Given the accounts on this site about the approach of Canadian politicians educational officials towards open source in the classroom, it's interesting to see what's happening elsewhere. A recent announcement indicates that the Indian state of Kerala is expediting a move to completely replace MS-Windows with Linux in its 12,500 high schools, serving about 1.5 million students.

Considering the matter of Toronto schools and access to FOSS, it was interesting to see this Information week article on Indiana switching more than 20,000 students to Linux.

While the InformationWeek article does talk about Unix/Linux in general as the top entry of its 12 greatest software programs of all time, it singles out BSD4.3 as the heart of the system's greatness and global significance.

Back in 1997, six years before the lawsuit started, I wrote an article for Linux Journal that suggested the initials SCO stood for "Software Considered Obsolete". As I read about the fallout from the outright dismissal of most of its lawsuit against IBM, it seems more and more likely that "obsolete" will refer not only to the company's software but -- soon enough -- to the company itself.

I've recently created a Technorati Profile and it asks me to create this link. I have no idea how useful this is, but it can't hurt.

I've been seeing an increasing number of comments suggesting that Microsoft is moving ahead with tools designed to reduce the numbers of unauthorized copies of Windows out there. Blogs such as this one on ZDNet do a good job of describing the possible implementation of this program, which has the potential to shut down a lot of copies of Windows deemed to be illegitimate.

While it's provocatively titled, "Beyond the Open-Source Hype", this article is reasonably balanced. While it does give Miscoroft a little too much benefit of the doubt, it does come to a conclusion I agree with: open source is certainly worth using, but in some cases the expectations from it are a bit overstated.

To me, just the appearance of this issue in a magazine that usually has little to do with IT, offering commentary that "Governments may be wise to choose open source", is one more small victory by itself.

There's not much that longtime tech columnist John Dvorak has to has that I find agreeable. He's been wrong on so many issues related to open source it's been hard to keep track.

This week, however, there's finally something on which we can agree, as he implores his readership to Screw the Digital-Rights Bugaboo. Of course, in the US such a plea at this time is somewhat pathetic, as the DMCA is already in place. Where was this opinion when the DRM debate was actually going on south of the border? I guess I shouldn't expect more from Dvorak, but I guess it's (maginally) better late than never.

The popular Groklaw website, which has been following the SCOGroup lawsuits against its partners and customers, has provided a review of last week's Hamilton event with which Bob Young, Ren Bucholz and Peter Salus. Groklaw had earlier promoted the event.

About halfway down in the comments is an interesting and informative addendum to the origial report.

My own personal thanks go to Ron Harwood and the HLUG gang for staging such a well-run event, and to Peter Salus for coming up with the idea. I'm happy that the meeting topic went well beyond the specifics of the SCO case, as there are many current issues in Canada (such as the new government's approach to copyright) that require attention.