SCO Litigation Takes Its Toll on Bottom Line, Aug 10, 2004

The SCO Group's ongoing legal battle against IBM and others is having a negative impact on the company, leaving it with few new customers for its Unix software and current users reluctant to pay additional licensing fees.

Both issues are taking a serious financial toll on the company, which saw its revenue for the second quarter drop by half and sales from its SCOsource division, which licenses its Unix intellectual property, nearly evaporate.

With Sun's decision at the end of June to release its prototype three-dimensional desktop environment, known as Project Looking Glass, under the GPL, the flashy project took the first step toward being more than a fancy trade-show demo.

After downloading and installing Release 0.5 of Looking Glass, I can report the project has matured enough to be a fancy demo right in my own cubicle.

Anti-virus software is definitely a challenge for the open-source model, and while there is at least one active program, there's no good evidence of how well it works.

The anti-virus business is an interesting one. On the one hand, it's amazingly competitive on a worldwide basis, even if Symantec dominates the U.S. consumer market; there are a lot of companies in this business. But it's also a disappointing business technologically. The companies are not out to solve a problem as much as to acquire an annuity stream in the form of subscriptions for signature updates.

2.6.8-rc4 has been released today.
See changelog for full details.

Files added: 527
Files changed: 4405
Files removed: 238

Microsoft literally owns the small- and midsize-business market, DiDio says, since competitors such as Novell Small Business Suite and Linux in general are barely a blip for these customers. Only 3% said they plan to purchase Novell's offering, while just 11% said they were using, or are going to use, the open-source Linux operating system.

"These customers don't care about the brand name," DiDio says. "Linux is not even on their radar, and actually, they don't even much care that SBS comes from Microsoft. They just want something that will be the most cost-effective and efficient."

Opera last week updated its browser to defend against a vulnerability that could allow an attacker to spy on private emails or computer files.

A flaw in versions of Opera prior to version 7.54 makes it possible for attackers to read (but not alter) files on a victim's PC or snoop on mails emails written or received by M2, Opera's mail program. The vulnerability also opens the door to cookie theft, URL spoofing (which can be used in phishing attacks) or tracking a user's browsing history.

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