SCO's missteps are many and record-making. I predicted that going after Linux would bring out leagues of obsessive geeks armed with electron microscopes. Proving SCO wrong is now the ultimate wizard's challenge, like a million-dollar contest to decipher an encrypted message. Every body buried at SCO is now being exhumed, to my great delight. SCO took a baseball bat to a condominium-sized wasps' nest and trigger SCO’s missteps are many and record-making. I predicted that going after Linux would bring out leagues of obsessive geeks armed with electron microscopes. Proving SCO wrong is now the ultimate wizard’s challenge, like a million-dollar contest to decipher an encrypted message. Every body buried at SCO is now being exhumed, to my great delight.SCO took a baseball bat to a condominium-sized wasps’ nest and triggered the inevitable response. My heart bleeds. I’ll make another prediction: The fun’s not over. What was painful is about to get expensive.IT is not thrilled with SCO’s plan to rid IT of Linux and AIX. Playing by SCO’s rules means paying SCO (no company that pays will ever be done paying) or ripping every IBM AIX and Intel Linux server out of the machine room. Neither option is acceptable. To add to that, vendors like Microsoft and Sun–among many others; Google is your friend–are gleefully watching SCO bending their customers over. In a heterogeneous world, which companies linking arms with SCO still claim to endorse, cheering for SCO puts the lie to any expressed devotion to customers’ right of choice. Let’s go from the boardroom to the cubicle. How does SCO think IT purchasing decisions are made? SCO has rendered itself radioactive to all involved in, or benefitting from, open source. Every major technology purchase has to be signed off by the company’s technical staff, moreso in lean times when every purchase is scrutinized.It’s amazing how inventive geeks can be when they’re determined to freeze a black hat vendor out of their shop. Their bosses will get well thought out, purely technical and objective analyses explaining why SCO, and those marching with it, are not a good fit for the project at hand. The recommended alternative may not be Linux just yet, if employers are skittish about potential legal liability. That reluctance is understandable, and it won’t last long. Fortunately, there are plenty of mature alternatives to Windows and System V-derived OSes. POSIX, Java, Python, Perl and PHP code will migrate effortlessly back to AIX and Linux when they’re in the clear.I lull myself to sleep each night with the same fantasy. I’m back in IT management. An SCO sales rep or reseller, or someone working for a company that supports SCO’s efforts, calls to pitch a sale to me. I answer by faxing him SCO’s ransom letter. I wonder if he’d call back? ——– Technology Industry