IBM on leaked memo: Nothing to see here. Move along..., Jan 10, 2004

It looked like a great story opportunity to me. There it was, right at the bottom of the leaked IBM internal memo reported on by Mike Magee in The Inquirer on Wednesday which seemed to call for an internal migration of desktops at IBM to Linux: the name and location of an IBMer leading something called an "Open Desktop Project Office." I immediately fired off an email to my IBM PR contact asking for an interview with the project leader. But sometimes the story is that there is no story -- or at least no answer.

A San Francisco judge shot down a Linux company's attempt to process claims on behalf of customers in Microsoft's $1.1 billion settlement with California consumers, the Redmond, Wash., software giant said Thursday.

In this settlement of 27 private antitrust lawsuits, California consumers who bought Microsoft products between 1995 and 2001 can collect rebates from Microsoft in the form of vouchers good for software or computer products.

Lindows.com, of San Diego, has been offering to process claims ranging from $50 to $100 on behalf of consumers via its Web site. Lindows.com's plan was to send the customers copies of its Linux-based software up front and then collect the money to pay for it from Microsoft.

SCO Group Inc., the software company that is suing IBM and extracting royalties from other Linux users, said Friday that it had held "low-level talks" with Internet search engine Google about a license agreement.

"Certainly if they're using 10,000 Linux servers that include our intellectual property as part of Unix, we would want them to license," said Blake Stowell, a SCO spokesman.

Supporters of Linux cried foul this week when Microsoft rolled out research reports that it commissioned from research firms IDC, Giga Research and the META Group that questioned total cost of ownership (TCO) of the open source operating system.

In the process, analysts involved with the reports are finding themselves under fire over them, including one more than a year old, because they say Windows enterprise server environments are less expensive to maintain than comparable Linux setups.

Two Linux distributors from China and Japan are building a common open-source platform for Asian companies

China's Red Flag Software and Japan's Miracle Linux aims to develop a common Linux platform to make it easier for Asian companies to switch to the open-source camp.

The two Linux distributors said in a statement they will make use of Oracle's software development centre in Beijing to jointly create a new Linux-based server operating environment called "Asianux".

The vulnerability could allow attackers to take administrative control of compromised systems and run attack code of their choice, an iSec advisory stated. ISec claimed that it had developed and successfully tested code that was capable of exploiting the flaw, although it added that actually launching such an attack wouldn't be easy.

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