Practical Technology

for practical people.

July 16, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

SCO: The zombie flick’s final scene

You know zombie movies. You chop ’em. You set ’em on fire. You machine-gun ’em and they just keep coming.

They’re scary at first, but then, except for the very best zombie movies – Night of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later – the zombies get to be pretty darn boring. SCO, the zombie that wanted to gack Linux, had gotten to be really, really boring.

But, even the longest zombie film finally comes to an end, and it looks like SCO’s day has finally come to a close. On July 16th, Judge Dale Kimball of the U.S. District Court ruled in Novell’s favor in SCO vs. Novell.

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July 16, 2008
by sjvn01
4 Comments

SCO goes down and Sun’s in Trouble

The decision is in, and SCO has gone down in defeat. The U.S. District Court in Utah has ruled in favor of Novell in SCO vs. Novell, the keystone case in SCO’s long, and ultimately unsuccessful war against Linux.

The foundation of Judge Dale Kimball’s decision, that Novell, and not SCO owns the IP (intellectual property) rights to Unix, remains as solid as ever. Instead of showing that Linux violated SCO IP rights to Unix, SCO’s actions has lead to the revelation that it never owned the IP rights to Unix in the first place.

This, within the narrow confines of this trial, means SCO owes Novell over $2.5-million for its Unix deals. In a larger sense it underlines that SCO never had a leg to stand on its case against IBM and Linux.

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July 16, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

Sun Set?

Sun has been a company in trouble for years now. Until recently, I was never really worried about it going under. Now, I’m worried.

Now, I have a love/hate relationship with Sun. I love many of their products like the SPARC workstations and much of the goodness in first the SunOS and now Solaris/OpenSolaris operating systems. I hate the results of their internal civil wars, which has made Sun shift like a snake in desert noon-day light from hardware to software company and from proprietary to open-source company.

I felt like I never knew which Sun I’d be meeting: the good Sun, the one that was open-standard and open-source friendly, or the bad Sun, the company that wanted iron-control over every product that it ever touched. I wasn’t the only one that was confused by Sun. With every switch back and forth it seemed to me that they lost ground.

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July 16, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

Linux for the kids: LinuxWorld Install Fest

Over the last few years, LinuxWorld has become the trade show for Linux, the business, rather than Linux, the community. This year, the show will include a blast from the past as it will include a massive install-fest.

Untangle, an open-source network gateway company, is sponsoring the 1,000 plus computer install-fest. This “Installfest for Schools of 2008” will take place in the exhibit hall of the LinuxWorld Conference August 4-7 at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. The even is also being sponsored by LinuxWorld and the ACCRC (Alameda County Computer Resource Center ) with additional support from Ubuntu, Canonical, and Mozilla.

You can help too. There’s no way Untangle and friends can install that many copies of Ubuntu by itself, so they’re hoping for hundreds of volunteers to refurbish those computers with Linux and basic open-source such as Firefox, and OpenOffice. The finished systems will then be given to local schools in need.

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July 15, 2008
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Linux can save us

In case you haven’t noticed, the economy is collapsing.

You can’t afford to drive anywhere, and, even if you could, you may not have a GM car to drive there for much longer. Some of you may be losing your houses, and the mortgage companies that gave you that mortgage in the first place? IndyMac went down late last week and now the question of the day is which major national bank will follow it down.

What does this have to do with Linux? Everything.

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