SCO, IBM battle heats up, Nov 12, 2003

Subpoenas are flying in the high-profile lawsuit between the SCO Group and IBM, as both companies try to buttress their legal claims by turning to third parties for information.

SCO said Wednesday that it has filed subpoenas with the U.S. District Court in Utah, targeting six different individuals or organizations. Those include Novell; Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel; Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation; Stewart Cohen, chief executive of the Open Source Development Labs; and John Horsley, general counsel of Transmeta.

The legal battle between SCO Group and IBM is widening, as IBM has sent subpoenas to investors and analysts who have supported SCO.

On Oct. 30, IBM issued subpoenas to Baystar Capital, Deutsche Bank, Renaissance Ventures and Yankee Group, companies that have either invested in SCO or published reports suggesting that SCO's claims against IBM could be legitimate.

Linux should be used more in governments, right? With no Microsoft tax being required and many fewer viruses, the taxpayers would be saved some money and the government would run more efficiently. Do I dare mention the possibility that Linux people might be hired in greater numbers?

Well, this is what a bunch of us in Maryland thought. Our goal--no one has accused us of thinking small--was to make Congress use Linux. Our reasoning was Congress, our second branch of government, can't very well take steps to encourage open source and free software in the Executive branch until Congress itself uses such software.

Novell on Tuesday shipped the latest version of Red Carpet Enterprise, the software it acquired in its purchase of Ximian that automates centralized management of workstations and servers running a variety of Linux distributions.

Red Carpet Enterprise 2, which is available now at a price of $200 per managed system, allows enterprise IT to distribute, install, rollback, repair, and update Linux operating systems and applications from vendors such as SuSE, Red Hat, and Ximian on Linux-based workstations and servers from a central management console.

TimeSys, a company that specializes in Linux for "embedded" computing devices such as DVD players, expanded its programming tools so that they can be used with any version of the open-source operating system.

The expansion means that TimeSys' tools can be used to customize a version of Linux based on either homegrown or commercially available versions of the operating system, the Philadelphia-based company said last week. The move could expand the number of developers interested in the start-up's technology.

In a move that some Linux users are likening to the attempt – doomed to failure, it turned out – to build a Tower of Babel, open source activist Bruce Perens pledged himself this week to the creation of a new Linux distro: UserLinux.

UserLinux would be based, said Perens, on Debian GNU/Linux, thus drawing on a pre-existing Linux project with over 1,000 developers behind it. And it would occupy the vaccuum that is going to exist in the consumer marker now that Red Hat is going to stop selling its consumer version of Linux in retail stores.

In a motion filed earlier this month with the Superior Court of California for San Francisco County, Microsoft asked Judge Paul H. Alvarado to reject all claims processed by the Lindows site, which offers to help people garner benefits from Microsoft's $1.1 billion class-action settlement.

In the latest legal filings, the software giant's attorney, Robert A. Rosenfeld, writes that the Lindows site violates the terms of Microsoft's agreement by using so-called digital signatures to process settlement claims. Digital signatures are online validation agreements used to verify individuals' identities.

A press release is out this morning (and is reprinted at the bottom of this article) that says Ransom Love is joining Progeny's board of directors. Progeny founder -- now Board Chairman and Chief Strategist -- Ian Murdock says they went after Ransom, not the other way around. "We asked him," Ian adds with a small laugh, "but he was more than willing." And why wouldn't he be? Progeny is not only profitable today but has been profitable for the last two years and is reinvesting its profits in the company. It is now up to 25 employees and is looking at further growth in the future.

Microsoft Corp. is preparing a major PR assault over Windows' perceived security failings in which it will criticize Linux for taking too long to fix bugs, we have learned.

In a sign that the inroads made by the Open Source community are starting to rattle the software giant, Microsoft has hired several analysts to review how fast holes are patched in the open source software and is expected to announce that Windows compares favorably.

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