Snowed By SCO, Sep 20, 2007

In the print edition of Forbes there's a great (albeit sometimes painful) tradition of doing "follow-through" articles where a reporter either takes a victory lap for making a good call or falls on his sword for making a bad one. Online publications don't typically ask for follow-throughs. But I need to write one.

At long last, the SCO Group's ugly, often farcical legal crusade against Linux appears to be over.

SCO tried last week to serve a subpoena to Jones at a house in Darien, Conn., where they believe she's been living, but the attempt was unsuccessful, according to a person close to the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

This is stunning. This is like Red Sox fans announcing they're going to root for the Yankees.

Seems like this case will never, ever grind to a conclusion. And not a month goes by without something weird or pathetic or inadvertently hilarious happening.

Linux today has less than 2% market share on the desktop. That's because with past versions of Linux only hackers could get Linux installed and running right. But a new batch of easier-to-use versions is putting Linux within reach of regular folks.

Wednesday night, in a blistering 39-page ruling, Magistrate Judge Brooke C. Wells of the United States District Court in Utah tossed out two-thirds of SCO's claims against IBM.

Sun’s problem is huge and it is simple: Linux. The free operating system, yoked to low-cost processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, has decimated the Unix market by offering customers a cheap alternative to pricey Unix boxes like the ones Sun makes.

Microsoft can't afford to screw up like this. There are free alternatives to everything Microsoft sells, like the Linux operating system and the Open Office application suite.

Fans of the popular Linux software program have long fretted that software giant Microsoft will attack Linux by claiming the free program violates Microsoft's patents.

In an e-mail interview with Forbes, Stallman explains that because Torvalds controls only a small part of the GNU/Linux operating system--the Linux "kernel"--it doesn't really matter if he doesn't adopt the new license.

In an interview via e-mail with Forbes, Torvalds discusses GPLv3, digital rights management and sharks with laser beams.

It’s been a rough week for Marten Mickos, the chief executive of open source database maker MySQL AB.

Stallman says it bugs him that VA Software-owned Web sites, like SourceForge and NewsForge, take money from Microsoft to run “smear campaign” ads on its sites. And he is not impressed when folks at places like Slashdot and NewsForge claim he is their hero.

Theo de Raadt is a pioneer of the open source software movement and a huge proponent of free software. But he is no fan of the open source Linux operating system.

Open source advocates have pushed McVoy to "open source" his product--that is, to publish the program's source code, or basic instructions, and let the world use it for free. But McVoy says it is simply not possible for an innovative software company to sustain itself using an open source business model.

The open source Linux operating system gets lots of media hype, but it hasn't caught on with medium-size businesses, a new study says.

"Linux has dominated the marketplace for high-performance computing," says Mark Seager, assistant department head for advanced technologies at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif.

To be sure, this all may be a tempest in an accounting teapot. But you would think that when a tiny company from the middle of nowhere decides to sue $96.5 billion (2004 sales) IBM and take on the entire high-tech community, it would make sure to keep its house in order.

Like Network Appliance, many top tech firms are snapping up Linux programmers, hoping to influence the way the operating system evolves. The trick is to hire programmers closest to Linux creator Linus Torvalds