An act of Congress that was supposed to level the playing field for performers and songwriters seems to do little to upset the status quo. As The Who once said, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."
FOSS Force
Google’s failed social network is now just another empty storefront on the Boulevard of Abandoned Tech
Has FOSS traded its shared values for success?
Part of the Linux culture for nearly as long as Linux itself, Linux Journal has announced that its November edition was its last.

Linux Journal is no more. On Friday, publisher Carlie Fairchild wrote that unless “a savior” rides in to save the day, the magazine born in 1994, just two years after Linus Torvalds posted that he was working on an operating system, has already released its last issue.
It appears that the once cancelled SCO Show has again been rebooted after a federal judge okays an appeal.

SCO. There’s a name I’ll bet you thought you’d never hear again. Guess what? It’s back.
Wasn’t there a Bond film called “Live to Die Another Day.” Even if there wasn’t, that applies here.
Actually, the incident reads more like vandalism than ransomware, but it still illustrates that the DMCA is bad law.

I’ll betcha never figured that one of the things you could do with a DMCA take down notice was use it as ransomware. In a case that proves that if you write bad law it’ll be exploited in more ways than you can imagine, that’s now been done. Forget the record and movie industries moves to take down innocent YouTube posts by misidentifying content as infringing — or misunderstanding fair use.
Actually, FOSS Force had nothing whatsoever to do with SUSE pulling the video, but the headline piqued your interest, didn’t it?

The Every-Other-Monday Column
Sometimes the best laid plans…
A week ago Sunday I wrote and scheduled an article to be published last Tuesday. In it, I poked fun a little fun at SUSE, while giving a thumbs up to what I thought was a very well executed — and funny — parody of “Game of Thrones.” It was also very clever, insofar as it managed to paint rival Red Hat in a less-than-open light, without ever mentioning the company by name. In the parody, the not-so-open guys all wore red hats.
Watching this video from SUSE, you might be excused for thinking you’re watching a trailer for a new Netflix original which looks suspiciously like “Game of Thrones.” To paraphrase an old Dodge commercial: “You can tell they’re bad guys because they all wear Red Hats.”

Okay, it’s a funny little five minute parody of House of Thrones. But it looks to me as if SUSE has thrown down the gauntlet and is challenging Red Hat…or a bunch of medieval guys wearing red hats…to who knows what. Are the gals and guys in Germany growing a little tired of being the perennial second fiddle — or now third fiddle now that Ubuntu is in server rooms everywhere, especially in Amazon’s cloud.











