German company clogs SCO's legal machine, Mar 26, 2004

As anyone interested in open-source software will know by now, SCO is claiming that its copyright-protected code was illegally copied into the Linux operating system. The company has sued IBM Corp. alleging copyright infringement and breach of contract, and earlier this month sued two Linux users, DaimlerChrysler AG and auto parts retailer AutoZone Inc., over their use of the open-source operating system.

But what some folks don't know is that Univention GmbH, a small startup software venture in Bremen, Germany, has successfully halted the Lindon, Utah, company from making copyright infringement claims in the country -- Europe's largest open source market.

Less than one month after becoming the first publicly announced purchaser of The SCO Group Inc.'s controversial intellectual property license for Linux, Houston-based Internet service provider Everyones Internet Ltd. is reconsidering the benefits of doing business with the Linux community's enemy number one.

Hewlett-Packard Co. says it is yielding to large clients' demands and expanding Linux distribution, a decision that could force Microsoft to reconsider some of its corporate pricing for Windows.

HP announced a wider partnership on Wednesday with Novell Inc. and plans to package its SuSE version of Linux with computers bound for corporate clients.

'What's interesting is the possibility it will give Microsoft the impression that it's actually in a competitive market,' IDC analyst Roger Kay said. 'It would act like a competitor rather than a monopoly and use price as a competitive tool.'

Will open source become the predominant development model for software? "It's just a matter of time," Lotus founder Mitch Kapor told an audience of software developers this morning.

The audience of more than 300 was gathered at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., for PyCon, a conference organized by volunteers from the Python community. The founder of Lotus Development Corp., called Lotus Software since its acquisition by IBM, told the gathered adherents of the open-source software-development language that open source is the only viable model for developing new desktop applications because of Microsoft's dominance in the space.

"We cannot have second thoughts about using Linux, as I had the great pleasure of converting our last Windows server to Linux a couple years ago," said Dan Smith, an administrator with the Intelligent Systems Lab at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. "And in a year or two, [we] will be able to retire the last of our Sun [servers]. We could not provide one-third of the services and abilities we currently do if we did not use Linux as our primary operating system."

andrake 10 has it, SUSE's rolling it out in 9.1, Gentoo has had a "test" version with it since last year, and now we'll probably see almost every commercial distribution move to 2.6.x within the next month or two because of competitive pressure. This is not in line with the basic "it's ready when it's ready" dictum that is given as the reason open source software is often technically superior to proprietary competitors.

Greenpeace UK has aging Novell Inc. servers and is putting them out to grass to bring in a storage network from IBM Corp. business partner Ardenta. There will be 100 Greenpeace staff using the 2TB SAN with IBM FASt600 storage.

The SAN will replace two NetWare servers and sits behind an existing infrastructure of Linux and Microsoft Windows 2000-based servers.

All parties involved are congratulating each other about this. "This is an excellent example of a high resilience storage implementation, recognizing that organizations of all sizes, large and small, need the very best protection for their vital data," stated Shaun Coulson, IBM Storage business director, U.K.

An attorney for San Diego's Lindows.com told a federal judge in Seattle yesterday that the company would be forced to shut down its Web site if the court didn't intervene in an ongoing trademark dispute with software giant Microsoft.

U.S. District Judge John Coughenour didn't make a ruling at the hearing, in which both companies had 20 minutes to present their case.

But he did discuss a compromise apparently aimed at allowing Lindows.com to continue to use its name and keep its Web site – where it sells software – operating.

Shares of Red Hat reached a 52-week high Thursday, as the Raleigh-based Linux distributor continued to reap rewards from a strong earnings report and analysts' upgrades announced earlier in the week.

Red Hat shares rose as high as $22.45 before dropping slightly to close at $22.38. That was an increase of $2.37, or 11.8 percent, from the stock's previous close of $20.01.

Red Hat's previous 52-week high was $22.11.

More than 16.3 million shares of the company's stock were traded Thursday, compared to an average volume of 5.3 million.

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