pretty much the same reaction to this blog - in other words, like Chait, I'm contributing to the same phenomenon I'm complaining about.

But there is a difference: I'd like to know how to break out of the trap: how to transcend the echo chamber and get into a real conversation with the other guy - and that's something neither the dailykos nor the NRO have the slightest interest in doing.

To be fair, it's true that the tech media and tech blogs are quite prone to the echo chamber effect. There's a pro-M$ echo chamber, and a pro-Linux/open source echo chamber, and a pro-Mac echo chamber. There's even a pro-SCO echo chamber, albeit a rather small one, and I've long considered "Murphy" to be part of it. So his carping about the M$ echo chamber is sort of like the crackpot calling the kettle black.
Oh, and to round out the cast of characters today, a piece about the Dell+Ubuntu thing, with FUD from Enderle and DiDio. So it's sort of a wingnut twofer, if you're into that sort of thing.
Utah's among a short list of states now cracking down on the sale of used CDs. No, really. They seriously are.
Slashdot story about the used CD crackdown. One commenter mentions SCO, "Yarro's Law", and CP80, due to the whole Utah connection. In fairness, Utah isn't the only state doing this. Florida, nice, stable, non-nutty, non-dangling-chad Florida, is the other one. So far.
Don Flexner, the F in BS&F, has been honored by Inside Counsel Magazine, whoever they are. They call list him among "The best lawyers to call in a worst-case scenario". Worst-case scenarios, eh? This kind of leads me to expect yet another pro hac vice request in the near future, if SCO can afford it.
Survey: Only 23% of adults are down with the Web 2.0 thang. If you're reading this, you probably qualify as an "omnivore".
NYT on the next must-have geek gadget: The 3d printer! Awesome.

5/7 SNR

2007-05-07T00:01:00.000-07:00

This August, SCO will hold something they call SCO Tec Forum 2007, which will be held in place of the usual SCO Forum event. The announcement is a choice example of PR spin, first saying that SCO Forum's simply been renamed to emphasize its technical focus, and later notes that a "full" SCO Forum event might be held next spring some time. From which we can gather that the August event will not be a full SCO Forum, and I imagine it's likely to be a substantially scaled-back event compared to previous years. Still at the Mirage, though, so if you get bored with the cutting-edge seminars on how to slap a GUI on top of your crufty old OpenServer app, you could go see the Cirque du Soleil's Beatles show, if you're into that. At least it'd be far less surreal than listening to SCO PHBs blathering on about the bright future ahead.
Inquirer and CBR on the delisting letter.
Unspam's anti-spam registry is a flop. So probably the next step will be to either make it mandatory for all Utah residents, or give the company a massive bailout at taxpayer expense, or both.
What to do when faced with a "No Open Source" clause. Fortunately these are far less common than they were just a few years ago.
Dell's signing up with the M$-Novell partnership. Hmm. It looks like this has to do with server hardware, and is unrelated to Dell's recent Ubuntu announcement.
On the heels of Dell's Ubuntu thing, Toshiba's thinking about preinstalled Linux too.
Here's a tiny lil' Linux box to go with the Olivetti TCV-250 you went out and bought after reading the previous SNR post
A letter from The Steve about Apple & the environment.
InfoWorld suggests that Oracle's Unbreakable Linux is gaining acceptance.
ZDNet: "Time to lap up Linux".
Computerworld on the Digg vs. AACS situation. Warning: Includes super-seeekrit number, visit at own risk.
Bill Beebe writes about the AACS thing here. Warning: Includes super-seeekrit number, visit at own risk.
Also from ComputerWorld, yet another Vista horror story.
Vista: More secure than OS X? It's not a very convincing piece: One interviewee talks about code quality, but has he actually seen Vista source code? And another quote comes from Theo. Yeah, try getting Theo to say anything nice about any OS other than OpenBSD. Won't happen.
The latest MS Word / ActiveX vulnerability.
Apple's managed to attract yet another patent troll.
And finally, the BBC reports on a toad discovered lurking on the bottom of Loch Ness. Yikes.

5/2 SNR: Groovy 70's Edition

2007-04-30T16:20:00.000-07:00

SCO's stock tanked into the 70 cent range yesterday, hence the title. I mostly pay attention to that for schadenfreude purposes, as a sign that the company continues to wither away. So it's good when the stock goes down, unless it goes too low, and one of their mysterious backers decides to shovel more cash into the company to keep the sham going. I'm not saying that's guaranteed to happen again, just that it's happened before, so there's a precedent for it, and investors on board who might be tempted to throw bad money after bad, so to speak.
PJ's got a new article about the delisting letter. She explains why she doesn't follow the stock angle too closely, but offers a few fun Darl quotes from back when the stock was still in full-on speculative bubble mode.
Slashdot covered the gag order story yesterday. I was going to say "finally", but I'd meant to do this post yesterday and didn't quite find the time, what with the NHL playoffs, and sleeping, and such.

The gag order business highlights another reason I do this SNR stuff. Groklaw is a great resource, of course, but I think the SCO situation and others like it require a more distributed model. Centralizing everything at one location presents a tempting target, a single point of litigation for SCO and every other IP troll that shambles out of the mire.
A gag-order thread on Tuxmachines, pointing to the Ars piece I linked to the other day. Incidentally, the Ars link was broken until an astute reader pointed it out. It's like an old CEO of mine said years back: Customers (readers, in this case) make the best QA, and you don't even have to pay 'em, the suckers. But seriously, if you see something broken, lemme know, or just post a correction, or whatever. Thx. Mgmt.
SJVN on the delisting letter.
SCO gets a quick mention in this entertaining ITJungle piece about RMS and GPL3. And Greek philosophy, too. And ventriloquism. No, really.
A different perspective on delisting. The poster says he knows people who own SCO stock, therefore he hopes it doesn't get delisted, because his friends would lose money. To which I can only respond: You call yourself a friend, and yet you let your friends buy SCO stock?
Coming soon to a TV near you, just what we needed: an HBO original movie about the 2000 election in Florida. I wonder who would play Boies?
While we're on that topic, seems Boies is back in the election biz, this time working for that Sanjaya punk. Ok, no, not really. But admit it: It's not actually inconceivable.
The very latest on Boies's gardening debacle. Nical (i.e. his side) was recently sold to another firm, although some suggest the new company is a front for the old company, to try to weasel out of the existing settlement agreement.
And the very latest on Sun, Solaris, and the GPL. The executive summary version: No GPL'd Solaris yet, but they're still thinking about it. And thinking. And thinking.
Meanwhile, Dell will now sell you a desktop box with Ubuntu preloaded. You probably heard about that already, and it wasn't a huge surprise after the recent PR with Michael Dell allegedly running Ubuntu at home, etc. But still, it's nice to see that they listened. If you took the trouble to go sign the petition, you are going to buy a box now, right?

I don't see anything on Dell's site where you can click a checkbox to buy a SCOSource license for a mere $699 extra. Funny, that.
An MMORPG patent troll that didn't get the Supreme Court's memo. In the longer term I think they're a dying breed now, but not just yet.
Study: Tech is as polluting as aviation.
From the math software world, Maple 11 is out now, and it runs on OSX, Solaris, Linux (even Itanium), Windows thru 2k3. But Vista? Not so much.
A BBC piece on Hollywood's heavyhanded, and failed, attempt to censor Digg re: the HD-DVD crack discovered a while ago. One curious thing is that they've already done the key revocation trick with new HD-DVD releases, so they've already "solved" this problem -- unless they have less than full confidence in the key revocation trick, that is. Hmm.

Slashdot has the story too, now.
I can't really call something "Groovy 70's Edition" without at least one groovy retrotech item. Dumb terminals are way retro. They're still cutting-edge in the SCO universe, as SCO's antiquated per-user licensing model shows, but elsewhere they're nearly extinct. I don't even know where you'd go to buy a new ASCII dumb terminal if you needed one.

Fortunately the world's awash in old terminals from back in the day, and some of them look pretty cool in a retro sort of way. And unless they use some sort of weird proprietary interface, you might be able to cable it up to your shiny new quad Xeon box and run Emacs on it, and if you've got Emacs, what else do you need? Ok, vi users aren't out of luck either, and I expect Lynx would work too. So really, you'd be all set.

And if you're going to do that, you might as well get the absolute coolest terminal ever made, the Olivetti TCV-250. (Mouse over the photo and then click 'more' for more photos). The Museum of Modern Art in New York has one on display, so its infinite coolness has been officially recognized by the design gods. The great thing is that since it doubles as a desk, you could probably hide a small *Nix box (say, a Mac mini) in or around it, and the TCV-250 would be all that you'd see.

(Ok, fine, the terminal's actually from the 60's, not the 70's, if you want to be pedantic about it. But now that SCO stock's hit the 70 cent range I'm looking forward to it dropping back to the 60's, so that makes it ok, and besides, this is my blog, and you didn't pay a cent to read it, so why are you complaining?)

Unfortunately all the stuff I can find about the TCV-250 on the net is just other people oohing and aaahing over it. And you can't blame them, I mean, check out that round monitor. Utter awesomeness. But there aren't any tech specs that I can find, and not even any mention of what it was originally supposed to connect to. And I also don't know where you'd get one, other than robbing the museum, which is inadvisable. I don't see a termcap or terminfo entry for it, and those never get thrown away once written, so it probably wasn't used as a Unix terminal way back when. So if someone was to give me one for Christmas or whatever, hint hint, I'd be willing to have a go at it. You know, to contribute to the greater good of humanity and all that.