On April 29, SCO will finally have its day in court, but not exactly in the way the Unix and Linux litigation company had planned. If things had gone the way SCO wanted, it would be facing IBM to see how much money it would get for IBM using Unix code in Linux. Instead of that fantasy coming true, SCO will be trying to hang on to what's left of its assets from Novell.
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Member since:2006-12-28
You and Butters are right of course and I guess I expressed myself inadequately.
What I was getting at, and didn't explain properly, is how much SCO's tactics resemble those of a patent troll's.
I know I've made the same comparison in other posts of mine, but come to think about it those posts could have been quite some time ago. My bad!
Member since:2005-07-24
I knew what you meant, but also knew, as soon as I read it that people would be lining up to point out the difference.
But as you say, the tactic is the same; Only the weapon is different. SCO had a particularly poor patent portfolio, and patents were not an option. So they had to work with what they had... or more correctly, what they could *claim* they had with anything at all approaching credibility.
Again, same intent, different weapon. If copyrights are an exacto-knife, patents are a hatchet.
Edited 2008-01-23 14:35 UTC
Member since:2005-07-06
Actually, if you have a look at the IBM case, and their (SCO's) public statements, they said they would also go out and demand payments for patented stuff they owned. They even went as so far to claim that they owned the C programming language - and all companies had to pay them for the privilege.
Basically its just one big fascicle round-about where by a company who can't get its business act together tries litigation instead of improving their product line-up. But I'm not surprised. This is Caldera after all - anyone remember the anti-GPL rhetoric, claiming that it was destroying software - or more like the fact that Caldera was unprofitable for years and Red Hat was charging ahead. Caldera then turned around and failed to take advantages when it was given to them - where was their relationships with companies when it came to their OpenLinux server product?
Quite frankly, SCO would have survived had it never been bought out by Caldera - Had SCO remained a stand alone company, re-organised themselves, and priced their server line up competitive with Windows and Linux over 9 years ago, they wouldn't be in the stick they are now. For those who don't know, SCO back then was Santa Cruz Operations, they were bought out by Caldera who hoped to leverage the UNIX assets and bring that to their Linux product line. They failed to properly commercialise their Linux product line, so they grabbed onto any possible thing that might allow them to survive a little longer - ranging from open source bashing to suing companies based off unprovable claims.
Edited 2008-01-23 14:27 UTC
Official Apple statement on PRISM and privacy: "Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it." This is basically Apple re-publishing their earlier statement in a more official manner. You either believe it, or you don't.
The open source Contiki operating system and its commercial Thingsquare distribution are making strides towards the connected home. According to a Computerworld article, a new LED light bulb manufacturer is putting small computers into their light bulbs. Each computer runs the Contiki OS, which gives each bulb an IP address and allows them to be controlled with a smartphone application. To connect the bulbs to the application, the bulbs use both Wi-Fi and the much lower power IEEE 802.15.4 mesh technology.
"Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it's forced to give the government. The legal filing, which cites the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about sweeping National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic." Draining the ditch after the cow has drowned in it."I can't find one person who has been using the Nexus 7 for an extended period of time, and hasn't seen a massive downgrade in performance. Just what kind of downgrade are we talking here? I cannot pick up my Nexus 7 without experiencing problems like a lag of ten seconds, or more, just to rotate the display; touches refusing to acknowledged; stuttering notification panel actions; and unresponsive apps." Fully and utterly agreed. My Nexus 7 was blazing-fast and awesome for a few months, and at some point, it just started sucking. Just like that. I've tried loads of ROMs, and nothing helps.A new release of the hobby operating system MenuetOS! The release notes are a bit non-descript, but you'll have to take what you can get: "updates and improvements (picview, httpc, ehci, ...)"."The Internet is one of the most transformative technologies of our lifetimes. But for 2 out of every 3 people on earth, a fast, affordable Internet connection is still out of reach. And this is far from being a solved problem. There are many terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity - jungles, archipelagos, mountains. There are also major cost challenges. Right now, for example, in most of the countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month's income. Solving these problems isn't simply a question of time: it requires looking at the problem of access from new angles. So today we're unveiling our latest moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access." Insane.
"MineAssemble is a tiny bootable Minecraft clone written partly in x86 assembly. I made it first and foremost because a university assignment required me to implement a game in assembly for a computer systems course. Because I had never implemented anything more complex than a 'Hello World' bootloader before, I decided I wanted to learn about writing my own kernel code at the same time. Note that the goal of this project was not to write highly efficient hand-optimized assembly code, but rather to have fun and write code that balances readability and speed. This is primarily accomplished by proper commenting and consistent code structuring." Just cool.
Jon Rubinstein, former CEO of Palm: "Well, I'm not sure I would have sold the company to HP. That's for sure. Talk about a waste. Not that I had any choice because when you sell a company you don't get to decide that. Obviously, the board and shareholders decide that. If we had known they were just going to shut it down and never really give it a chance to flourish, what would have been the point of selling the company? I think the deal we had with Verizon really hurt us, but who knew that at the time? These things are all hindsight.""And so it is with Dell's Alienware X51 R2, a small form factor gaming PC in console digs. It's shaped similar to Microsoft's Xbox 360 Slim, and though it's slightly larger than either a 360 or PlayStation 3, the X51 R2 would be right at home in a living room setting nestled next to a large screen TV. Indeed, it's adept at running Steam's Big Picture mode, and if your primary objective is to play games in the living room, go ahead and consider the X51 R2 a hybrid game console." This is obviously not the only machine like this - still, these are very valid console alternatives even for those that don't like being hunched over with a cramped WASD-claw. Also, PC gamers among us: could you get away with the $699 model for gaming?
From Bloomberg: "Microsoft, the world's largest software company, provides intelligence agencies with information about bugs in its popular software before it publicly releases a fix, according to two people familiar with the process. That information can be used to protect government computers and to access the computers of terrorists or military foes." The lid has officially been blown off.
Member since:
2007-03-29
However, the whole SCO story is not about patents but about copyright. Their claim was that Linux included original Unix code. They did not claim that any of their patents (if they have any) had been violated.
Edited 2008-01-23 08:24 UTC