Practical Technology

Reality, as good writers know, is sometimes stranger than fiction. SCO’s recent performance in the U.S. District Court in Utah is a perfect example. With years to prepare, SCO executives made some remarkable statements in their attempt to show that SCO, not Novell, owns Unix’s copyright.
While this case is not about SCO’s claims that IBM [...]

OpenSolaris, Sun’s open-source take on its Solaris operating system, has finally arrived. Some people, like Jason Perlow at ZDNet think that this is great news and that Sun’s latest operating system will give Linux a real challenge.
Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. I’m inclined to doubt it simply because OpenSolaris has failed to develop [...]

For an executive who had just had his company bought for a cool billion a few months ago and was on the eve of announcing a major update to his business’ flagship database program, former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos, now Sun Microsystems’ senior vice president for databases, didn’t look comfortable. Mickos had come to the [...]

Some people can’t believe Sun actually spent a billion dollars for MySQL; I can’t believe they got such a great deal.
If you believe my long-time colleague John C. Dvorak, Sun purchasing open-source database power MySQL was “perhaps the worst single event I have ever witnessed in the history of tech mergers and acquisitions.” Nonsense! This [...]

When Judge Kimball ruled against SCO in favor of Novel and said that Novell owned Unix’s IP (intellectual property), that was the end of SCO. So now, SCO’s legal cases are dead — but what about its friends and partners?
I’ve said since the beginning that there was next to nothing to SCO’s claims that Unix [...]