That’s the title of my Slaw post for today.  It reads as follows:

We have not heard much about this lately, partly because a summary judgment in 2007 stated that Novell owned the Unix code.   A jury confirmed last week that SCO had not acquired the copyright to Unix from Novell in an asset purchase agreement.

The significance of this to the world at large is that Linux was derived from Unix.  SCO launched a long standing battle claiming it owned Unix, and thus had rights to certain code within Linux, and thus the right to be compensated for Linux use. 

Apparently, SCO is not yet giving up though – there is some suggestion that it might continue the fight, however futile it might be.

For more details, see this Groklaw post.

Unix and other systems count time by using a 32 bit field to count the seconds starting from January 1, 1970 (known as the Unix epoch).  So at 6:31 Eastern time today Unix time will be 1234567890.  There are actually a few events planned around this milestone.

Another noteworthy Unix time event will occur in 2038, when the time can go no higher using 32 bits.  Fortunately, 64 bit systems should be widely in use by then, staving off the next upper limit for another 290 billion years.

Check out the events, and a countdown clock to today’s milestone.