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On December 14, 2007, the California Court of Appeals ruled in favor of two of the defendants. In one appeal, Eagle Broadband was appealing the award of legal fees to one of the defendants as excessive. The defendant had succeeded in his anti-SLAPP attempts and had the claims against him stricken. In that appeal, Eagle lost and has been ordered to pay defendant the amount the trial court had ruled.

With my new job, I'm now faced with a major challenge. They are a Windows shop with a mix of servers running locally and some hosted, including their major ERP package. Although I've only been working there for about a month, it looks like the overwhelming majority of people confine their work to using e-mail(via a web interface), a web browser, and office productivity suites (e.g. MS Word or Excel, some Powerpoint sprinkled in). There are a few people using tools like MS Project and Visio (and they have a license for Project Server, but I can't tell that they are actually using it). I'm guessing the corporate communications employee is using some graphic packages and some desktop publishing, but I'm not sure what yet. And our fraud investigator, who also manages security, has some apps for creating employee id badges and access cards for doors. Beyond those, I'm not sure there is anything else in use (granted, I haven't even attempted a census of applications yet).

A pennant of pain to illuminate the the wrath
To those who would choose to cross the Nazgul's path.

But over time it's become a fair body of work.  What scares me most is that I've gotten noticably better at it.   Still, IMO, it's nothing grand, but some have found it quite amusing.  Of course, as I've noted it's all dreadfully ephemeral and topical.   A few years from now SCOX will be a footnote in the history books (maybe a chapter - on how not to do it - in a few law books) and the weekly ups and downs referenced by these will be obscure if not completely opaque.   Still, here for your amusement...

The opening of the story is quite telling as it starts with the question, "To Vista or not to Vista". The question was one faced by a school district in Illinois - going forward, would they stick to the Microsoft platform or look at a Linux platform. I raised the same issue with one of my clients a few months - although no action is needed at the present time, eventually they will be forced to upgrade to Vista or try an alternative. Many other people I work with continue to struggle to get PC's with XP loaded instead of Vista - seems you pretty much have to order them on-line as retail stores don't have anything with XP loaded (I'm guessing they are prevented for contractual reasons even if they did want to sell something customers want).

I've been doing some (albeit limited) research into financial analysis and bankruptcy.  As I look at some of the more basic tools one uses in analyzing financial statements, I noted the following:

Thanks for reading,
Jeff

Press release from SCO released today:

http://ir.sco.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=264124

We had been waiting since noting NASDAQ had halted trading shortly after 1p.m.

Update [2007-9-14 16:15:15 by JCausey]:The news has begun trickling out, though I have not yet found anything that is an article other than a reprint of SCO's press release. In any case, it is always nice to see the headlines on the Yahoo! summary page for SCOX looking like this:

Thanks for reading,

Jeff

453    ORDER granting 385 Motion to Strike ; granting 387 Motion to Dismiss ; finding as moot 389 Motion in Limine; granting 391 Motion in Limine; granting 393 Motion in Limine; denying 395 Motion in Limine; finding as moot in part and denying in part [406] & [408] Sealed Amended Motion in Limine; denying 410 Motion for Entry of Judgment. Signed by Judge Dale A. Kimball on 9-7-07. (sih) (Entered: 09/07/2007)

The UNIX copyrights belong (and always did, digression: to the extent they have any residual validity) to Novell.  To pat myself on the back see, http://www.ip-wars.net/story/2007/5/28/143137/155, "Why SCO Does Not Own the UNIX Copyrights".   Kimball's ruling closely follows what I laid out - in considerably more detail, of course, with lots of additional legal citations and references to various declarations.  But in the main he relied on Braham and Almadia's declarations to demonstrate that the written contracts meant what they said, and that "extrinsic" evidence should not be considered.

Microsoft has by word and deed asserted that it has patents upon which Linux and other F/OSS software.   Now letting this become widespread legal warfare would be the worst possible outcome for all participants.   MS runs the risk of having its patents, one by one, invalidated and in time having its business credibility destroyed.   F/OSS runs the risk of becoming de-facto illegal in the US.    The best possible outcome for MS is that no large business will run F/OSS without buying a license from them ... and US companies move more of their operating centers overseas to locales not recognizing software patents and the US more quickly becomes a technological backwater.   The best outcome for F/OSS under the open war scenario is that it lives for years under patent threat, and several companies suffering serious loss and legal expenses, others paying a MS license directly contrary to F/OSS principles thus vastly degrading F/OSS's credibility, and gradually over years invalidating most MS patents one by one.