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While the rest of the world reports the $613M fine against Microsoft as a standalone, the LinuxWorld report juxtaposes it with HP's confirmation - being reported by Reuters - that HP is wavering in its support for Windows on the desktop. Its notebooks and laptops will now support SUSE Linux. An HP'er concedes: "Does Microsoft like the fact that we do Linux stuff? Absolutely not." Is this the end of the beginning now in the Windows vs Linux desktop battle?"

Just click and enjoy. It's a good read.

...written by Tong Liu (the lead developer) in last month's LinuxWorld.

You have to be a subscriber to view the HTML, but it seems that you can download the PDF version for free...

Worth noting also, Linuxworld magazine has an article this month on HA-OSCAR which is pretty good!

CA's senior VP of product development Mark Barrenechea says here that the SCO claim is nonsense.

So SCO is running around making nonsensical claims?
I'm dumbfounded.

SCO's Claim re CA "Is Nonsense," Says Computer Associates

CA's senior VP of product development Mark Barrenechea says here that the SCO claim is nonsense.

Novell also has Richard Seibt on board now, the former CEO of SuSE. He joined to continue managing SUSE LINUX as President, and said - according to LinuxWorld again: "2004 will be the year of Linux."

According to that same report (I just read it through) he also says: "How do you make money out of open source?"
Here was his answer: "It is a development model - but it is also becoming a business model. People will pay for the convenience of 'free' software. Companies like Novell have invested millions of dollars in proprietary code which it is now contributing to the community - such as its UDDI server."

Stone's boss, Novell's Jack Messman said at LinuxWorld in January that "Novell is a billion-dollar company that's wagering its future on open source" and made a convincing case for there being no contradiction between supplying a free Linux distribution and supplying value-add services on Linux that Novell charges for. His final words were apparently: "Linux is simply good business."

Stone's boss, Novell's Jack Messman said at LinuxWorld in January that "Novell is a billion-dollar company that's wagering its future on open source" and made a convincing case for there being no contradiction between supplying a free Linux distribution and supplying value-add services on Linux that Novell charges for. His final words were apparently: "Linux is simply good business."

You're still getting my goat with a certain slashdot naivete. You doubt anyone wants to buy from them?

A judge can. Besides, SCO doesn't need to distribute Linux, merely sell protection against lawsuits.

Anyhow, I think we sort of agree, but are talking past each other at this point.

Here.

NZheretic, some of your post is copied from David Mohring's post on Linuxworld.com. I didn't bother to check the rest but it sounds like you're good at cutting and pasting, if not thinking. You really should credit your sources when piecing together this kind of mega-cut'n'paste karma-honeypot post.

What are the chances that any of these "licensees" will get their money refunded when SCO loses?

Why would they get a refund? Have you looked at the SCO Intellectual Property License for Linux?

If you terminate the license, you don't get a refund. They can terminate your license if you're doing something wrong, but a) SCO terminated IBM's Unix license without proper notification of the breach and b) SCO has described contracts as "what you use against parties you have relationships with."

They're selling a license that covers...

[boldfaced parts emphasized by me] "UNIX-based Code" shall mean any Code or Method that:
(i) in its literal or non-literal expression, structure, format, use, functionality or adaptation
(ii) is based on, developed in, derived from or is similar to (iii) any Code contained in or Method devised or developed in
(iv) UNIX System V or UnixWare(R), or
(v) any modification or derivative work based on or licensed under UNIX System V or UnixWare.

So they're bascially selling a license which purports to cover any code, in anything, that just so happens to behave the same way code in Unix System V or UnixWare behaves, or any product derived from those sources. Pretty broad spectrum, neh?

This is why people have been saying it's a bad idea to buy an SCO "IP license" until they are found to have rights to any "IP" in Linux. Because you're entering into a legally-binding agreement with a company that will audit you to try to intimidate you into "compliance".

Contrary to the notion where you get some kind of security in buying a license to use someone's IP, SCO's license gives you the exact opposite; no warranty, no indemnity (but Mr. McBride, what about all the times you claimed Linux users were at risk because of lack of warranty indemnification? And they explicitly state that there's no protection if you happen to infringe on someone else's intellectual property rights by using this license... like, say, the Linux kernel developers whose GPL-licesned code would be infringed?) and the right for SCO to audit you any time they want and make you cough up money if you "pirate" Linux by putting it on another machine -- oh, and the licenses are not transferrable between machines, either.

Sucker. Anyone who buys an SCO IP license has, in my opinion, no right to cry later when it turns out they bought a pig in a poke.

Jay (=

as the possible new name, thanks to a piece at LinuxWorld that's linking back to this thread.

More than Microsoft, I'm worried about the national government and political majority. They received Bill Gates in the parliament, which is a honour few get (ok, that building has hosted more mafiosi than the worst pub of Palermo, but that's an honour anyway), normally reserved to heads of foreign states, and while the government is right-wing, the mayor of Rome is a prominent leader of the left.

I would guess this will end up being a political issue between right and left. Whatever, just one more reason to get rid of Berlusconi.

The study chose to not consider malware because that is really a UI and social engineering problem, this study was about attacking servers without an inside patsy and Linux came up short. It is dishonest and dangerous to ignore these sorts of results.

No it is not dishonest to ignore these results. These results are dishonest. Raw numbers don't prove anything. There is no statistical analysis done at all. Perhaps there is some worthwhile anylysis in their report but you have to pay to see it. Sounds a little sketchy to me. It's absolutely insane to say that MacOSX is the most secure simply because it is hardly ever used as a webserver in comparison to Linux.

The previous survery they mention was reported here:

linuxword

As you can see they are reporting about only webservers.

As you can see here, Apache is the most common webserver (by far):

netcraft

Considering Apache is the most used webserver and Linux is the most used operating system to run Apache on then I would say that the results makes perfect sense, but prove nothing.

What if I made my own operating system and made it as insecure as possible, then ran a webserver on it but since no one cares about cracking my website it never gets cracked? Am I to presume that it is the "World's Safest Operating System"? It seems you would. It also seems that the "World's Safest Operating System" could be a worm infested zombie and still be considered safe by your standards and by mi2g's standards. You have to admit that at least the title was misleading.

Some more on that history: Larry McVoy on Bitkeeper, kernel development, Linux Torvalds & Bruce Perens

Ross says, of the whole open-sourcing-Java issue: "the issue is something of a bugaboo, anyway. The source code for Java is readily available to anyone who accepts the Sun Community Source License (SCSL.) You can fix problems and submit patches to your heart's content."

Then he writes: "Eric Raymond has focused on the wrong issue. Making Java "open source" might placate a vocal contingent in the software development world, but it would not significantly raise consumer awareness and acceptance of our platform. I simply don't care all that much whether Java is "open sourced" because I don't consider that to be the central problem."

What Ross considers *IS* the problem is here.

2.6.0 is now in freeze mode and it will be really hard to remove all the lines that SCO alleges are infringement

I don't know where you got that idea. Remember when the entire VM was replaced in the midst of a stable kernel?

actually I heard it here first...

...600 new features

Maybe some of you guys still remember this article on Microsoft's presence at LinuxWorld Expo. It suggests that if Microsoft would have announced a Linux port of Office it would have meant the end of Linux.

• JFS was first ported to later versions of OS/2 and then to Linux

• XFS (my favorite, which SCO may try to claim next)

Thus, I urge all persons who have sympathy for Free Software, Open Source, and Linux:

Do not cheer on attacks on the SCO site. By doing so, you falsely implicate our community in the attacks, in the eyes of outsiders who read your words. Our community believes in freedom of speech, not silencing our opponent's speech through net attacks. We will defeat SCO using the truth, not by gagging them.

Publicly deplore the attacks as an attempt to defame us, and not an effort of our community. Show others this notice. Continue to fight SCO, using all legal means at your disposal. Show others the analysis of SCO's ongoing fraud at Groklaw.net and elsewhere, and explain to them your own experience as a participant in the Free Software community.

Continue the visible presence of Free Software as a force for good in the world by producing excellent original software for everyone's free use and deploying it wherever possible. Promote these projects to the press and public as you carry them out. Do what you can for other public-good projects such as schools and non-profit organizations. FreeGeek.org is an excellent example of how to carry this out.

Show others by example that our side always takes the high road. When they see a low-road sort of action like denial-of-service, spam, or stock fraud, they'll know who to blame. Remember that your actions count. You are ambassadors of our community.

Many Thanks

Yes, this is a good read. The flames have started already of course from folks who didn't read the actual piece merely the headline. The author is a SysAdmin who argues that the Linux community needs to distance itself vocally from the MyDoom perpetrator.

"andy" should have read this MyDoom Worm "Harmful to Linux Reputation" Hear, hear. May "andy" rot in hell!

Plex86 (and Xen, VMware, and Connectix, and Ensim, and others) are the things people should look at if they want fast virtualization of x86. The trouble all these technologies run into is that IO has to go through the "host" OS (the one actually running on the metal) - often popping into userspace to do it (read: context & ring switches --> slow!). This is necessary in order to allow multiple virtualized OS's to share the IO devices. This causes stuff that is IO intensive (games, compilers, databases, etc.) take a fairly serious performance hit. Interestingly enough, Intel is working on building this sort of capability in the chips directly - check out Vanderpool for instance. I don't know if AMD is doing anything similar, anybody heard anything?

Huge MyDoom Zombie Army Wipes Out SCO and "If ISPs Are Blocking Sco.com Today, What Happened Jan 28/29?"

Huge MyDoom Zombie Army Wipes Out SCO and "If ISPs Are Blocking Sco.com Today, What Happened Jan 28/29?"

...titled "UserLinux - The Leaning Linux Tower of Babel?"

Openoffice has had great support for database entry since 1.0, check out the trail of Tears: MySQL, ODBC & OpenOffice 1.0 part 1 and part 2. The major problem the writer of that article had was all the dependency problems with the various programs. I set it up on a freebsd server no problem, thank god for the ports system.

Openoffice has had great support for database entry since 1.0, check out the trail of Tears: MySQL, ODBC & OpenOffice 1.0 part 1 and part 2. The major problem the writer of that article had was all the dependency problems with the various programs. I set it up on a freebsd server no problem, thank god for the ports system.

LinuxWorld hits the nail on the head when linking this morning's disturbing victory with an eerily appropriate statement by Sun's Java guru James Gosling this week about how Sun's own competition with Microsoft is "a life-and-death kind of struggle." Gosling's point was that "if [Microsoft] succeed, the whole ecosystem that the rest of the industry feeds off goes away." Lindows' Michael Robertson clearly views the situation identically, saying: "The ruling will deny the Netherlands the cost- savings that desktop Linux currently offers to approximately 18 million people worldwide, leaving vulnerable and expensive Microsoft software as the only option for computer consumers in the Netherlands."

If the Microsoft investment continues... Evil

A really good troll makes every word in his sentence a link so that his point seems valid.

You don't even have to visit the sites, just google something like "linux vs windows", grab relevent links and include then in your post. No one will read them anyways, and believe you because you provided plenty of background Info and reputable sources (computing.net included!). They will have to believe your Pro-Windows rant.

Linux isn't a Toy OS. it's used by google. Who provided you this Informative post :)

> If anyone asks you what this sco fiaSCO is about, you can direct them to this article.

AND THEN you direct them to these published Novell vs. SCO correspondances, Make sure to point out McBride's (SCO's) intentions as stated in their own words back in 2002 compared to his open letter a year later. It shouldn't be too hard for anyone not keeping up with /. to come to the conclusions that SCO is seriously smoking Crack, CRaCK, CRACK!. Although, it may just be easier to point them to this simulated IRC chat which seems to epitomize the entire series of events leading to this big mess. Oh and supposedly SCO is suing trees now.

Folks, go toThe Linux World page and look at the ad from IBM.

The page linked is Linux World's page on SCO v. Novell - with an IBM Linux ad, featuring the face of "Linux" with the words
I know you are
but what am I?

over it.

EEEEVILLLL!

You KNOW that IBM had that ready and waiting for this move!

Of course there's evidence!

SCO is the company formerly known as "Caldera Systems". the money from the microsoft settlement went to "Caldera Inc."

according to this register arcticle:

"There is not even a financial link between Caldera Systems and Caldera Inc,"

and the company that purchased old SCO's unix busines was Caldera Systems (Official history here). that's why they were so desperate to pump up the stock and to get that $50 mil financing from baystar capital (apparently baystar is backed up by several companies, including microsoft). they were running out of money from pre-ipo financings and ipo money. according to linuxworld they had only $4 million left to pay the bills.

And here's the link to the resolution.

Wrap Up of the Case

Here.

Gee. I wonder if the bastards actually coded the damn thing, or if they were good boy and did the right thing: steal code from an opensource project... no? =oP

None of your examples are specific enough or pan out to support your premise that RMS is against choice.

Emacs. Running emacs on X did not help the hurd, so he found a new developer and forked the project away from the existing developer. The mailing list emails of the time look incredibly childish. Plus the whole man vs info idiocy.

I'll have to ask you for a specific thread so I can see exactly what you're referring to. As for man and info, the choice of info is not to everyone's liking (including my own), but this is hardly denying choice. Nowhere in the licenses that cover GNU are you denied the freedom to make derivative works or distribute those derivatives to help other people. This power could be denied because that's how US copyright law works by default. It takes special action to grant these powers.

The long held grudge against Trolltech and KDE long after they moved from their own free licence to his GPL is another example.

Again, a specific post or essay would be helpful here. I remember when Qt was not free and eventually GNOME and Harmony were started. GNOME took off and the Harmony project became unnecessary because Qt was made free. RMS RMS examined and explained the legal issues involved in Qt's GPL-incompatibility including how KDE had been infringing upon the copyrights of some GPL-covered works. This was KDE developer's fault, not RMS or the FSF.

Contrary to the picture you're attempting to paint, RMS granted the forgiveness that KDE developers legally needed in order to continue to distribute their own (previously copyright infringing) code. RMS urged KDE's developers to get forgiveness from the other copyright holders whose code they had infringed upon. This is not the behavior of someone who holds a grudge, this is the behavior of someone who recognizes how valuable KDE is to the free software community and wants to make KDE legally available to all.

To this day, the Q Public License is a non-copyleft free software license that is GPL-incompatible meaning one cannot legally combine QPL-covered works with GPL-covered works without getting special permission. This doesn't affect the KDE project because Qt is also licensed under the GNU GPL.

GNU is very political.

"The Free Software movement *is* politics" and that is not news to people who understand what software freedom is all about.

I just wish the GNU pages would spend less time putting others down and have more documentation.

Then I hope you'll choose to help them out by writing the documentation you feel is absent or lacking quality. I'm sure many free software projects would welcome your discerning eye. But I don't think this has anything to do with RMS disliking choice or denying others the ability to choose.

Bunk and flaimbait! Why do you think that IBM Global Services, in cooperation with Dell and HP, just announced a major push to promote Linux on the desktop worldwide. See, among others, http://www.internetwk.com/breakingNews/showArticle .jhtml?articleID=16100352 or http://www.linuxworld.com/story/37858.htm. I get really tired of hearing people carp about how "Linux on the desktop is dead". This has been going on for years! IDC has estimated that deployment of Linux on the desktop will grow from about 1.5% today to c.a. 7% by 2006. That's just two years away, folks!

Don't forget when you complain about how hard Linux is to install, Windows comes pre-installed on most consumer level machines. This is courtesy of Microsoft's OEM licenses which severly discourage computer makers from offering choices, whatever the Justice Dept. decided about the practice. Just try to install Win2K sometime from scratch and get all the driver stuff to work with all your hardware.

Linux may not support the latest/greatest hardware on the market, but just about everything you need to do in a real-world situation can be done easily on a Linux desktop. I run gnome-2.4 under Gentoo Linux on my primary desktop and it works like a champ. It's easy, very configurable, and supports all the bells and whistles such as flash, streaming audio, java applets, etc. not to mention most standard office stuff I need to do. It's stable, as are the apps I run, and I'd recommend it to my 92 year non-techie old mom without hesitation. The BSOD is a thing of the past for me!

Here's the link. Sorry about that.

Try the first paragraph of this story for a bunch of technical links. Or this one from Linuxworld for a more introductory overview.

But probably what you really want is Joseph Pranevich's Wonderful World of Linux 2.6.

Speaking of which

Here's a good reason why Austin might be doing this.

Austin had a good scare a while back, with rumors of a Microsoft/BSA audit of the city's computers. The BSA is based in Austin, BTW. Anyway, I'm willing to bet that Austin didn't take too kindly to the hassles that Microsoft put them through, and are now happily giving them the boot up their ass.

Good for them.

In what way? Your message is nothing but opinion, and not a very sound one. GNOME, among other things, is considerably more advanced in both components, media framework (gstreamer), internationalization and (especially) accessiblity. The latter three pieces are about to be re-used by the KDE project!! So much for GNOME being behind and less advanced.

Pot, kettle, black? You offer little besides opinion as well. A quick google search turns up articles like this. I've yet to find anything touting GNOME architecture over KDE.

That's not to say GNOME doesn't have many good points that KDE should really look into (gConf comes to mind), but having coded for both systems, I know which one looks nicer to me.

KDE developers know the game is up, and are now trying (as the article says) to clean up the filthy mess that is the KDE/Qt interface and make it usable... and at the same time scrabble hopelessly to use the XML, media framework and accessbility systems from GNOME.

The article also says that: "Luckily for KDE, they have the advantage over Gnome. It is easier for them to streamline, strip out and clean up their current interface than Gnome to get that level or architectural quality that KDE today enjoys.", KDE's DCOP, KParts, and better overall integration (compare Abiword and Gnumeric to KSpread and KWord. I prefer the former, but the latter are better integrated).

Huh? My point, if you bothered to read it instead of getting all excited and zealous, is that it costs nothing to write applications (say a word processor) for the GNOME desktop whatever license you choose to use for your app. Unlike Qt, which will cost you $3000 for every developer you have working on it... unless you want to use the GPL for your application.

Um... Yes, you can write any application you want for GNOME, BUT it has to obey the LGPL license terms. You can't choose whatever license you want. LGPL != BSD. Whilst less restrictive than GPL terms, it's still difficult to write proprietry applications on top of it. Qt, however, has a choice between GPL and proprietry. You just have to pay for the latter.

Who is talking about commercial funding? I'm talking about commercial deployment... which is money in the bank + support fees + guaranteed survival.

Guaranteed survival? So no commercial product ever flopped?

I did not say KDE is dead. I said it is dead for business use. No doubt a hardcore of zealot will continue to huddle around the creaky old project, but it has no future in the real world.

Nice wording, but you're not backing it up much. SUSE still uses KDE as it's primary desktop, Lindows does, Mandrake does as well. Redhat uses GNOME but that's the only major Linux distro I can think of.

Again, a statement with nothing at all to back it up. Perhaps you think repeating the same old meme "KDE is more advanced" will make it true.

Um, it is? Just look at the two systems. Compare them side by side. GNOME has many nice features, but it is behind KDE; if you look at them both running, you can see that. There's quite a few internet articles on it as well.