Walk Alone

And it took four long years. SCO got its Unix IP claims thrown out. No doubt about it - Novell owns Unix IP. That will have a domino effect on SCO’s case against IBM (and many other companies). If SCO doesn’t own Unix IP, there arises no case of IBM violating it by (allegedly) inserting Unix code into Linux code.

The seed of this litigation sprouted after IBM and SCO had a fallout over Project Monterey. When IBM moved on after declaring the project dead, SCO was left without a viable plan for the future. Decision: screw the tech vision, sue the f***kers. What should have been a contract dispute spiraled into an industry-wide battle. Net result: SCO is D-E-A-D.

Just proves that it is only the lawyers who benefit from litigation.

What I’m thinking here is - do we hold Sun and Microsoft accountable for their part in supporting SCO? Both the companies bought licenses from SCO which enabled it to finance its litigation activities. Even so, Sun did a nice turnaround. OpenOffice, if nothing else, redeems them from their past. And trust me, Sun has given Open Source a lot more than OpenOffice.

On the other hand, Microsoft has been a persistent bug. Sun bought licenses for a few Unix drivers (it had originally licensed Unix from AT&T) but MS bought a complete Unix license just for the heck of it. Pray tell, what has MS done on the Unix scene? Nothing. It was just an excuse for pumping money into SCO.

Indeed, the MS-Novell deal is more of an insurance for Microsoft than for Novell’s Linux customers. After all, Microsoft licensed Unix from SCO, who had no friggin’ rights to license it in the first place! Oops!

Meanwhile, it is surprising that while MS can count the number of patents violated, it can’t list them out. Open Source developers are waiting. Making people wait is bad manners.

FUD, FUD, FUD.

I realized the utility of “Look before you leap”.

Having procured a 64 MB flash drive, I was looking around to putting it to a better use than just carrying files. And I found a good one - as a bootable Linux USB key. At last count, there three good quality distros for less than 64 MB -Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux and spblinux. Plus I believe that using SYSLINUX, it could be possible to make a bootable USB key from just any distro’s ISO image which fits on your flash drive, even Knoppix, if you got a 1 GB key!!

I went about downloading the manuals, how-tos and the 50 MB ISO files. After an entire day spent downloading, I thought of checking my BIOS - and it was not able to boot from a USB device… The entire project was summarily abandoned.

Before that, I tried to get a BIOS update. Again, I was ready with a flashing utility but without a proper bin file for the update…

Guess if I do manage to get the USB on my list of bootable devices, it make a great project. Any ideas on making my BIOS boot from USB welcome.