Kernel release: 2.4.23-pre7, Oct 09, 2003

2.4.23-pre7 has been released today.
See changelog for full details.

Files added: 186
Files changed: 1305
Files removed: 8

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has asked the SCO Group to provide information regarding complaints filed with it, about SCO's IP claims and statements regarding the need for commercial Linux users to obtain a Unix licence, according to the company's latest quarterly filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

The complaint was filed in July by Open Source Victoria, a marketing, advocacy and focus group.

It asked the ACCC to investigate SCO's activities in light of "unsubstantiated claims and extortive legal threats for money" against possibly hundreds of thousands of Australians.

Why have you chosen to go after Linux customers in addition to IBM?
Sontag: SCO has really been left with no other choice but to request that commercial customers of Linux compensate SCO for our intellectual property with a license fee. The hardware vendors don't take responsibility for infringements in Linux because, technically, they aren't distributors. The distributors pass the hot potato to business end users by shielding themselves with the GPL by saying, 'This product has no warranty and no indemnification.' So now if Linux has problems, including misappropriated intellectual property going into Linux, the end users are left holding this hot potato.

As the Linux Expo got underway in Olympia's exhibition centre on Tuesday, across town at the UK Tech Summit some of the UK's most prominent CIOs gave the idea of open source a decidedly cool reception.

Speaking at a panel debate at the influential gathering of technology vendors and CIOs, they said that although Linux does figure in their organizations, they still do not feel it is ideal for mission-critical operations.

The views are likely to inflame the sensibilities of Linux advocates, who cite the stability and security of Linux as a major advantage over Microsoft's operating systems.

Frank Denis reported a bug in unpatched versions of MySQL prior to version 3.23.58. Passwords for MySQL users are stored in the Password field of the user table. Under this bug, a Password field with a value greater than 16 characters can cause a buffer overflow. It may be possible for an attacker with the ability to modify the user table to exploit this buffer overflow to execute arbitrary code as the MySQL user. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CAN-2003-0780 to this issue.

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