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Appropriately enough as my students are reading the Open Source Module (previously the Unix & Linux module), Novell has won the jury trial, and did not transfer the copyrights in Unix to SCO. Groklaw continues to be a valuable resource in its coverage of this case and other issues.

This decision hopefully removes what little cloud hung over Linux. The cloud was small because of the lack of evidence of infringement, Caldera’s (then-SCO) licensing Linux under the GPL, and the likelihood that the allegedly copyrighted material could be coded around. It’s still a good thing that Novell won, because SCO could would have caused problems with increased litigation and threats of litigation in any alternative scenario.

Even with the loss, SCO, of course, plans to continue its litigation campaign as it can. I am afraid to predict the death of the organization, because I thought that these issues should have been settled years ago, but somehow it just keeps on going and going and going…

And that wasn’t an April Fool’s joke. Here’s an interesting one from the Austin Chronicle, though:
The End of UT Football
“Governor, Lege order budget cuts; ‘Students must come first,’ says Powers”

which is all the more wonderful/terrible because all of the numbers in the various articles are pretty much accurate.

Jessamyn West of librarian.net created a video of installing Ubuntu (the Linux distribution) on a couple of library computers, and it’s been sweeping the net. I had seen it on her blog first, then Boing Boing, and now Groklaw. Excellent!

According to Groklaw, the US Patent and Trademark Office will be examining Blackboard’s e-learning patent and all 44 associated claims, due to requests from the Software Freedom Law Center. The request was filed on behalf of Sakai, Moodle, and ATutor, open source educational products.

Back from vacation! My wife’s family lives in Nebraska, and we had a family vacation travelling around Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wyoming. We drove over 3,500 miles (starting from here in Austin) and saw some really great stuff that I’d never seen before, including Mt. Rushmore, the Crazy Horse monument, the Black Hills, Deadwood, Sturgis (just before bike week), Devil’s Tower, Cheyenne Frontier Days, and a demolition derby. ^^

We ventured through several small towns, and in just about all of them the city library had a prominent position on the main street, and looked well-maintained. There was a lead story about library programs in the main paper at Lincoln, NE, and in Cheyenne we saw a library reading program commercial on television. Today we saw a Library of Congress commercial about reading… when did those start?

We’ve started a Koha installation for our IT Lab’s book collection. There are several reasons for this, beyond our book collection getting out of hand. ^_^ First, open source and free software are pretty logical choices for libraries. Code can be examined and edited, and if you have people who are comfortable with tech and experimentation then it can be a pretty low-cost alternative to other software, especially for libraries with limited resources. I’ll write more about open source later (and link to the open source and libraries websites that are outhere), but we’ve always had a pretty good commitment to it- we’ve got about 25 or so servers running Linux, including our main systems. Koha is shaping up to be a pretty interesting project. We’re not too thrilled with the interface, but if the Z39.50 add-on works then we should have relatively smooth sailling… sadly, it seems that LDAP integration with Koha is problematic, so we’re not quite sure how we’re going to sign iSchool individuals up for accounts yet.

Got the new version of DSpace up (1.4) this week, using Gentoo. I’ll be creating pages detailing some suggestions for installing DSpace with Gentoo based on my, Sam’s, and Shane’s experiences.