It seems like the biggest business story of the past month has been the insane success of General Motors’ “employee discount” program, wherein customers get the same price for cars that GM employees get. The question I’ve been wondering about is how big a discount customers are really getting. Reading the paper this morning, I learned the answer — customers paid $400 to $500 less for GM cars in June than they did in May. Obviously the words “employee discount” are magical, because the raw savings certainly can’t account for the sales growth GM has seen. The program is scheduled to end on Tuesday but GM is considering extending it, and Chrysler is going to offer an employee discount sale of its own. I can already see the magic fading away.

Brian Kernighan’s declaration in the SCO lawsuit is not to be missed. Aside from the technical conclusions, Kernighan’s qualifications are an interesting read (even if they are written with excess humility). IBM paid him $400 an hour for his time. His basic conclusion is summarized as follows:

If unprotectable elements are excluded from the comparison and an appropriate standard of similirity is applied there is no similarity between the six parts of Linux identified by Mr. Gupta and the allegedly copyrighted works.

I wasn’t surprised that SCO’s claims were spurious, but I was surprised at how little they are claiming.

Chip Salzenberg looks like he is the next in a long line of computer programmers who have been abused by their employer and the government who becomes a cause celebr