Yes, that’s right; my mom is an Ubuntu user. She has been for about a year now (since Edgy). This is the story of how it all got started. (more…)

OK, don’t get me wrong, here. I have my myspace. I’ve been there since it was cool, but what happened? Why isn’t it cool anymore? Granted, they have a bazillion users, but anyone who’s been there awhile knows that something happened for the worse some time ago. Was it NewsCorp? I don’t think so. I think it was started long before that giant acquisition. Two words: user control. (more…)

During the day, I’m a Jaded, 20-something, Network Engineer in a small, mild-mannered company. Up the stairs from me, work the three programmers. Last week, while upstairs filling our coffee cups, I was explaining to a coworker the upcoming death of SCO, when, unexpectedly, the head-programmer walked out from behind his corner-cubical to say, “You need to get all the facts, SCO still owns all the work they’ve done on OpenServer.” My story begins.

Several years ago, a linux provider called Caldera acquired the Server Software and Services division of the Santa Cruz Operation, or Old SCO. With it, they obtained certain rights to Unix and UnixWare. They changed their name to The SCO Group, to sound more convincing. They then decided to diversify their business plan by suing, or threatening to sue every linux vendor and customer under the sun for violating “their” Unix patents with code contained in linux unless they were to purchase a license that allowed it (SCOsource). They’d never shown any actual evidence that any code was infringing, but, never-the-less, there were companies that saw it as justified to buy SCO products when outfitting their own servers. We were one of those companies. The cases that SCO were involved, and their respective Wikipedia entries are as follows:

• SCO v. IBM
• Red Hat v. SCO
• SCO v. Novell
• SCO v. AutoZone
• SCO v. DaimlerChrysler

A very prestigious list of lawsuits indeed. That is, until it was shown in court that new SCO didn’t actually own the Unix source they claimed to. On August 10th of this year, in the case of SCO v. Novell, the presiding Judge Dale Kimball ruled not only that Novell had retained its copyrights or Unix and UnixWare but that SCO was to pay a to-be-determined amount of their income from their two largest (read: only large) sales of SCOsource licenses: Microsoft and Sun. With interest, this amount could reach roughly $30 million. According to my calculations, that’s actually quite a bit more (we’ll call it $20 million more) than SCO’s cash on hand. Seems to me they’re in a bit of a pickle.

I’m brought back to the end of my first paragraph. Do I have my facts straight? I think so. I understand that SCO stills claims to own all the after-”purchase” work done on their OpenServer, but what good is that when progress had been slow and you owe three times the cash you have on hand? Am I misguided, or shall I say it again? We have a dead man walking.