Behind SCO's open source challenge, Oct 12, 2006

Three and a half years ago, a company called the SCO Group took another company called International Business Machines Corporation to court. Among many other sins, said SCO, IBM had misappropriated intellectual property by stealing parts of Unix and putting them in Linux. If true, enormous implications would follow for open source in general and Linux in particular.

Hans Reiser, the developer of the ReiserFS and Reiser4 filesystems, has been arrested in Oakland, California as a suspect in the disappearance of his estranged wife Nina Reiser. As the news of his arrest spreads in the free and open software communities, a growing concern is the effect that the case might have on Namesys, Hans Reiser's company, as well as the future of his filesystem work.

Kennards' story may be a rarity in the overall desktop market, but it does demonstrate how businesses have the option to perform large-scale migrations to Linux provided their applications permit it because, like Windows, it will run on commodity PCs and thin-clients.

Use of Internet Explorer is continuing to decline at the expense of Mozilla's Firefox, making the imminent launch of IE7 even more vital for Microsoft.

So was Microsoft really the power behind SCO's Linux jihad? Or did it simply wink approvingly from the sidelines?

Transmeta has filed a lawsuit against Intel over ten alleged patent infringements.

Technologic continues to reduce the boot time, price, and size of its embedded boards and systems targeting remote sensing and other power-critical applications. Its new $100 ARM9-based TS-7400 board can boot Linux in 1.1 seconds, and is available as part of a tiny WiFi-enabled system.

The release of Portland 1.0 is expected to accelerate adoption of Linux on the desktop. According to market analyst IDG, this will help the desktop Linux market grow to around $10 billion by 2008.

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