Leaked SCO memo may indicate huge MS payoff, Mar 04, 2004

A SCO Group insider has leaked an internal company memorandum discussing its relationship with Microsoft, and it reveals that SCO is apparently collecting a lot bigger payoff from attacking Linux than anybody knew.

The SCO Group's lawsuits against two Linux users this week sent ripples through the Linux universe, but not much in the way of fear.

Legal experts expect many Linux customers to grow more nervous as a result of SCO's suits against AutoZone and DaimlerChrysler, but Howard Feiock, systems administrator for Baraboo, Wis.-based dairy cooperative Foremost Farms USA, is not among them.

"I don't think that SCO has a case. I am just waiting for the case to be thrown out and for SCO to subsequently go out of business," said Feiock, whose business uses Linux for screening e-mail for viruses and is testing Oracle business software. "For our organization, we have no plans to discontinue use of Linux in our environment whatsoever."

The magistrate judge doing the legal housekeeping in the run-up to the $5 billion SCO v. IBM trial next year gave the SCO Group what it wanted Wednesday and ordered IBM to cough up the discovery that SCO claims is vital to its charge that IBM copied Unix code into Linux.

IBM has been told to turn over the releases of AIX and Dynix that SCO's lawyers say represent "about 232 products" in 45 days. SCO in turn has been told to provide the court with a memorandum saying whether the code is relevant or not to its case and identify additional files it may want.

"One order of truth, hold the irony." Sometimes a story is so good, you almost don't want to know if it's true or not. Such is the case with the widely reported discovery by UK firm Netcraft that the Nevada District Court, which will hear one of the two SCO lawsuits, itself runs Linux on their Web servers.

Netcraft based this report on the analysis that they perform on Web page requests to sites. Unfortunately, as their own FAQ indicates, these results are not 100% foolproof, due to firewalls and proxy servers that may lie between the actualy Web server and the outside world.

Unfortunately, in this case, that is exactly what has happened. Phone calls to the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, which provides hosting for the Nevada District Court, reveal that the site is in fact running on Lotus Notes technology on top of Windows servers. Technical staff in the administrative office of the court strongly refuted any claim that Linux is being used at all on the site.

A change in licensing terms by the well-known open source projects Apache and XFree86 has led to the Free Software Foundation listing both licences as being incompatible with the General Public Licence or GPL.

The new licence approved by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) was meant to be compatible with other open source licences, such as the GPL, and one that remained true to the original goals of the Apache Group.

Microsoft's attempts to prevent Linux from over-running Asia look shaky with the news that a special low-cost, cut-down version of Windows XP still works out more expensive than a Linux box.

The software giant has recognised that price is a critical factor in the poorer countries of the world and so has created a special XP-Lite version with which to entice new users.

Gerry Louw is a longtime fan of Sun Microsystems and its powerful Unix-based computers. In fact, he has been running Sun's pricey machines at various companies for more than ten years. Yet today, Louw, chief information officer of VMS, a 1,000-employee company in New York, is ripping out hundreds of Sun servers in 16 locations and replacing them with inexpensive servers running Intel processors and Linux, a free operating system.

2.6.4-rc2 has been released today.
See changelog for full details.

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