SCO What?

I'm struck by the almost unanimous chorus of indifference that has greeted the news that a court has reversed one part of an ealier ruling regarding who owns the Unix copyright:

For the foregoing reasons, we AFFIRM the district court’s judgment with regards to the royalties due Novell under the 2003 Sun-SCO Agreement, but REVERSE the district court’s entry of summary judgment on (1) the ownership of the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights; (2) SCO’s claim seeking specific performance; (3) the scope of Novell’s rights under Section 4.16 of the APA; (4) the application of the covenant of good faith and fair dealing to Novell’s rights under Section 4.16 of the APA. On these issues, we REMAND for trial.

As well as Groklaw, others that are distinctly unimpressed are Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, Roy Schestowitz and Eric Bangemann.

And me to that list: SCO still has everything to prove, and very little money to prove it with. And even if it *did* prove anything, all it would gain would be the right to be ground into very fine particles of dust by IBM's legal department....

Free Software is Trendy

Like many, I've had great fun playing around with Google Trends. The tricky thing is trying to find something sensible to say about what you find there. Luckily, when it comes to GNU/Linux and related matters, Steven Vaughan-Nichols has already done it.

How the Stacks Stack Up

The ever-interesting Steven Vaughan-Nichols, who goes back a long way in the free software world, has a fascinating article about a comparison of two application stacks, one open source, the other from Microsoft. The results were surprising:

The tests showed that such vanilla LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/PERL) stacks as SLES (SUSE Enterprise Linux Server) 9, Zope, ZODB, and PHP and a pure LAMP based on SLES, produced "C" results. They weren't bad, but they weren't anywhere near as good as an out of the box .NET stack based on Windows Server 2003, IIS (Internet Information Server), SQL Server 2005, ASP (Active Server Pages), and SharePoint Portal Server 2003.

The results mirror those of the Mindcraft tests back in the late 1990s, when GNU/Linux found itself whupped by Microsoft. But the consequence was a range of improvements that soon took free software past Windows. However disappointing the current outcome for the stack tests may be, I'm sure that the same will happen here.

Remember: every bug report makes open source stronger, and the same goes for adverse benchmarks.