SCO says it's time for Linux users to pay up. [The Register]

Ya gotta wonder what's going on at SCO Group. The company formerly known as Caldera, erstwhile Linux OS distributor, is clearly attempting to precipitate a crisis in open source land that, sadly, many could have predicted when Linux started to attract money a few years ago–a crisis that Caldera played an active part in until its sudden personality change as holder of the crown jewels of Unix System V.

BSD is looking better every minute–though I suppose SCO is looking for ways to sue anyone using the Mach kernel, too.

Did IBM and others dump intellectual property that didn't completely belong to them into the open source code of Linux? Did they, in fact, give Linus Torvalds a poison pill of multiprocessor code?

For most people, the question, as the linked article in The Register suggests, is moot. If you're only using single or dual processor systems in cluster to run Linux, the alleged infringed code may not be of any consequence. That means that the only people really impacted by SCO's claims may be those trying to run Linux on a mainframe or on IBM or HP mega-servers.

And there ain't a whole lot of those people out there.

I've been an occasional user of Mac OS X's amped-up Sherlock for a while. But I'm just starting to realize how amped-up Apple made it in the latest release–by opening up its “channels” to non-Apple web services.

I was already impressed with many of the non-Apple channels added to Sherlock, like “Flights” (the FlyteComm-provided channel that plugs Sherlock into airlines' flight status databases) and “Yellow Pages” (the business directory that gives driving directions, from Switchboard).

But the lightbulb really went off for me when I added Feedster as a Sherlock channel. Now, I have this itch to build channels of my own. And I'd love to see somebody extend the ideas that are there already–like adding a feature for future flight lookup and pricing, or a price-comparing e-commerce channel…

Better yet, I'd like to see Apple offer an easy way to start consuming RSS feeds directly in Sherlock. It's great that you can search feeds on Feedster, but how about building a straight subscription engine right into Sherlock? I'm sure that with a little scripting, I could wire Radio or