Let's make it a good, good happy weekend!

Some days are miserable.  Some days are great. 

Some days you just have to relax and be patient for the world to come back to it’s senses. 

Today was one of those days that fell into place in the world of tech. 

You’re either a complete Linux geek or a Unix greybeard or some combination thereof if you’re following this.  There’s been this little lawsuit going down in the States between a whole bunch of companies.  Don’t worry, I’ll summarize.  Notably, there has been this group of litigeous bastards (old joke, ha ha) called SCO who seem to have been suing everything in sight.  They sued IBM for allegedly putting SCO propriety code into Linux - not that SCO would tell us precisely what that code was.  They’ve sued former customers like Auto Zone and DaimlerChrysler.  (Hint:  If you’re a company that has to sue your former customers - you’re on really shaky ground.)

Let’s see…  Red Hat counter-sued SCO to basically force SCO to stop what Red Hat sees as SCO’s campaign to sully Linux and to declare that Red Hat has not violated SCO’s copyright or any trade secrets.

Meanwhile Novell stepped in and declared that SCO was wrong when they were saying they owned UNIX and that Novell actually had kept the copyrights for UNIX.  Of course, Novell was claiming that SCO actually owed them money from licencing (from Microsoft and Sun) and that Novell - not SCO - were the ones who could waive the right to sue IBM and Sequent.  Novell had done so, of course, potentially making the rest of SCO’s legal schenanigans very moot indeed.

Novell got their ruling today.  Novell retained the copyright to UNIX, and SCO needed to respect Novell’s choice to waive the lawsuit.  As PJ says, it’s not entirely over, but this certainly puts things in order to box it up and tie it with a ribbon.

Ms. Jones, I salute you.  It’s a pleasure to read your insight and I thank you for all the work you’ve put into this.  Keep going, PJ, make the world a better place.

I will still complain about the court system, though.  Call me a Doubting Thomas if you will, but this was a long ways to go with little gain to show at the end to really demonstrate that justice has been carried out here.  Justice delayed is justice denied, just because the right result came out of this part doesn’t mean it’s been good all around.

But tonight is the time for celebration.  PJ goes with a red dress and chocolate.  I’ll try to come up with something original of my own..