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Back in 2007, it seemed like the SCO nightmare was done; the company had suffered a summary judgment depriving it of its claim to the Unix copyrights and it had gone into bankruptcy proceedings. In the latter half of 2009, though, SCO is still here. Now, an appeals court has ruled [PDF] that part of the 2007 judgment was erroneous and must be reconsidered; some worry that SCO could come back, zombie-like, to terrorize again. The real threat may not be SCO, though, but what comes after. The agreement between Novell and the Santa Cruz Operation was a mess which never clearly spelled out what was being sold. It is far from surprising that Novell and the company now known as the SCO Group disagree on its particulars. The lawyers involved in making that agreement, quite simply, did not do their job. Even so, the district court, in 2007, was able to obtain enough clarity from this document to conclude that there was no question at all of whether the Unix copyrights had been transferred to SCO. The result was a summary judgment throwing out SCO's claims regarding those copyrights. That judgment was welcomed in the community, but there may be justice to SCO's claim that it was a little too hasty.

Oracle Corp. ended it silence Thursday on its post-merger plans for Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Unix systems in an advertisement aimed at Sun customers to keep them from leaving the Sparc and Solaris platforms. Oracle's ad to "Sun customers," makes a number of promises that includes spending more "than Sun does now," on developing Sparc and Solaris, as well as boosting service and support by having "more than twice as many hardware specialists than Sun does now."

IBM has begun offering a free version of its Enterprise Generation Language (EGL) tools, so developers can build dynamic web applications without getting their hands dirty using HTML or JavaScript. Big Blue's new EGL Community Edition is an Eclipse-based development tool based on code plucked from IBM's Rational Business Developer workbench, which the company has been selling for years. EGL applications or services are written, tested and debugged at the EGL source level, then compiled to Java, COBOL, or JavaScript.

Charlie Schluting helps admins decide if Xen is a viable alternative to VMWare. Why move away from VMWare? Xen is open source and less expensive. But will it do the job?

Six steps to accelerate Solaris to Linux on POWER porting tasks. Accelerate your porting efforts by following this six-step guide. Learn the differences between Solaris and Linux on POWER that you commonly encounter during a port. Get an introduction to the development environment for Linux running on IBM POWER processor-based systems and see how Sun's compiler/linker switches compare with those of GNU GCC and the IBM native compiler. Finally, learn about tools for performance analysis and software packaging for Linux on POWER.

VirtualBox is a free, powerful and versatile virtualization program which is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows hosts, and can virtualize many different Operating Systems. VirtualBox was originally developed by Innotek, but was purchased by Sun and renamed Sun xVM VirtualBox. There are several versions of the program, but I use the free closed-source version, since it has more features than Virtualbox OSE.

Nominations are officially open for the 9th annual Linux Medical News Freedom Award to be presented at the November 14th-18th AMIA Fall conference in San Francisco, CA. Deadline for entries is September 30th, 2009. This is NOT a officially sponsored award or event of AMIA. This award is co-sponsored by the IMIA Open Source Working Group.

The CodePlex Foundation, a non-profit foundation formed with the mission of enabling the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities, launched today, September 10, 2009. Incorporated as a 501.c6 non-profit, the CodePlex Foundation was created as a forum in which open source communities and the software development community can come together with the shared goal of increasing participation in open source community projects. The CodePlex Foundation will complement existing open source foundations and organizations, providing a forum in which best practices and shared understanding can be established by a broad group of participants, both software companies and open source communities. Initial funding for the Foundation comes from Microsoft Corporation.

[It is going to be very interesting to see how they use this new tool of theirs. - Scott]

The controversy continues to heat up around Microsoft's misleading anti-Linux training materials designed for Best Buy salespeople. Meanwhile, the Linux Foundation's Jim Zemlin has alleged that Microsoft tried to spread anti-Linux FUD by dumping 22 Linux-related patents in the hopes they'd be purchased by "patent trolls."

Linux is fun, in my opinion, and I have been using it as my sole operating system since 2001. Most major Linux distributions are accompanied by well-stocked software repositories so I don't need to look very far to find a solution for any given task. However, there are times when I need a bit training and the first thing I do is reach for a tutorial. Linux is powerful and contributes greatly to productivity, but, as with most things in life, a new system can require a learning curve. This is where tutorials come in handy.

Some complain that there is simply too much choice in the free software world and far too many Linux distributions. Well, now there’s another called Lubuntu. A derivative of Ubuntu with the LXDE desktop, it’s super light and very fast. Finally, there’s an Ubuntu perfectly suited to those older, low end machines!

Windows 7 is better than Vista. Great. But saying that is like saying you'd rather catch the common cold instead of swine flu. Aside from the default options being obnoxious and hard to use, there are several things I need to see in a Windows operating system before I'll even contemplate switching back.

The latest version of Linux offers a whole host of new features – for example a USB 3.0 infrastructure, drivers for the Sound Blaster X-Fi, KMS support for Radeon chips and improved versions of Btrfs and Ext4. As is traditional with new Linux versions in the main development branch, however, this is only the tip of the iceberg.

In this talk I take you through how I produce podcasts like the Software Freedom Law Show and Linux Outlaws using only Free Software and Open Source solutions. Sound engineering is something I’ve done for a long time and it’s a real passion of mine. I hope that comes across in the talk.

X.Org 7.5 with X Server 1.7 will be arriving months late once it's released after failing to meet the original April release schedule and then failed twice with two more proposed releases during the summer. However, the latest release schedule, which puts the final release in late September or so, might actually work out this time -- in good part thanks to Peter Hutterer.

A planned maintenance for the transformers for the openSUSE servers at the Nuremberg office will bring down the critical services for a few days over the 9/11 weekend.

A message on the Chromium Blog indicates that Google are beginning the process of rolling out extensions for Google Chrome. Although Chrome and Chromium are regarded as good browsers, critics have pointed to the lack of Firefox style Add-ons as a reason for it not being adopted more widely. Google have been working on implementing extensions and have now moved to turn on the extensions system in the Dev channel builds of Chrome and Chromium.

A recent Blog of helios reported, as well as many other blogs, that Microsoft is sending literature, and sometimes salespeople, to train and educate employees from Staples, Best Buy and now Office Depot, in the art of Linux FUD. The outcry from our community has been impressive....as have the actual materials that have been handed out to various store employees. Wanna take a guess at which one will have an impact?

This tutorial shows how to set up a CentOS 4.8 server that offers all services needed by ISPs and web hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Dovecot POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. In the end you should have a system that works reliably, and if you like you can install the free webhosting control panel ISPConfig (i.e., ISPConfig runs on it out of the box).

Let’s roll up our sleeves and dig around inside webOS to find out just what’s available to the developer looking to make modifications on a rooted device.