Aust open source drama echoes SCO fight, Sep 20, 2004

Australian courts may soon host a legal drama reminiscent of the open source legal watershed brought about when SCO sued IBM for allegedly misappropriating its Unix intellectual property and distributing it in Linux.

Deacons solicitor, Nick Abrahams today revealed he was in pre-court negotiations to defend a legal case in which a large IT company was attempting to use provisions of the open source General Public License to force his client to reveal its proprietary code.

New Zealand’s local authorities have come out in support of open source software to encourage more IT use in the community.

In their collective response to the government’s draft ICT strategy, local authorities point to government’s broad agreement with the principles of last year’s Worldwide Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).

What seems to be an embarrassing blunder by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) in its hunt for online pirates has prompted Linux Australia to contact its legal representatives and warn of a possible breach of Australian law.

The EPA is using Linux and IBM supercomputers on a grid to carry out improved air quality modeling as well as to better predict the environmental risks of exposure to air pollution, an agency spokesman said.

"We think this open systems approach by IBM will give some added speed and better efficiencies focused on improving the nation's health by partnering with states in their implementation of new clean air standards," said Dr. Paul Gilman, assistant administrator for the EPA's research and development group.

Have you ever thought about turning your kid into a computer geek? While we might not want to go quite that far, as savvy future professionals, they'll no doubt need wide ranging computer skills. Linux offers youngsters a richly featured, comprehensive, hands-on environment that they can use to learn about applications, networks, servers, and how to make it all work together. If you work with them, you can even start to instill some of your hard-earned business acumen, as well.

Microsoft cared little for politics until the Department of Justice called it a monopoly. Now the company approaches lobbying the way it approaches everything-aggressively-and consequently it dominates the technology policy agenda. CIOs may not be better off for it.

The latest legal interchange between SCO and IBM concerns discovery. That Big Blue meanie, IBM, is asking the judge to dismiss the case and thus kill the entertaining stream of news that it regularly produces. SCO accuses IBM of not handing over millions of lines of code for SCO to analyze - indeed stonewalling - in order to deny SCO the ability to prove its ever-so-reasonable case. (After all, what's $5 billion between friends). SCO is also asking for IBM to provide a roadmap to help it analyze the code.

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