Category: Open Source News

After 7 years of FUD, FUD, FUD, SCO lost the most important case today: They do NOT own the copyrights to Unix.  This means that all the other lawsuits will collapse almost instantly.  Poof.  Luckily SCO will go down the tubes too and that will be that.  Excellent.  Finally.  Phew. http://www.novell.com/prblogs/?p=2153

According to this article, the NYSE is now running Linux on all it's core systems.  This is really great news for a number of reasons. 

Going back a bit, you will recall that Microsoft actually bankrolled part of the SCO litigation? The logic was that the Linux legal FUD would help them. 

Alas, it seems to have gone a bit Pete for MS, with a tremendous backfire.  Far from being driven into the arms of Microsoft, the NYSE has sided with the devil and decided that a non proprietarty unix like operating system is what they wanted.

NYSE have moved around 600 HP servers (yes, 600) to Linux. 

To say that it's all over bar the shouting might be a bit previous, but on Friday the judge in Novell v SCO decided in favour of Novell, meaning that SCO never owned the Unix copyrights in the first place.  This is really important as it largely pulls the rug out from SCO v IBM too.

It's not quite that clean because SCO do get to keep copyright on Mods made sinc 1995 meanting that they have a couple of bits and bobs left to  sell to unsupecting punters.

It does mean though that SCO now owe most of the licensing monies they took from Microsoft and Sun to Novell, which is nice. 

The share price says it all really: Stock lost 71% of it's value today as investers bolted for the door.  What nutters were still in at that point pretty much deserved to lose it really.

 Great news all round.  All in all the company is now worth slightly less than an empty coke can.

It’s really worth reading the Deposition of SCO Employee Erik W Hughes. He confirms that the Linux Kernel Personality
did indeed include Linux kernel code, and as a result, both UnixWare
7.1.2 and 7.1.3 included Linux kernel code until May of 2003.

Remember that to have done so such
inclusion would have to be under the GPL — yet the question that is
left unanswered, tantalizingly, by the deposition is this: in what way
was the Linux kernel "included" in LKP? Did the UnixWare kernel somehow
make use of the Linux kernel binary? If so, how — and would the use be
intimate enough to have created a "work based on the program" as the
GPL puts it? If not, how was the kernel "included"? Was kernel source
code reused in the UnixWare kernel, as one anonymous source  claimed ages ago? Firm answers to
these questions cannot be gained from this deposition alone, but IBM probably does know, and
we’re definitely getting warmer. And more and more, it looks like SCO’s
goose is cooked.

No wonder SCO is now talking about trying to
survive as a tech company even if they lose the litigation. It also is
now apparent why SCO tried to say the GPL is unconstitutional, void,
voidable, etc., anything to try to make it not be binding on them.
Please don’t anyone ever again tell me that we don’t need the GPL. Look
at the role this champion license has played in SCO v. the World.

Source: Groklaw

Open Office 1.1 beta is out now and the news is that many of the niggles of 1.0.1 are cleaned up. Grab it now from the Open Office site. Features and Fixes include:

• PDF Export
• XHTML Export
• MySQL Support in data sources
• Better internationalization
• Recovery feature for damaged OO files
• Improved detection for dictionaries/thesaurus