Summary: Adobe boss cites Microsoft MVP de Icaza as he tries to incite people against Oracle; SCO case updates help show that Oracle is not all "evil"

THE REGISTER has this new article titled "Oracle forms new 'axis of evil' against open source, claims Adobe" and it opens by saying that "Oracle has replaced Microsoft as the FOSS community’s number one enemy, according to Adobe System’s open source boss."

Here is Adobe's original post (to avoid misrepresentation by The Register) which says "see also this great post by Miguel de Icaza" (he distorted the facts about Oracle and Java [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] in order to promote Microsoft/.NET/C#). Adobe is a drug dealer-like fake friend of Free/Open Source software and a real nuisance to GNU/Linux users. It is in no position to tell Free software which companies are greater enemies to Free software as that would be hypocritical.

One area where Novell remains helpful (to itself but also to others) is the SCO case, where Oracle too seems involved at the moment. People must remember that Oracle is still the steward of many Free software projects like OpenOffice.org, VirtualBox, and even MySQL. Its lawsuit against Google is described by some people as defensive or reactionary. Anyway, from Groklaw we have:

Cahn Replies to Reservations of Rights by Novell and Oracle, HP and US Trustee - Update

[...]

But then it gets tricky. Cahn's position is that SCO owns "explicitly or impliedly" -- that last bit being the sticky part -- certain rights, to develop UnixWare, for example, to license or sublicense UNIX technology as per Amendment 2, in his interpretation, and the ownership and copyrights to any new code SCO itself developed after the APA. OK. How about a list on that? For real. How about a list of copyrights? So that is what Cahn proposes selling, "Debtors' rights to exploit and develop Unixware and the Software Business."

That's what they told the 'new guy' in this company. What planet do they live on? It's somewhat bizarre that a Novell vice president promotes Microsoft along with Novell while Novell is fighting the Microsoft-funded SCO and even fights Microsoft in the WordPerfect case (new update from Groklaw, see [1, 2] for background). Groklaw has another post about SCO's bankruptcy (which SCO may have faked for convenience and pardoning). Here is new proof that SCO knew about IBM's Linux involvement as far back as 1998 (back when Bill Gates called Linux “LUNIX” because it was more obscure).

Look what I just found, SCO's Partners page from 2002, on Internet Archive, and lo and behold, it provides proof positive that SCO, then calling itself Caldera, knew that IBM was involved with Linux as far back as 1998. That's the year Santa Cruz and IBM signed the agreement regarding Project Monterey, executed in October of 1998. No one, therefore, Santa Cruz or Caldera, had any reason to be in the dark about IBM's Linux activities while IBM was also working on Project Monterey.

Now that the old caldera.com pages are on Internet Archive again, thanks to SCO selling off the domain name, many interesting things are surfacing, and we find out why SCO tried to hide them for so long. They should have waited a little bit longer.

It was funnier when SCO published "Blah. Blah. Blah." last year. ⬆