OStatic

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?

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.

I've never had any deep-seated issues when it came to flashing the BIOS on any of my systems. It's generally something I don't worry about unless it's clearly necessary, because it traditionally meant hunting down floppies that worked or figuring out whether the motherboard in question could flash from CD or USB. My motherboards of late have included handy (proprietary, but still undoubtedly handy) flashing utilities that took the whole media search out of the equation. Problem is, I can only use these handy utilities on Windows, and only one computer in the house fits that description.

All right, there is one emotionally scarring BIOS update in my past. When I built the MythTV box, the motherboard had a sensor that was confident my processor was hitting the 180 degree Celsius mark, and was subsequently shutting down. Of course, the sensor was misreading the temperature, a known issue with this motherboard, and a BIOS flash would put it right. The problem was the motherboard could only flash via floppy, and the one working floppy drive in the house was in another computer. The chassis for the MythTV box didn't have a floppy bay at all, so I ended up holding a floppy drive over the open case while the BIOS flashed.

The likelihood of these sorts of situations happening in the future for those using Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems (including Mac OS X) has just been minimized. The Coreboot project has released the 0.9.0 version of flashrom, which it says is faster than many vendor flash utilities, scriptable, and requires no physical access to the machine in question (no floppy drive, no keyboard, and no monitor? No problem!).

While not a completely new concept, the Debian team introduced what it called a couple of new architectures over the weekend. Except the new architectures aren't really new, per se -- i386 and amd64 are already supported in Debian. They're already supported in the Debian Linux kernel. The new additions are FreeBSD kernels compiled for the aforementioned architectures.

Though much of the fanfare in the Ubuntu camp seems to center on the desktop version, its Server Edition has been steadily attracting interest -- and new users. Thanks to the requests of these users and Ubuntu partners, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has announced it is offering its first official training course dedicated solely to the Ubuntu Server Edition.

There's another new twist, however. While this course will be offered at various partner training centers in June, it will also be offered through a virtual classroom.