Microsoft takes Lindows fight to Sweden, Dec 11, 2003

Microsoft has opened another European front in its war to get Lindows.com to change its name.

The company has won a temporary restraining order which prohibits Lindows.com from use of the marks "Lindows", "Lindows.com", and "LindowsOS" in Sweden, pending a later decision on alleged trademark infringement. The judgment in effect halts Lindows OS sales in the country.

A months-long backroom battle led by Brazil, with support from India, South Africa and China, against the United States over open-source software took center stage Wednesday at the UN information summit meeting here.

Samuel Guimarães, executive secretary in Brazil's foreign ministry, told government representatives at the summit meeting's opening sessions that free-to-share software is crucial for the developing world because it enables poorer countries to develop their own technology instead of having to import it.

Linux is making sufficient inroads into the embedded systems market to send vendors scrambling. The latest example was Wind River Systems, which experts say has 30 percent of the market for the tiny operating systems that run millions of devices ranging from cellular phones to airplane navigation gear.

Microsoft's patent appears to be platform agnostic, making it likely to apply to all operating systems including Linux and Unix. The operating system would recognise files to be run as applications by the HTML application file extension, .hta.

I know, I know, I'm about three weeks early for my annual predictions column, but I want to come right out and say it: 2004 is going to be a big year for Linux.

Big in terms of its corporate enterprise adoption, which, according to every industry observer I spoke with, should continue apace or faster. Big in terms of a hot topic for next year, specifically with the infamous SCO lawsuits coming to a head.

And finally, big in terms of investors on both sides of the Linux equation.

SCO has reported that they are experiencing an attack on their servers. Groklaw has been flooded with information that indicates their story doesn't add up.

The consensus of what I am hearing is: That it is probably not an attack. That their description of the "attack" makes no sense. And that if what they are saying were true, SCO would be admitting to gross negligence.

SCO Group Inc., the small software maker suing IBM over the use of software code used for the Linux operating system, said on Wednesday its home page was brought down by a hacker attack in the morning.

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