The Big News

If you disconnect yourself from news sources over the weekend, something that's increasingly hard to do, you are often met on a Monday morning by some surprising news item. Of course, what's big news to you might not even be on your neighbor's radar....

A lot of Americans awoke on the morning of August 13 to learn to their shock that Bush's Brain, Karl Rove, was resigning from the White House. Others may have felt that the big news item was that the Perseids were putting on a great pre-dawn show.

But for some of us the big bombshell was the ruling in a Federal court that SCO does not own UNIX. Novell does. This would seem to take all the meat out of SCO's lawsuit against IBM, thwart any attempts to extort money from the Linux community, and probably end whatever secret relationship Microsoft may have had with SCO. The judge even said that SCO had improperly collected money from Sun and Microsoft that it had to pay to Novell. SCO, no surprise, is talking appeal.

On Slashdot a debate erupted about what this ruling might mean for Sun. Those who know something of Sun's long and complex relationship with UNIX seemed to think the answer was: nothing.

Of more interest here is the matter of what the ruling means to Open Source -- and particularly for Open Source Java. Early opinions suggest: nothing but good.

Posted by Mike Swaine at 10:24 AM  Permalink