This eWEEK – 17

Lights, camera, action! Is it the California gubernatorial race? No, its that other political sideshow: SCO vs. the World. Darl McBride, riffing on James Bond, said SCO is in the middle of the battle of the century. David Boies lawyers are running all over the place. Linus Torvalds said SCO is smoking crack. How long can this go on? Lets bring on the Terminator.

But seriously, the fight over code, intellectual property and copyright is getting nastier. As Senior Editor Peter Galli writes from SCOs Las Vegas conference, the company is now being labeled a hypocrite. “SCO is both attacking the GPL on the one hand and benefiting from the GPL on the other hand. SCO cant have it both ways,” said Jeremy Allison, the lead developer for the Samba open-source project.

Another company that also wants it both ways, but is being nicer about it, is Hewlett-Packard. The acquisition of Compaq does not seem to have slowed Carly Fiorina and company at all. But in light of last weeks disappointing earnings announcement, one could ask, Is HP stretched too thin? Find out the answer by checking out our coverage of HPs dual consumer/enterprise strategies this week by Senior Editor Jeff Burt and Editor in Chief Eric Lundquist.

And speaking of Boies, is that Microsoft “embracing and extending” again? Senior Writer Darryl Taft reports that developers in Redmond are not sitting still while IBM beefs up its tool products with modeling standards and experts from Rational. Model-driven architectures are the future, and Microsoft is planning to add its own UML variation to Visual Studio with help from Rational alumni. Only time will tell if a Java-like splintering is the result.

One IT shop that is getting ahead of things is McKesson, the pharmaceuticals giant whose use of ProactiveNets ProactiveNet 5.0 application performance management tool is the subject of our Labs On-Site evaluation. As Senior Writer Anne Chen writes, eWEEK Labs was impressed by the speed and ease with which ProactiveNet identified the source of McKessons application performance problems.

One final note: If youre tired of hearing about outrage over the spam created by the SoBig.F virus, get used to it. Dennis Callaghan reports that even without the Internets fastest-spreading virus, spam is here to stay.

Stan Gibson is on vacation this week. In the meantime, send comments to scot_petersen@ziffdavis.com.