The story was the subject of much hyperventilation last week which revolved mostly around a few impassioned quotes:

Here it is, patent number7617530. Thanks, USPTO, for giving Microsoft, which is already a monopoly, a monopoly on something that’s been in use since 1980 and wasn’t invented by Microsoft. Here’s Wikipedia’s description of sudo, which you can meaningfully compare to Microsoft’s description of its “invention”.

This from Groklaw, a site that specialises in free and open source software legal affairs, i.e. exactly this kind of thing. But for whatever reason — zeal? clicks? — their reading of the patent, which we picked up, turned out to overblown. Says Sudo maintainer Todd Miller, via Ars:

I’ve already received a number of questions about US patent 7,617,530 that some people seem to believe might cover sudo. I don’t think that is the case,” he wrote. “Sudo simply doesn’t work this way. When a command is run via sudo the user is actively running the command as a different user. What is described in the patent is a mechanism whereby an application or the operating system detects that an action needs to be run with increased privileges and automatically prompts the user with a list of potential users that have the appropriate privilege level to perform the task.

So, if not this, then what does the Microsoft patent cover? Back to Ars:

Specifically, it describes a user interface which displays accounts that have the necessary rights to perform an action when the user is blocked from performing an action that requires higher access privileges.

These are similar, but not patent similar.

Turns out though, that there is a Linux tool called PolicyKit just like what Microsoft patented, which prompts users to switch to a higher-level user account when they hit against a permissions barrier. It was created after the patent was filed. So, Microsoft, on all counts: not guilty. [ArsTechnica]

That’s because next Friday, UNIX time will read 1234567890. Scary! And, it just so happens that this event will coincide with one of the more superstitious days on our calendar, Friday the 13th. Scarier!

Well-known UNIX and Linux personality John Maddog Hall plans on celebrating the event in style:

While our friends at Bell Labs (er, ah, Lucent….O.K. “Alcatel-Lucent”) strive to understand this phenomenon, I will be doing my civic duty by drinking fine beer, and maybe an Islay scotch. This is hard to do while you are holding your breath, but I will suffer through. Who knows, perhaps the U.S. government will give us a “bailout” to study this issue.

To see when this takes place in your time zone, run this little Perl script, which I promise won’t end the world before next Friday:

perl -e ‘print scalar localtime(1234567890),”\n”;’

Shit just got real, folks. Say good-bye to loved ones. Make sure you start with your Windows machines, because UNIX is probably going to take them out first. Part of an agreement with Linux and Linus Torvalds, I’ve heard. [Linux Pro Magazine via Slashdot]

[ZDNet via CrunchGear]