SCO – Ultimate Hypocrites ?

Posted on August 24, 2003 by Chris Samuel

Oh dear oh dear oh dear, SCO do seem to be able to make a complete pigs ear out of things, don’t they.

First of all they say Linux has copied code, then they give two examples, the first being a malloc() routine appearing in V3 Unix and written in 1973 (the algorithm appeared in a book in 1968) and released under a BSD license by Caldera (now SCO – yes the same ones pursuing the law suit) and the second being part of the Berkeley Packet Filter suite written by Lawrence Berkeley Labs and released under the BSD license. Read more here.

Then they say the license that many open source projects are released under, the GPL, is worthless and bad, and yet the same day announce that they’ll be using the Samba 3.0.0 release in their systems. Now guess which license Samba is released under ? Read more here.

To cap it all off, their webserver, according to Netcraft, is running Apache on Linux!

Have a look at what it, and the other systems it shares space with, run, by looking at the Netcraft Summary for the IP block it lives on says.

Lots and lots of Linux, some Windows and no SCO or Unixware…

Living with Linux from PC World NZ

Posted on June 29, 2003 by Chris Samuel

Here’s an excellent article on living with Linux from New Zealand’s PC World magazine.

If you’ve wondered about running Linux in the past then I’d suggest having a read of it, it concentrates on what the experience is like, as well as looking at a functional comparison between OpenOffice.org and Microsofts Office XP.

SCO, the 10-Q form, IBM, Linux and Microsoft

Posted on June 16, 2003 by Chris Samuel

As most people involved with Linux and who aren’t hiding under a rock will know, SCO have begun legal action against IBM over alleged trade secret breaches in the US. They’ve also been bad mouthing the Linux community and claiming that code from Linux has been taken from their UNIX codebase. To this end LinuxTag and various German Linux companies have obtained an injunction against SCO in Germany to prevent them from repeating allegations which they refuse to publically prove.
Anyway, one of the latest developments in this have been quite interesting, in that Microsoft went and bought a UNIX license from SCO. The conspiracy theorists went ballistic over this, saying that MS were essentially funding SCO to damage Linux.
In the light of all this, SCO’s recent filing of it’s form 10-Q (a US Securities and Exchange Commission document, legally binding) makes for very interesting reading. The brief notes are:

SCO believes that the legal action may damage their business in the long run.
Apart from MS there has been only one other (unnamed) SCOSource licensee.
These two licensees contributed over $8 million to SCO’s revenue.
The unnamed SCOSource licensee has also been offered up to 210,000 shares of SCO at $1.83 a share. SCO is currently trading around $10!
SCO describes the SCOSource UNIX license as “perpetual”.

For more info read on….

Continue reading →

Microsoft kills of Linux Anti Virus Software

Posted on June 14, 2003 by Chris Samuel

Well Microsoft have done it again.

They’ve bought out a Romanian Anti-Virus software company, most of whos business is making software for Linux gateways to protect vulnerable Windows systems from virus attack.
Guess what’s the first casualty of the takeover ? Yup, the anti-virus range.

So much for the anti-trust judgement..

Sources: