Groklaw's Jones Looks Beyond SCO, Feb 12, 2004

Pamela Jones is known to millions of online readers as "PJ," the editor and moderator of Groklaw. They also know her as the heart of the open-source community's legal battle against litigation aimed at the Linux kernel and other free and open-source software.

Since its launch on May 17, 2003, Groklaw has morphed from a one-woman blog into an open-source legal research project involving hundreds of people -- an effective counterweight to the legal departments of companies like SCO Group and Microsoft.

The French government will install open source software on the desktop as part of Project ADELE, a plan to computerize much of the country's administration by 2007, a government official said Wednesday.

The administration will migrate a significant number of its desktops to open source operating systems and application software, Jacques Sauret, director of the French Agency for the Development of the Electronic Administration, told a meeting of the French IT and Telecoms Press Club.

Whether that significant number will be 5 percent, 10 percent or 15 percent is still being debated, he said.

Sun Microsystems may have been the last major server maker to embrace Linux, but Chief Executive Scott McNealy argues that the company will benefit more than its competitors from the open-source software.

"The open-source model is our friend," McNealy said Wednesday at the company's analyst conference here.

Novell is seeking to undermine the SCO Group's legal claim against IBM with evidence that allegedly shows SCO purchased limited rights to the Unix operating system.

In a letter sent to SCO on Friday, Novell lawyers argue that when Novell purchased Unix from AT&T, the agreement excluded the right to control "derivative works"--subsequent software based on Unix code. Those terms then govern the Unix assets SCO bought from Novell, according to the letter, which invalidates SCO's claims to control Unix-derived software distributed by IBM.

However, a SCO victory doesn’t necessarily bode well for Microsoft in the long run, either. First of all, Linux will continue to grow, even with a SCO tax. Surveys I have conducted for clients find that most developers, for example, seem unfazed by the prospect of a SCO tax. Only a handful would reconsider their Linux plans if SCO prevailed.

That’s because a lot of IT shops are attracted to Linux by features other than up-front pricing, which only is a small part of the cost of ownership anyway. Microsoft itself makes a big deal about the fact that up-front cost doesn’t matter as much as cost of ownership over a three-to-five-year period. In some estimates, Windows comes out with a slightly lower TCO than Linux, mainly since there aren’t as many skilled Linux developers and administrators as there are with Windows. That situation may change dramatically – look at all the campuses where Linux is being used.

Stacy Holland is a California-based executive recruiter who specializes in finding people with Linux-related skills. Her business card has her photo at the top, and beneath her photo it says, "The Linux Lady." She started working with Linux people (and using Linux) in 1999, and decided to concentrate on Linux because, she says, "It's a very exciting, close-knit family of technically-motivated, interesting people." This doesn't mean every NewsForge reader should immediately send Stacy a resume. She only recruits management types. But she has plenty of career advice for coders (and others) who want to become top management, along with tips on how to ride the waves of today's shifting IT job market.

Motorola has launched an embedded Linux powered A-76x-series smartphone in the China marketplace, with VPN capabilities and productivity software targeting enterprise customers. In addition to phone features, the A-768 offers a PDA, browser, MP3 music playback, full-motion video recording, speaker phone, finance utilities, and more.

The city of Schwäbisch Hall used toy penguins and gender competitiveness to persuade workers to accept the switch to desktop Linux

A local council in Germany may have found the secret to overcoming user reluctance to Linux -- stuffed penguins and powerful women.

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