EU: Settlement Talks With Microsoft Fail, Mar 18, 2004

The European Union antitrust chief said Thursday last-ditch settlement talks with Microsoft Corp. had failed and he would propose that a precedent-setting ruling against the U.S. software giant be adopted next week.

"We made substantial progress toward resolving the problems that had arisen in the past but we were unable to agree on commitments for future conduct," EU Competition Commissioner Mario Monti said. "It was impossible to achieve a satisfactory result in terms of setting a precedent."

Lindows.com, Inc. has submitted a motion to the United States District Court in the Western District of Washington asking the court to halt a flood of global trademark lawsuits Microsoft has filed against competitor Lindows. Dating back to 2001, Microsoft has filed multiple requests to shutdown Lindows.com in the U.S. Those requests have been repeatedly denied. Recently, Microsoft has begun filing separate lawsuits with identical claims in foreign courts to attempt to overrule those U.S. findings and block access to a U.S.-based company and website.

"Microsoft is purposely delaying the U.S. case from going to trial while they use their monopoly profits to fund a global legal assault on our small company to halt the adoption of Linux," said Michael Robertson, chief executive officer of Lindows.com, Inc. "The U.S. case has been ongoing for over two years and Lindows is looking forward to presenting extensive evidence to a Seattle jury demonstrating that windows is a generic word and that Microsoft secured a trademark only by committing fraud on the trademark office."

Microsoft has continually had the dunce cap pulled over its ears as the Internet struggles with a deluge of virus and spam activity, accused of leaving a smorgasbord of vulnerabilities in its products for miscreants to exploit.

However, commenting on the situation at IDC Security Vision event in Sydney, Symantec Asia-Pacific vice-president Vince Steckler said today's open source operating systems wouldn't fare any better if they were more dominant than their proprietary counterparts.

Can't you see it? A new version of the old Western movie is coming to a town near you. Entitled Showdown at the SCO Corral, this movie has the cast of characters assembled to create one of the most heated battles in the IT space in years.

In case you haven't seen the trailer to this film, let me give you a quick review. SCO is currently suing IBM, DaimlerChrysler, and AutoZone for violating SCO's Unix copyrights by using Linux. However, it has yet to be proven that SCO's intellectual property is part of the Linux operating system. So you now have companies being sued for possibly no reason whatsoever. Plus, there's passing innuendo that Microsoft may be funding SCO in its efforts. All the while, the lawyers are having a field day collecting gold from every party that's trying to protect themselves. Tell me this is not the perfect Western!

The press release announcing the upcoming SUSE 9.1, based on the 2.6 kernel, was headed, "Novell Releases First Commercial Linux Featuring 2.6 Kernel." The new version certainly sounds nice -- we can hardly wait to get our hands on a copy -- but what struck us first were several points in the press release itself, including more mention of Gnome than we've ever seen from SUSE before.

We can't all run out today and buy SUSE 9.1; it's not expected in stores until late April or early May. But it sounds like it might be worth waiting for. According to Novell, it runs on both 32- and 64-bit microprocessors, and includes a LiveCD, a la Knoppix or Mepis, so you can test it from your CD drive before deciding to do a full install.

Open-source software developers are subject to the same macroeconomic forces as the rest of the IT industry, and they have to avoid repeating the monstrously costly mistakes of the 1990s, says Ray Lane, general partner in venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers.

In the present environment of unpredictable threats of international terrorism and slow economic growth, companies are going to be more careful than ever about their software technology investments, Lane said during a presentation at the Open Source Business Conference here.

IBM hopes to have 40,000 Linux desktop users within the company by the end of the year, said an IBM executive at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco.

About 15,000 of IBM's 300,000 employees have moved to the Linux desktop, said Scott Handy, IBM's vice-president of worldwide Linux strategy and market development.

Hyundai Motor Co., South Korea's largest automaker, and its affiliate Kia Motors Corp. have adopted a Linux cluster system built by International Business Machines Corp., the world's largest computer maker, for vehicle crash simulation testing and analysis, IBM Korea said on Wednesday.

By connecting a number of small computers, the cluster system helps them perform as a high-performance supercomputer, said IBM Korea, a wholly owned subsidiary of IBM.

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