Was very happy to read today that the air has gone out of the SCO balloon. Since 2003 SCO has been a thorn in the side for free software developers with the ongoing lawsuits and claims about Unix and Linux. With Judge Kimball not essentially gutting their case I think we have mostly seen the last of McBride and company. I think the outcome of this lawsuit will play a major role also in defining the rules of the game in terms of open source, in some sense showing that if a sleazy corporation want to try to get ahead of the game by bogus lawsuits the community now has enough resources and friends to shut them down.
In combination with the recent US supreme court ruling on software patents I think we will see a lot of changes in the coming years as the lock in model of software fail. I think the next big battleground might very well be media codecs where the US supreme courts ruling can level the playingfield and cause a lot of media codecs to become open source compatible as their patent protections fall away.
Asus Pro31s and Linux
As a followup to my blog post about the problems I had running Linux on my Asus laptop I thought I should mention that with the latest kernels for Fedora it works pretty well. The Wireless and DVD player for instance both run fine, and I am able to switch to console mode easily now without the screen going black. Suspend do not work 100% yet, but that is a common problem with a lot of laptops.
I must be really out of it — I’ve somehow missed hearing about that Supreme Court ruling until now. What was the name of the case, so I can go look it up?
There is an article on the supreme court ruling here
. Some googling should reveal a lot of other articles talking about it.