I'm saving any specific conclusions until I have the full picture (Wednesday night or Thursday/Friday morning). This little show has been at times interesting, but business and real life keep reminding me that the real questions will not be answered short of a trial. I know how I feel, now I have a little better idea how the enemy feels...

Meanwhile, I think the weaknesses in our infrastructure here and in Europe pointed out by the Blackout, LoveSAN32/RPC and the terrible trouble on the continent with the heat wave (especially in France and the UK) are MUCH bigger stories in the immediate and near term and will affect my business and the concerns of my clients more than this sideshow.

But I am here now, so here goes:

1. Darl's hair really is that bad.

2. There are FAR fewer than 1000 people here and FAR fewer sponsors than I was led to believe. No major discussion (some disappointment and some worry though) about HP pulling out of the Keynote...for everyone that made mention of the pull-out, 10 reminded them of who sponsored the little reception last night (HP). That was little comfort, since HP did a MUCH better job at LinuxTAG and LinuxWorld. No mention at all or concern about Intel (which I found to be, potentially, far more damaging to the attendees.).

3. The code show: Boies, as you all know by now, was a no-show. BIG morale and spirit buster and something of a topic of discussion (briefly) during the break immediately following the VERY long and dry keynotes.

On to the code itself, as was publicly shown. McBride showed a number of what I would have thought were classroom exercises in a first-year c programming class. One side was marked as 'Linux,' one as UNIX®. The code seemed to be basic iterative programming and set-up code, as you would see in any text or on a test. Primarily, it seemed to be initializations of variables and set-up of stacks and heaps. At no time was there any explanation of or provision to provenance of either code example. No one brought up the general availability of the Linux source tree and the time it has been available vs. the date of SCO's filing. No one questioned the sheer AMOUNT of claimed code vs. the total in the kernel/module space. There WERE striking similarities in the examples, but there were also differences.

Overall, the explanations by Sontag and Heise were dry and boring. Many dozed, after the initial unveiling. Most paid FAR more intention to the 'derivative works' arguments, over the actual 'copyright violations' in the examples.

My overall impression of the presentation was a thought from Shakespeare's _Hamlet_: that it was a "...a tale told by ... idiot(s)/ full of sound and fury/ signifying nothing"...no provenance and no real code that I could see, that would have been any different, whether it was in the Linux kernel or in an ancillary supervisory program for any nmber of embedded systems.

<<<continued>>>
UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the United States and other countries.