Yesterday the team announced the release of the first development release of Compiz Fusion. This means it is still “unstable” but almost certainly more stable than the temporary Ubuntu repo we have been using which builds “deb” packages automatically from their git repository on an almost daily basis.

Here’s a nice video showing off the latest eye candy you could be getting on your desktop

According to their release notice, the odd release numbers are for unstable and the even numbers for stable code. So the first stable release will be 0.6 but may actually have less features than the 0.5 release if particular code is still deemed to be unstable… (Hope that makes sense?)

Anyway - this thread discusses how to build 0.5.2 from source on Ubuntu if you want it now. Or alternatively I guess, just wait for the very kind host of the unofficial Ubuntu repos to come back off holiday

If I get chance to I’ll probably build it tonight and document the process here once I am happy it works.

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Novell start to discuss the implications of the legal victory they achieved against SCO on the 10th August.

In a decent summing up of opinion on infoworld by Elizabeth Montalbano, we get:

“We’re not interested in suing people over Unix,” Novell spokesman Bruce Lowry said. “We’re not even in the Unix business any more.”

And Novell’s own CMO John Dragoon gives a neat and concise diary of events that led to Friday’s momentous decision:

“This is a great outcome for Linux and the open source community. A big cloud has been lifted. Customers and developers can deploy and develop on Linux with increased confidence that SCO’s copyright allegations around Linux will be put to rest. “

Checking SCO’s stock quote tells us what the market really thinks: http://finance.google.com/finance?q=scox. Down to just 37c when I looked. That’s a fall of over 75% since market close on Friday and a market capitalisation of about $8m (or approx. £4m in Sterling).

I can’t see how SCO can remain a viable business for much longer. As an anonymous commentator wrote on a mailing list - Novell could buy them with spare change and that would be the end of that. Although it’s a bit of a waste of $8m I guess. There are plenty of other companies out there with that sort of cash to burn…

• Microsoft Corporation: $268.14B
• International Business Machines Corp. : $151.90B
• Hewlett-Packard Company: $122.69B
• Red Hat, Inc. : $4.12B
• Novell, Inc. : $2.26B
• Sun Microsystems, Inc.: $16.74B
• Oracle Corporation : $99.96B

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