18 Jan 2004 garym   » (Master)

SCO Scuttle and other SPECTREs

Of course it's bogus, and about as likely to score a land-claim as the bid to have most of North America returned to the First Nations peoples (even where such claims have legal basis) there's just too much water under the bridge now to do much other than shrug, but as we all know, lawyers don't get paid to shrug.

So it's a countdown to yet another non-event for January 27th when SCO will (this time for sure) finally disclose what has their ire in such a knot, and then the long and painful march to the court date of April 2005, during which period we'll all get deluged by terrabits of pundit profferings --- yeah, I remember the Microsoft Anti-Trust case, and yes, I confess, I even played a part of that media frenzy, chatting with Bob Young while he caught a ferry just to ask his 'reaction' to the finding ... as if it really mattered.

But it doesn't matter, does it. It's bogus, playing into the media hype specifically designed not to inform us, but to feed us more ZDNet advertisements, lined up to dutifully hand our eyeballs over to the flash animation sidebars, and who cares what the content is. It's a shame it can't be wholesome content like Conrad's, but alas, no, it's our own media circus, our own OJ Simpson nee Jacko nee Jackie O (for those old enough, or Maggie T for us Canucks) and it's oh so predictable, like the so-called war correspondents who sit in hotels, barred from direct observation, speculating over rumours and gossip presented nightly via satellite as 'news' ... and now, seeded by the lunacy of SCO, we're about to do it too, again, still.

Of course the solution to the whole IP Patent Opensource Infringment Thing is really quite simple: Release all code anonymously via identity-protecting file-trading networks ... but, like, not many geek egos are going to let that happen --- anonymous code was, once upon a time, quite prevalent, perhaps even dominant, but that was a long time ago, back when we cared more about what computers actually did rather than who it was that made them do it.

In the mean time, come Jan 27 and in that long march to 2005, do yourself a favour: Grab all your headlines via RSS, and at the least hint of anything even remotely related to the SCO caper, just look away and seek instead real news, like Batboy or the latest Jacko story ...

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