Looks like Darl McBride, SCO’s “sue-happy cowboy” CEO, has seen his last roundup. In a new 8-K filing with the Security and Exchange Commission, the company reveals that, under the order of a bankruptcy court, it has eliminated the chief executive officer and president positions and consequently sacked McBride.
“There’s No Free Lunch–or Free Linux.” That was the title of SCO CEO Darl McBride’s keynote address at the Computer Digital Expo in Las Vegas back in 2003, and it signaled the start of a long legal siege. Earlier that day, SCO announced plans to file suit against a large-scale user of Linux as part of its campaign against the open-source operating system.
In Sept. 1991, Microsoft exec Jim Allchin emailed CEO Bill Gates: “We must slow down Novell. As you said Bill, it has to be dramatic. We need to slaughter Novell before they get stronger.” And in 2001 Microsoft Chief Steve Ballmer likened Linux to “cancer.” Later that year, Gates derided open-source licensing models like the one used by Linux as “Pacman-like.”
It’s been a year since Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer first claimed the Linux operating system infringes on Microsoft’s intellectual property and six months since the company’s general counsel, Brad Smith, and vice president of intellectual property and licensing, Horacio Gutierrez, told Fortune magazine that Linux and other open-source software projects between them violate 235 Microsoft [...]
When a company begins characterizing its assets as merely “those remaining,” as the SCO Group did earlier this year, bankruptcy is an inevitability. So it comes as little surprise to learn that the company’s hard fought, but ultimately ludicrous, four-year legal campaign against Linux has ended in a Chapter 11 filing.
Time is the great healer, is it not? In December 2001 Lindows, a small company marketing a Linux-based OS capable of running major Microsoft Windows apps, was sued by the software giant, which claimed Lindows violated its Windows trademark. Most upstart ventures in Lindows’s position would likely have backed down in the face of Redmond’s [...]
Whatever goodwill Dell open-source community gained after selecting Ubuntu as its desktop Linux distribution just went up in smoke like an Incenderon laptop. This morning the PC maker joined the controversial Windows-Linux partnership established last year by Microsoft and Novell. Under the terms of the deal, Dell will market and provide migration support [...]
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
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