Did SCO actually buy what it thought it bought?, Jan 08, 2004

Just before Christmas last year, Novell announced publicly that SCO had known for some time that it did not receive all rights and ownership to UNIX technologies, despite public statements to the contrary. Novell has made public correspondence between lawyers representing both Novell and SCO. Read these in their entirety - they are quite enlightening.

These letters finally start getting to the heart of the mysterious "Amendment No. 2" which SCO referred to publicly in a press release dated June 6, claiming it transferred "everything" to them and which Novell claimed never existed - Novell's legal team is adamant that no copy ever existed in their files. Bruce Lowry, director of public relations at Novell told me today, "We've acknowledged publicly that Amendment 2 is valid, although we have not said we agree with SCO's interpretation of Amendment 2. As we said on December 22, we believe we've retained the ownership of UNIX copyrights and have registered those with the US Copyright Office."

A recent article by Richard Stallman on the subject of the direction of the Free Software community provoked a lot of discussion, in particular on whether he is right to push so strongly his principles of Free Software over and above the pragmatic principles of Open Source. In this article I would like to defend Stallman's vision of software, and its place in community rather than as a consumer product, and re-advocate Stallman's assertion that the right to form a community is more important than the ability to use particular software.

Microsoft has acceded to the Finance Ministry's demand that it be allowed to purchase individual components of Microsoft Office, rather than having to purchase the entire package, the ministry said yesterday.

Since this was the heart of the dispute between the ministry and Microsoft - a dispute that recently led the ministry to threaten that it would stop using Microsoft products and switch to open-code software - this concession would presumably clear the way for the ministry to sign a new deal with Microsoft.

The Massachusetts state government's attempt to push open source software is being challenged by one state lawmaker who is questioning the state IT leadership's actions.

"We want to know what their authority is," said Senator Marc Pacheco, who has formally asked the head of the state's Office of Administration and Finance (OAF) to provide him with the legislative authority for its relatively new policy of advocating open source software.

Microsoft is calling its new anti-Linux ad campaign "Get the Facts," but I call it "Get the FUD."

At the heart of the campaign is a new Microsoft web site that provides you with the "industry case studies, business analysts' reports, and test lab results" to make an intelligent decision between Microsoft's operating systems and Linux. Yeah. Right. And, I'm Bill Gates.

International Business Machines Corp. on Thursday announced plans for a retail sales system, which includes everything from the cash register to the computers that store data, based on a version of the Linux operating system from SuSE Linux.

2.6.1-rc3 has been released today.
See changelog for full details.

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