From the summary by a couple of good people (Chris Brown and Frank Sorenson) who attended the latest hearing in the SCO versus IBM farce, reported on Groklaw in the story “1st Word From the Court Hearing – Under Advisement“.
Chris Brown writes:

He stated that the discovery sought is plainly relevent including white papers, interim version, notes, & etc. That in the discovery obtained on the 20 developers IBM has turned over already, SCO has found documents that will support its claims. That in the requested discovery SCO seeks evidence of admissions that the source of infringing code is from Sys-V, AIX, or Dynix. He said SCO is entitled to show how that code came from those other operating systems. That SCO is not limited to code-by-code comparisons, but may show how it’s developed.

(Note: In fact SCO was dismissive of what it called “code-by-code” comparisons around a half dozen times during the hearing. Could this be foreshadowing their admission that they have been unable to find any evidence of infringing copied code?)

Frank Sorenson writes:

Normand says that SCO expects to find admissions from IBM’s developers in the materials that the source code came from System V, AIX and Dynix.

Under SCO’s theory, SCO is not limited to demonstrating through a code comparison. They want to show in IBM’s own words, through the developers notes, emails, etc. They expect that they’ll show IBM’s developers see a deficiency in Linux, they’ll implement it using knowledge and code from System V, AIX, and Dynix, then contribute to Linux. The developer may even mention the importance and improvement to Linux. He talks about the insufficiency of doing a code comparison, and how SCO would like to demonstrate using the internal IBM development notes.

So what happened to this then ?

“We’re finding…cases where there is line-by-line code in the Linux kernel that is matching up to our UnixWare code,” McBride said in an interview.

SCO wouldn’t have been misrepresenting or just incompetent by some chance are now looking to cover their tracks ? 🙂

Groklaw has an excellent article written by Georg Greve (the president of FSF Europe) called The Complete Story of the Vienna Conclusions which tells the process that the UN and WIPO went through to reach conclusions and how Microsoft managed to get them changed without even the knowledge of the chair of the committee!

This apparently happened because of a comment by Microsoft on a blog that was, well, shall we say less than well used or publicised. You can read the full comment from Microsoft here.

The relevant quotes are:

p5/2. Digital Rights/Creative Commons
While we largely agree on the point that more choices should be given to creators and users (and the subsequent conclusions on Creative Commons or Wikipedia) we explicitly disagree on the notion that “increasingly, revenue is generated not by selling content and digital works, as they can be freely distributed at almost no cost, but by offering services on top of them. The success of the Free Software Model is one example” and propose to delete this text part completely, as it contains only an one-sided perspective on the ICT industry. The rationale for this is, that the aim of free software is not to enable a healthy business on software but rather to make it even impossible to make any income on software as a commercial product. We don´t see this neither as a viable not as a desirable path for the future economy of Europe.

That’s so bad it’s not even wrong.

P6/3. eLearning and eScience … Deletion of “…like the linux project” as this is only one particular – anti-commercial – specificity of the open source landscape. You could use instead of “Linux” the more broader term of “open source project”.

So Linux is “anti-commercial” ? Quick, someone better tell IBM, Redhat and everyone else who’s making money out of it to stop, quick!

There is an interesting article at LWN about the shared subtrees work that is being merged into 2.6.15.

Bah, the Dapper Drake Live CD still panics on my machine with an Adaptec 2100S card – they’ve still not fixed bug 17897 that’s the result of it wrongly loading both the dpt_i2o driver and the I2O subsystem. 🙁

This is fairly old news now but MIT have developed a US$100 laptop that runs Linux for distribution to schools in the developing world via government programs. MIT has a website for the laptop (which is not yet in production), but the pictures that are available show it in a rather shocking luminous green colour!

The specs are (according to the FAQ):

The proposed $100 machine will be a Linux-based, full-color, full-screen laptop that will use innovative power (including wind-up) and will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data. This rugged laptop will be WiFi-enabled and have USB ports galore. Its current specifications are: 500MHz, 1GB, 1 Megapixel.

There is no “Why that colour ?” question in the FAQ unfortunately..

This looks like rather a nice tool if you’re curious as to what the black hats are up to at the moment – mwcollect simulates an insecure system and, when attacked, works out whether the exploit is trying to download some remote code and obligingly fetches it for you and quarrantines it for later inspection.

Or at least that’s what it says on the site, I’m blogging this as a bookmark so I can have a play at some point..