Much has happened worthy of a mention today, firstly is the long running law suit between IBM and SCO over Linux, Federal Judge Kimball denied IBM’s motion for a summary judgement, but did so in a manner that shows that he seriously doubts the merits of SCO’s case.
“Despite the vast disparity between SCO’s public accusations and its actual evidence–or complete lack thereof–and the resulting temptation to grant IBM’s motion, the court has determined that it would be premature to grant summary judgement,” Kimball wrote. “Viewed against the backdrop of SCO’s plethora of public statements concerning IBM’s and others’ infringement of SCO’s purported copyrights to the Unix software, it is astonishing that SCO has not offered any competent evidence to create a disputed fact regarding whether IBM has infringed SCO’s alleged copyrights through IBM’s Linux activities.”
Although IBM didn’t get what it wanted here, the signs are pretty good that the Judge has no more patience for SCO’s behaviour. Read more here.
In other Open Source news, South America apparently has the most Open Source groupies in government as nearly every government department over there is setting up an Open Source Agenda. Expect Bill Gates and co to head over there at some stage and try to convince them that giving Microsoft their money is the better solution.
Open Source is spreading away from it’s software heritage with news of a Biology Open Source IP system, designed to get scientists to co-operate on important work. This could be the start of something big. Read more here.
Yahoo has released a free search tool bar for the Firefox web browser. Firefox has been downloaded nearly 23.5 million times now, and it’s share of the browser market grew by 34% in last November alone.
Lastly comes news from Opera, the little guys with the most popular web browser for mobile phones on the planet. They are creating a new system whereby the browser is the platform, meaning companies like Nokia can create the entire user interface of the phone though the browser. This is very cool, because it means a company can release a phone, running Windows CE, Symbian, Linux or any other phone OS, and since all of them can run Opera, they all will look and operate the same. Excellent Idea. Read more here.
