SCO: Linux lawsuit to be filed Tuesday, Mar 02, 2004

The SCO Group plans to expand its Linux legal attack on Tuesday by filing a lawsuit against a large company using the open-source operating system.

SCO Chief Executive Darl McBride announced the plan Monday at the Software 2004 conference here, but he didn't identify the company beyond saying it would have a recognized name.

SCO, which owns a disputed amount of Unix intellectual property and claims some of the code was improperly used in Linux, threatened in November to sue Linux users, although it missed a self-imposed mid-February deadline.

Alabama, with Senate Bill 276, is the latest state to introduce a bill concerning the use of open source software in the public sector.

SB 276, written and submitted by State Sen. Quinton Ross, last week passed its first challenge with a 7-1-1 vote in the Governmental Affairs Committee where it originated. It will now go to the state senate floor for debate, probably within the next few months. If it passes the senate vote, it goes to the full legislature. A win there sends it to the governor's desk to be signed into law or vetoed.

Gentoo Linux has announced the release of Gentoo Linux 2004.0 for x86, AMD64, PowerPC, Sun SPARC, and SGI MIPS architectures. The 'Gentoo Hardened team' has also unveiled the inaugural release of a security-enhanced Gentoo platform for the x86 architecture.

In addition to bugfixes and increased security, Gentoo Linux 2004.0 contains tools for developers including toolchain and user environment based on Linux kernel 2.6.3, GCC 3.3.2, GLIBC 2.3.2, KDE 3.2, GNOME 2.4.2, and xfce4.

There's no other way of looking at it. Sun Microsystems has again declared war on Microsoft. In the past, Sun generally provided servers, while Microsoft focused on software. The border has become very blurred, especially now that Sun has made a new play for small and medium-sized businesses. Sun's traditional customers were large and rich enterprises. Its products were the Mercedes Benzes of servers, and were priced to suit. But the high-tech crisis hurt the giants too, and Sun changed direction and products, cut prices, and entered the services sector.

Linux could start to chip away at Microsoft's stronghold on the enterprise desktop within the next 12 months, says a senior executive from Novell.

To date, Linux's successes among Asian businesses has been largely confined to the server end. With the exception of some government-led initiatives, particularly those undertaken by Chinese and Thai authorities, the open-source operating system (OS) has not made significant inroads into the corporate desktop market.

However, David Lenz, director of sales and marketing for Novell Asia-Pacific, is bullish the tide could turn this year.

Linux-based hosting operations posted the strongest hostname growth in February, capturing the top three spots and seven of the top 10 in our monthly Hosting Switching Summary. Leaders Go Daddy (up 117K) and 1&1 Internet AG host the majority of their sites on Linux.

Domain registrar eNom, which recently accelerated up its push into shared hosting, was the fastest-growing Windows-based host. Yahoo was February's strongest performer among FreeBSD hosts, with a gain of 13.8K.

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