open sourcery: a blog about open source

Thursday, January 8th

The continuing saga of SCO vs. the world...

music: Liz Phair
mood: tired

The battle wages of SCO vs the rest of the open source community. Now Novell (who claims some Unix copyrights) is stating that SCO did not receive ownership of all UNIX technologies...

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/01/08/1073437391747.html

If you've kept up with open source news, or read /. (slashdot.org) then you're probably familiar with this battle that has been going on for almost a year. Its a battle of SCO claiming that they own ALL UNIX copyrights as well as claiming that some of Linux's kernel has stolen or borrowed code from UNIX.

So why is SCO so upset? Because they're greedy... they want everyone who runs Linux to pay them a licensing fee. I believe the workstation license was something like $699 for single processers and more than $1000 for more than one processor. If you look at their stock, you'll see where stupid non-technical stockbrokers are buying SCOX stock in the hopes that Linux will lose and SCO will be able to get millions and millions of dollars from all these freeloading Linux users...

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=SCOX&t=1y&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=

You will also notice that top execs in SCO are SELLING their stock at the higher price so that they can gain profit off of others. I hope these guys like sharing a cell with the Enron execs...

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/it?s=SCOX

SCO has already filed lawsuits against IBM, which then provoked Red Hat to file suit against SCO. Then SCO later started going after Fortune 500 companies who run Linux, as well as other large Linux users. They've even gone after Hollywood because they use hundreds of Linux machines for animation and other graphic rendering.

Lately though, Novell has gotten into the mix with their aquisition of Suse Linux. They're also in the transition of migrating their services to run on Linux instead of Microsoft.





brenner on 01.08.04 @ 09:34 PM EST [link] [No Comments]


Wednesday, January 7th

a mechanical blog note

music: Beastie Boys
mood: hopeful

Hi, all. Please note that you have to scroll down toward the bottom of this page to find the blog login link. I've tried several methods to put the sidebar on the side, to no avail as yet.

Five extra credit points to any student who provides a successful method for getting the sidebar to show up on the side... happy first day of classes!
scott on 01.07.04 @ 07:52 AM EST [link] [1 Comment]


Monday, January 5th

open source on a Mac?

music: Radiohead
mood: puckish

So can one run open source software on a Mac, you ask? The answer is an unqualified 'yes!' You can go a more brute-force way, or just run any of the software that we're covering this semester on any Mac OS X system you choose. Mine came shipped with Apache and Perl, for example.

Part of what makes this so easy is that Mac OS X is built on top of FreeBSD, a variant of Berkeley Software Distribution UNIX.

If this nerds you out, consider that I have a friend who tried to get an early release of Apple's Darwin running on an Intel system in the late 90s...
scott on 01.05.04 @ 10:29 PM EST [link] [No Comments]


Stallman on free software and GNU's 20th anniversary

music: Radiohead
mood: optimistic

Hello, class. Here's a timely link for our first week, as you're reading about 'free software', and 'open source'. You'll find that RMS (aka Richard M. Stallman) is an interesting character, to be sure.

You can check it out. Good evening, folks.


scott on 01.05.04 @ 09:38 PM EST [link] [No Comments]