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But I feel bad for SCO's real employees.

I feel the opposite as you. I feel that any employee that stayed during this course of action (especially into 2004) must condone what the company is doing, and is part and supporter of the "Caldera FUD movement" (for a lack of a better term I guess). As I recall many of them volunteered to make anti-Linux signs on the behest of a SCO executive on the day when the Provo Linux Users' group held a "protest SCO" day (original Slashdot story)

I imagine one day should I notice any of the current 166 alleged SCO employees standing on freeway on-ramps with "will work for food" signs would be better off to stand clear of my car or any adjacent puddles in my path. At the very least they should have the sense to omit Caldera/SCO from their resumes -- they can mitigate this work history by claiming to have been in prison.

The Mac platform has a pretty good shareware community that is helped by sites like MacUpdate and VersionTracker. The Mac, having a smaller percentage of the market, has the benefit (for shareware developers at least) of having more holes that shareware developers can fill. So if you have a great idea and can turn it into a great app, then you have a good chance of finding success in the Mac market. Watson, Konfabulator, and NetNewsWire are a few great shareware apps on the Mac. Unfortunately Apple might decide to fill the same holes that your app might fill as was the case with Watson and now Konfabulator.

I have found a small amount of success myself with my Shareware app, HyperSpell. But its nothing I could ever quit my day job over. Mainly its something to do in my spare time and it filled a hole that I wanted filled. The biggest problem most shareware developers face is just getting people to know that their app exists (marketing).

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Not free as in effort, but I'm willing to try it.
Free Flat Screens | Free iPod Photo

Maybe open source is communistic after all.

And Vietnam is just the first domino.

Hm, it's not obvious at all to me. How does pissing off the Open Source community "increase SCO shareholder value"? Much more likely SCO is just trying to extort $$$ out of companies that use Linux, and is pissing off the Open Source community as a side effect. (on the other hand, SCO's stupid placards do lend credence to the just-trying-to-piss-us-off argument, if not a motive)

"I think this [website] comes from a few individuals in the open-source community, which tends to paint a bad picture of the community as a whole. I think most in the open-source community are good, hard-working developers that want to create some great things. It's unfortunate that a few bad apples spoil the image of the whole group." - Blake Stowell, September 25 2003

Thanks to SearchEnterpriseLinux for their coverage, but we must disagree with the statement that our site "excerpts several comments SCO officials have allegedly made about Linux during the past year or so." None of these comments are "allegedly" -- they're 100% verifiable fact, statements made in front of God and everyone...which is the point of providing links, so the reader can check the full original context. Of greater significance is the assumption that our creation must be motivated by anger; since we don't know Darl personally, our feelings could best be described as "affection". Like Saeed al-Sahaf, McBride proves that "truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense." With his rampant contradictions and defiance of all logic, he provides us with the finest gift of all -- the gift of laughter. Rather than provide needless attempts at witty commentary, we prefer to let his statements speak for themselves.

You down with OPIP?

Not so fast. C&G SpellCatcher, formerly Thunder 7 is an excellent, unique app that Cocoa services fail to replace because so few applications use Cocoa services.

That's what HyperSpell is for. It lets you access OS X's spellchecker from any application, and it's free.

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This post checked with HyperSpell

Neat-o, but the entities (Microsoft, SCO, etc.) that are attacking the GPL as liberal/socialist/communist are in the US, and **THEY**, not me, **THEY** are doing so in that context. I didn't make up the words, so if you have a gripe about semantics, talk to somebody else. I was trying to head off this argument because It - appears - to - be - an - issue, and it shouldn't be.

I am sorry I failed.

Right here, the poster in the upper-right that says SUE ME.

Let us consider the following facts:

• Linux user cannot be characterized, by and large, as music or software pirates -- there is no precedent to label them as such any more than Microsoft Windows users
• Not paying for Linux is not a piracy issue, Linux is, by it intent and modus operandi free of licensed and proprietary code
• Presuming that IBM has placed illegitimate, license bearing code into the Linux source tree this does not necessarily reflect poorly on Linus Torvalds, Linux kernel developers, Linux users or the OpenSource community
• Linux usage != stupidity. (I can only assume that this was meant to be farsical. In the realm of debate the tactic of argumentum ad hominim, "argument against the man," (In this case: "You're stupid!") is generally abandoned in grade school.
• "Ya Vol!"[sic] (Intended, correct me if I'm wrong, to be "Jawoll!" a characterization of Nazi adherence to orders popularized by "Hogan's Heroes".) is a crude characiture of nazism not communism. But hey! To the culturally illiterate, what's the difference? Besides, IBM is an oligarchy.
• And... Well I could go on but that would be a full scale rant.

Copy of a post to LWN in answer to someone else who applauded the humour:

The Who's down with Other People's Intellectual Property sign is major chutzpah. The IP which TSG (not the original SCO, The SCO Group) is laying claim to is code written by IBM which belongs to IBM according to the terms of the AT&T agreement.

For an example of such code, turn to SMP. TSG's own SMP implementation sucks so badly that all of their licencees, past and present, have written and are using their own implementation instead. TSG is claiming ownership of those implementations.

The short story is that the IP in contention does not belong to TSG even if it was originally developed (by IBM) for use with SCO UNIX or UnixWare sources and is not a part of the BSD codebase or otherwise public domain or copyright (e.g. GPL) by others. To put it in the same terms that TSG are applying to IBM and Linux TSG are using barratry to steal the rights to code that they did not write and do not own.

It's worse than that. If you read what Chris Sontag said in the BYTE article, you will see that TSG are trying to leverage their barratry to steal ownership of every significant OS in the world.

You know how annoying parking meters are? In asserting that everything else descends at least in principle from their UNIX codebase, TSG are trying to install a meter on every CPU in the world, starting with the USA. They are trying to encumber everybody with a licence agreement, but instead of using Microsoft's attrition method, they're aiming for one fell swoop.

To show you how brazen this is, consider the same scenario in another industry. The Canopy Group buys Ford, then claims that since every production-line car in the world was derived in one way or another from Henry Ford's system. They start with General Motors but have an eye on an unexpectedly thriving kit-car industry. Is the analogy clear, and good enough?

While TSG employees might be fine and friendly to deal with, TSG management is trying to stage one of the biggest ripoffs in software history. If they succeed, it will undermine the livelihood implied in tens of thousands of Linux-related job in the USA and greatly slow Linux deployment worldwide. They even have the gall to hint about taxing the BSDs! If they fail, TSG and these guys' jobs, pensions etc will be a scorched memory.

This (to say nothing of much other lying and prevarication) makes those posters a lot less funny than you hope. Ha, ha, and all, but meanwhile they're trying to throw the IT world over a barrel.

And suddenly Boise' actions make sick sense. In the unlikely event of him winning this one, he'll be first in line for the next one, and the next, and the next... and if TSG's licence works out to something of the order of $100 a CPU a year, their income will easily exceed Microsoft's. Are you reading me, Bill?

The penny evidently hasn't yet dropped for Sun. The $100M they've already paid is a drop in the bucket compared with what TSG will get out of them if they win.

My co-workers and I were the ones that took some of the pictures. You can find more of them here (with mirrors):

http://www.kuwan.net/scotesters/index.html

http://www.karlrees.com/sco/scotesters/index.html

http://www.normanfam.org/sco/scotesters/index.html

I should note that Ralph Yarrows, head of the Canopy group which owns 46% of SCO, was the one to organize the anti-protest and was the one who had the posters made.

My co-workers and I were the ones that took some of the pictures. You can find more of them here (with mirrors):

http://www.kuwan.net/scotesters/index.html

http://www.karlrees.com/sco/scotesters/index.html

http://www.normanfam.org/sco/scotesters/index.html

I should note that Ralph Yarrows, head of the Canopy group which owns 46% of SCO, was the one to organize the anti-protest and was the one who had the posters made.