In recent times, I’ve discovered in myself a heretofore dormant trait to give a shit about anything other than sex. One example of this is my near-fanatical hatred of the SCO Group. This has come about for several reasons. Initially, it was because I was the systems administrator of a server running SCO Openserver 5.05, an operating system so rooted in 1980s technology that it should be shipped with leg-warmers and a copy of Forever Your Girl. It’s one thing to concentrate on stabilising software instead of adding new features, but it’s entirely another to simply be lazy. Openserver (and their other major UN*X offering, UnixWare) were looking severly dated even in 1997, and there have been precisely zero major updates since then.

But now there is a new, and oh-so-much-more compelling reason to loathe the shell that has replaced SCO: their blatant and cynical attempt to claim ownership of Linux, a free operating system kernel that, together with the GNU system software and contributions from developers all over the world, has grown into a major competitor in the operating system industry. Now, you would imagine that in supposedly free, democratic nations such as the USA, any group of individuals would be able to create their own operating system and do whatever they like with it. Right? Wrong! Companies like the SCO group are actively trying to outlaw the GPL, the license upon which Linux and other GNU software is based, calling it “un-american”. Their lies never seem to end.

Anyway, back to my point: SCOX is paying like a bitch for being such an asshole to the software community. The total amount of money they made from their scheme to charge people for Linux: $11,000. Cost to SCO of gaining a reputation for suing their own customers: priceless.

Observe, their stock chart over the last six months:

It’s good to be alive. Unless you’re Darl McBride. Then again, it’s not McBride who’s lost his life savings, is it?

We can only hope that at the end of this sordid tale, the bastards (and bitches? no, methinks just bastards) who run SCO Group get their asses slammed in jail. In the meantime, it’s just nice watching them get spanked.