SCO Scores Low On Industry Good Will, Nov 20, 2003

With its recent pronouncements about suing Linux customers and BSD, SCO's Darl McBride doesn't seem to be scoring very well in the good will department, judging from the reactions of Las Vegas showgoers.

McBride spelled out some of SCO's latest plans at least three times yesterday: in a press teleconference; a speech at Jupitermedia's Computer Digital Expo (CDE) in Las Vegas, and a press briefing just afterward.

Attendees at Comdex and Apache.Con--two other shows going on in Las Vegas this week--responded to the news with a mix of anger, frustration, bemusement, and concern.

The debate over SCO Group's claims on the Unix and Linux operating systems has never been polite. But now, it has grown deadly serious. Literally. Following telephone and e-mail threats to the Lindon software company and Darl McBride, SCO's president and chief executive; senior vice president Chris Sontag, and others, an unspecified number of bodyguards has been assigned to protect SCO's leadership.

Sometimes I suspect Bill Gates doesn't sleep so well at night. Not out of any guilt over his billions or the alleged mediocrity of his product. No, I wonder whether he might actually worry about the competition. Not Apple (though that iPod MP3 player is a killer toy, and I'm cheerfully typing these words on an Apple PowerBook G4). No, I'll bet Linux and its creator, Linus Torvalds, cross Gates's mind when he's looking up at the ceiling late at night.

The end game in the SCO fiasco is at hand. IBM's dissection of SCO's discovery wish-list is covered in exquisite detail at Groklaw. As yesterday's conference call demonstrated, SCO's lawyers are being forced to make increasingly bizarre arguments to just stay in the game. The company's last substantive filing demanded that the court find the GPL invalid and unconstitutional, and all software released under the GPL in the last three years to be public domain. At this point, it appears the entire SCO case will devolve to the nuts and bolts of contract agreements between IBM and AT&T. If you believe that IBM lawyers are stupid and sloppy, and have been for the last 20 years, then you might believe SCO has a chance. I don't.

Red Hat's renewal rate for support subscriptions to its high-end Linux product was more than 90 percent in the company's most recent quarter, well above the 75 percent rate the company tells analysts to expect.

Brazil's government is urging its massive bureaucracy to use free software like Linux on its computer systems in a cost-cutting move that could cost Microsoft millions of dollars in lost revenue.

The initiative seeks to reduce the cost of proprietary software licenses the government needs to use programmes like Microsoft's Windows operating system, which runs about 90 per cent of the world's computers.

The government says it spends more than 100 million reais, or about US$34 million ($54.05 million), a year on license payments, an amount deemed too big for the cost-conscious, left-leaning administration of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Linux Networx announced today that the Army Research Laboratory, a Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) Major Shared Resource Center (MSRC), has accepted the newest and most powerful HPCMP Linux cluster into their production environment. The 256-processor system designed for ARL, dubbed "Powell," is capable of performing 1.7 trillion operations per second (teraflops). The Powell cluster, recently ranked 113th on the Top 500 list (http://www.top500.org), exceeded rigorous effectiveness and capability testing requirements prior to delivering critical computations and simulations to MSRC users.

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