OStatic

In its Quixotic effort to never admit defeat, the SCO Group has (again) filed reorganization plans in Bankruptcy Court. It has been a drawn out procedure that first raised the ire of the open source world, and later the courts, as appeals were filed and reorganization plans were rejected and resubmitted.

The SCO Group is giving it another shot, this time proposing it can rise from its ashes by selling some of its assets in a public auction. The money made from these sales will contribute to the operating budget and fund the OpenServer product line and mobile business development. A press release issued earlier says that there are several investment groups interested in a sell off, but even so, they'll still have to wait to hear what the Court says.

Over at Internetnews.com, Sean Michael Kerner points out an intriguing bit of information spotted at Groklaw indicating that SCO appears to be taking some steps toward reincorporating the Caldera International name. Insert copious amounts of wild speculation here.

SCO is currently restructuring, and truth be told, nobody knows what this filing for reincorporation truly means. Is SCO starting a new subsidiary? Is it trying to distance itself from its past? Is it going to deal in any way with Linux distribution development?

Check out Linus Torvalds' rant about security people .....

SpiderOak: Two gigs of online storage for free--and a Linux client.....

Linux 2.6.26 kernel update released.....

Justice is served: SCO ordered to pay Novell millions.....

Do Linux Penguinistas need just need to accept that the world is not ideal? .....

At the JavaOne conference, Sun officials detailed how they've dealt with missteps in delivering open source products such as OpenSolaris.....

Microsoft hires SCO veteran to head up its competitive strategy initiatives.....

Britney Spears beats Paris Hilton in open source code references.....

Enomaly's open source cloud computing platform is getting more attention.....

The U.S. Supreme Court will be hearing oral arguments on Bilski vs. Kappos on Monday, November 9th. Not surprisingly, many open source advocates are on the edge of their seats because it's an opportunity for the Supreme Court to decide that software is not patentable. Confused about the details? As part of its mission to advance Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) through law-related services, the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has provided a backgrounder with information on briefs filed by parties of interest to the FLOSS community.

In December, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) filed suit against Cisco, after several years of urging the company to comply with the licensing terms used on its Linksys routers. Several Linksys routers used firmware licensed under the GPL/LGPL, but Cisco failed to make the source code available per the terms of the licenses.

It's not terribly easy to make the FSF resort to legal action, but after five years of relative unresponsiveness, FSF licensing compliance engineer Brett Smith said the organization had to take stronger measures to get the problem resolved.

The case against Cisco has been settled, with Cisco agreeing to appoint a Free Software Director who will ensure Linksys complies with the terms of the free licenses it uses, and report back to the FSF on its progress.

In November, openSUSE implemented some significant changes to its licensing model, with the aim of making the distribution easier to remaster, re-work, and redistribute. At that time, openSUSE community manager, Joe Zonker Brockmeier, said that work was also underway to clarify openSUSE's trademark guidelines.

This week, the openSUSE Project released the newly re-examined trademark guidelines. The guidelines, available in PDF format, are designed to complement the new, easier to customize and redistribute openSUSE releases by explaining how to handle branding in different situations.

The FSF Europe's Freedom Task Force and GPL-Violations.org have jointly prepared a few guidelines on how to best report (and avoid) license violations. Some of the advice is common sense (suspected violations are best handled in private, reported only to the involved parties, and organizations such as GPL-Violations and the appropriate branch of the Free Software Foundation), but reminders are always useful, especially in the heat of the moment.

Not content to dominate search and online advertising, two operating systems, and cross-platform browser, Google is now getting into the programming language business as well. Yesterday Google announced Go a brand-new systems programming language. Why does Google need Go? According to the FAQ on the site, Google saw a gap in the existing systems programming languages, and the company decided it was worth trying again with a new language that has taken ideas from other systems programming languages as well as scripting languages like Python and JavaScript.