SCO Group Disputes Novell Copyright Claim, Dec 24, 2003

Novell spokesman Bruce Lowry declined to comment beyond what the company posted on its Web page, which was a statement about registering Unix in its name and what it said were correspondences between the two companies in which Novell disputes SCO's claim to owning the copyrights.

The battle is the latest for SCO since it purchased Unix from Novell in 1995. SCO has sued IBM Corp. over the Unix-derivative Linux operating system, and SCO also is seeking licensing payments from Linux users and has threatened legal action against them.

The SCO Group's lawsuit against IBM and and new warnings of legal action by SCO against other companies over its claim that copyrighted code slipped into select versions of the Linux kernel are not slowing deployments of the open source operating system, an upcoming study has found.

Linux operating systems continue to gather steam in government information technology circles, with officials at the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts announcing they would support the open standard as the basis for mission-sensitive applications.

The courts agency awarded PEC Solutions Inc., based in Fairfax, Va., a contract worth up to $9 million to help migrate the administrative office's existing Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Solaris/Intel Corp. server infrastructure to the Linux platform. The agreement is initially for one year with an option for four more years.

According to officials, the Linux systems will back several critical applications supported at court locations throughout the United States, including court and probation/pretrial services case management, finance and accounting.

We're being consumed by the fact that we like to solve computer problems, and we can't understand why other people just don't see the benefits as plainly as we do. History shows far too many superior technologies that are rendered obsolete because of a more easily accessible alternative. Anyone who has owned a Betamax VCR can attest to this. I'd hate to see the same happen to Linux and OSS.

The Centibots are part of a military project funded by DARPA, the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Working in teams of up to a hundred, they are designed to conduct surveillance in hazardous areas, spot intruders and find ``objects of value'' like prisoners or wounded people. After a year and a half of development, the Centibots' creators say they are ready to show their stuff to their military backers. On Friday, nearly 100 robots lined up in hallway for a class picture. They'll spend the next few weeks in final testing before snuggling into bubble-wrap for the trip back east.

The Centibots cost about $4,000 and are built from off-the-shelf components, including ordinary WiFi cards for communicating with each other and cheap PC cameras that send images humans can interpret. Via Technologies, a Taiwanese company with operations in Fremont, supplied the motherboards. A Linux operating system manages 1.2 million lines of code, written in Java, C and C++.

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