Practical Technology

After covering the war of words over IBM’s use of patents in a business dispute with French start-up TurboHercules and giving my two cents on this open-source family fight, I’d hope the matter would die down. I was wrong. Florien Mueller, the founder of the European NoSoftwarePatents campaign, who started this most recent open-source internal [...]

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Do you know why Unix failed to take off as a mainstream operating system? It wasn’t because it was too hard to use. Mac OS X, the universally acclaimed ‘easy’ operating system is built on top of BSD Unix. It’s certainly not because Windows is better. It wasn’t and it isn’t. No, I put most [...]

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The recent attacks on IBM patent use by some in the open-source community are way out of line. First things first, I hate software patents as much as the next open-source supporter, but the recent claims that IBM has betrayed open-source with recent patent claims are way over the top. If it were just one [...]

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Ding Dong! The SCO is dead. Which old SCO? The Wicked SCO! Ding Dong! The Wicked SCO is dead! Yes, it’s true. After just more than 7-years of SCO lawsuits, SCO has lost its last real chance of causing Linux and the companies that support it-IBM; Novell, and Red Hat–any real trouble. In a U.S. [...]

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I’ve given up on predicting when the zombie movie series staring the undead SCO monster is finally going to stay quietly in its grave Still, this week a jury is deciding whether SCO or Novell owns Unix’s intellectual property rights. You may have thought that this was settled. Most of us who followed SCO certainly [...]

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