Linux Code Red, Jan 22, 2004

It’s taken more than a decade, millions of man hours and an international movement bent on software sovereignty to poise Linux as the fastest-growing player in information technology. Now, on the cusp of punching through proprietary software’s kung-fu grip on the market, a fuming little Utah County company threatens to stomp Linux dead in its tracks.

“I’ve been pounding the table here for a year or so saying there’s no free lunch, and there is going to be a day of reckoning for every company that thinks they are going to try and sell a free model.” That’s Darl McBride, president and CEO of the SCO Group, a perennial loser at selling UNIX and, until recently, Linux operating systems.

The SCO Group Inc. has found a new venue for its attacks on Linux and open-source software: Capitol Hill.

SCO earlier this month sent a letter to the 535 members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate from company President and CEO Darl McBride, raising concerns about open-source software and its General Public License (GPL), the company confirmed on Wednesday.

In the letter, which the Open Source and Industry Alliance on Wednesday made public on its Web site in PDF format, McBride wrote that open-source software threatens the U.S. IT industry, the nation's global economic competitiveness and national security. He urged lawmakers to consider these threats when voting on economic, intellectual property and national security issues.

Intel likely will take a two-phase approach to providing software that Linux needs to take advantage of the processor maker's Centrino chips, an Intel executive said Wednesday.

The chipmaker likely will begin by releasing a proprietary software module, called a driver, said Will Swope, general manager of Intel's Software and Solutions Group, speaking in an interview at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo here. He said he hopes the company will later offer an open-source driver, software that the general Linux programming community may scrutinize and reshape if desired.

Novell Chief Executive Jack Messman said the purchase of a Linux developer and a $50 million investment will help it become "the largest Linux vendor" as it fights a lawsuit over ownership of the computer-operating system.

"I'm interested in growing the Linux market very fast and serving our customers," Messman said. "We believe that having another large vendor like Novell in the Linux business helps grow the business."

Microsoft Corp. is ratcheting up the rhetoric in its battle to contain the fallout from dissatisfied customers moving to the open-source Linux operating system.

Earlier this month the Redmond, Wash.-based software company launched a new advertising campaign, referred to as "Get the Facts," which is designed to give customers information about the advantages of using its Windows operating system versus Linux, its open-source competitor.

Building on that campaign, Orlando Ayala, the senior vice president for Microsoft's small and midmarket solutions and partner group, sent an e-mail to all his staff late Wednesday night, telling them that "there continues to be a great deal of noise in the marketplace about the growth of Linux."

As never before, corporate customers are turning to Linux software instead of Microsoft Windows to run big business operations.

Now, if only they could get the word processor's basic "cut and paste" feature to work.

At the LinuxWorld trade show here this week, advocates said the next big challenge for the loose-knit "free software" movement is to create a reliable way to run desktop computers and perform mainstream office tasks.

Although Novell Inc., SUSE Linux AG, Sun Microsystems Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Red Hat Inc. are all offering protection or indemnification programs to protect customers from possible legal threats stemming from their use of Linux, industry leader IBM has quietly remained on the sidelines.

But here at the opening day of the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo, IBM publicly weighed in on the issue at a product announcement news conference, arguing that there's really no need for it to indemnify its growing pool of 6,300 Linux customers. IBM's rationale: The ongoing $3 billion lawsuit filed against it last March by The SCO Group Inc. is baseless.

Version 3.1 of the K Desktop Environment, one of the two main desktops used by Linux distributions, has been awarded the LinuxWorld magazine 2003 Readers' Choice Award for Best Linux Desktop Manager.

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