SCO acts as Microsoft shill to attack Linux

IN CASE you have had your head in the proverbial sand, over the past week, the already listing SCO case had the air let out of it. The whiney leak you heard when Eric Raymond published the Halloween X memo suddenly turned into a big flappy farty sound. Mike Anderer, the 'brains' behind the MS 'not investment' into MS spilled the beans.

I say 'not' in quotes because it wasn't a direct investment on MS's behalf. A few people working for MS happened to call up Baystar and suggest that they put a ton of money into SCO. Note the phrase 'senior executives' not senior executive in the BusinessWeek article here. This says to me that either several high up MS people suddenly decided that Baystar should invest in SCO, and the Baystar people were just to myopic to see it on their own, or it was a coordinated MS plan. If you think it was sheer luck, you simply have not been paying attention, and you should have someone else tell you when it is safe to cross a street, you might miss a bus coming at you, flashing its lights, honking its horn, at noon, while you are sober.

No, the amazing part about this is they, and I mean SCO, Anderer, MS and all the others not yet outed, thought they could keep it a secret. When you are dealing with brainchildren like Sontag and Darl here, you expect them to be stupid, but as Halloween X points out, they put it in print, in a way that it could be discovered easily!

How stupid can they be? Don't answer that, it was rhetorical. So, what it comes down to is that SCO is acting as a MS shill to attack Linux. As I said earlier, oh shock, oh horror, who would have thought? As one hack so eloquently put it, Microsoft has the short term memory of a goldfish. I guess they forgot they were recently convicted of being a monopoly and abusing that power. Oh wait, they comprehensively bought their way out of that one, didn't they? Goldfish indeed.

So, back to the point, Anderer lays out the master plan while trying to dodge the issue in this letter published by NewsForge. The plan is this, MS will fund lawsuits against Linux, Linux users, and anyone else who doesn't swear fealty to MS's security risk masquerading as an OS. Sadly, this is actually a good plan, and would have stayed that way if it hadn't been outed so comprehensively.

Backtracking a little more, the SCO case is floundering badly. Every claim it makes sounds devastating to the uninformed mouth breathers in the general press, but even a casual look at the facts devastates any case it mistakenly thinks it may have. In a classic case of beating your head against the wall until you pass out, it picks a new fight with a bigger foe each time. IBM, RedHat and Novell lawsuits not good enough for you? Throw in AutoZone, DaimlerChrysler and telegraph that you are trying to silence all impartial voices in the matter matter, and you have a winner. Oh yeah, threaten the Fortune 1000 for good measure, remember attacking your former clients to make an example out of them encourages new people to sign up.

If I were writing a PHD dissertation on the best way to pull off the business equivalent of 'suicide by cop', this is the course I would recommend. Oh yeah, I would also throw in 'Use false and misleading examples to cover up bad quarterly numbers and distract the press'. Oh wait, it's alleged to have done that too.

So, why all this stupidity (I can't think of a stronger word right now)? Well, SCO was a failing business, the cliff that it was hurtling toward was in sight, and everyone knew it. It had a woefully out of date product, and no hope of catching Linux, much less surpassing it. So what do they do? Get bought out.

The best way to do this is to make yourself look as valuable as possible, and then make someone an offer they can't refuse. It looks like they tried to play nice with IBM and IBM said no. So they stopped playing nice, and threatened one of the largest companies in the world with a groundless, oft-morphing lawsuit.

Imagine the surprise in Utah when IBM told them to get bent and responded that SCO would have an example made of them. Looks like IBM's legal team are not blinded by the short term. So SCO found itself grasping at straws, staring down the gun barrel of one of the most experienced legal teams in the world. Hell, anyone nicknamed "The Nazgul" would make me think twice.

So rather than saying 'gee, we're sorry', SCO went on an MS financed bender, suing and threatening everyone under the sun. Not under the Sun, it signed a licence. MS hid behind the scenes and wrote the cheques, while Darl mouthed off. MS had plausible deniability, and SCO had a market cap of about 20x compared to a year ago. SCO insiders cashed out their previously worthless stock options by the carload, and all the players 'won'.

While I am sure the hinted at SEC investigation will be tons of fun for reporters like me, as it stood a week or so ago, SCO insiders made tons of cash, and MS was not implicated in anything. Then Raymond published the memo, and Anderer opened his mouth, and even the dumbest of reporters showed the beginnings of recognition.

The SCO case is over. MS can't touch them anymore, it just got too hot. No investor in his right mind would fund it, it is bleeding money faster than insiders can stuff it in their pockets, and it has comprehensively destroyed any chance it had of salvaging its old core business.

All that is left now if for IBM to gut them and leave SCO hanging out to dry. This one will end up as a classic 'head on a pike' example to the next morons who try something like this. With any luck, IBM will have enough of an opening to pierce the corporate veil and go after the Canopy Group this and a few others like it. Until the people sniping from behind shell corporations are made to pay for their actions, it will keep going. I think IBM is up to the task though.

That brings us back to goldfish. MS will lay low for a bit, and then try it again. It can't beat Linux on price, it can't beat Linux on quality, it can't beat Linux on security. Let's just say it can't beat Linux. So it can sit back and watch their market share erode on the desktop like it is starting to on the server side, or fight back.

Since it has shown little ability to improve or secure their product line, that leaves the FUD route. As Anderer gently danced around the issue, you can be sure it will do this again and again. it will also hide it much better. If it doesn't pick such chowderheads as partners, it might have a chance. Maybe it will, maybe it won't, but we will see.

So, what has this accomplished, other than a bunch of memorable quotes and self-contradictions that are sure to make a business school case study book in the near future? Well, the first bit is that MS has failed, abjectly and miserable in a way that, when I realised it, quite frankly stunned me.

First, it has pointed out to every crackpot out there how effective patent lawsuits can be. It's on the receiving end of a bunch right now, itself. Since just about every large corporation out there will express a dislike for MS in private, if MS starts an all out patent war, it will lose. It has been pointed out that IBM alone has more patents than MS, and if you throw in RedHat, Novell, Sun and a few of the 'old boys' club, MS should be deathly scared of this eventuality.

Not that this will slow them down, goldfish, remember? Antitrust, EU, monopoly, shiny thing, what is my name, wow, renamed technology, licence agreement, Software Assurance, loud noise, patch patch patch, where was I again?

So, we know what will happen, carry on carrying on as it is, but what's been accomplished? Nothing much. The SCO case may have been rumored to slow down Linux adoption, but I think it had quite the opposite effect. No company that I have talked to has said anything about not deploying it. Little guys are generally oblivious to the case, and large companies have legal departments with enough of a clue to tell them there is no problem. Occasionally, you get someone who is really stupid but if you trust them with your data, you deserve what you get, there are alternatives.

The FUD didn't work, where the proverbial rubber met the road, so what was the end result? It gained Linux a massive mindshare among the CxO set. Think about it, there are those that are using Linux, and those that are not using it. Those that do understand how much money they can save, and what the meaning of 'free as in speech' means. Those that don't probably have not thought hard enough about it.

For the second camp, Linux was this thing that longhaired hippie freaks want us to use. No guarantees, and because it is free, it can't be as good, even if for some unknown reason, the IBM rep swears by it. Confusion reigns, and that tends to mean less than serious consideration at the next planning meeting.

Then came the SCO suit. What happened? Business Week covered Linux. Forbes covered Linux. The New York Times covered it. The Wall Street Journal covered it. Everyone covered it. Not weird fringe outfits, but mainstream financial and news press all covered it.

What was the net effect of this? Let's see, the way I look at it, how many C-level executives were hit with the clue stick? Lets see, Banc of America uses Linux, DaimlerChrysler uses Linux, AutoZone uses Linux, and other names bandied about use it successfully. Before the suit, what percentage of execudrones could have told you that? How about after? MS just bought Linux a lot more than $100 million in advertising. Rather than slow down Linux adoption, I bet it speeded it up, a lot.

So, in the near future, we have the suit to wrap up, more MS sniping to contend with, and a boatload of mud to sling at recently Teflon coated walls. This will pass, and Linux will come out stronger, and MS weaker. If the government actually gets a clue, and god forbid, acts, it will only speed up what now looks to me to be inevitable.

As long as MS picks this destructive course of circling the wagons and paying mercenaries to fight for them, it will lose. The other side knows the tactic, and if they can soundly thrash their opponent in the first round before they were aware, what chance does MS have in round two?

What can they do? In a word, play nice. $100 million would buy a lot of programmers to do a code review. If you put out software that does things for the consumer instead of locking people into the upgrade gerbil wheel, you might gain back the mindshare you are bleeding. Self-serving interests will only help your opponent, the only way to fight them is to serve the customers needs, not your wallet.

MS hasn't gotten word that playing nice will help it, but who cares. Right now, if it does, it will live, if it doesn't, it will die. Thanks to SCO and Anderer, we know what is going on, and know how to face it next time. Thanks to IBM, RedHat, Novell, and curiously SCO, the case of the hour is done for. It is deflating as we watch, and the trapped rats are scrambling for an exit. IBM will most likely make sure none is found. µ

"That brings us back to goldfish. MS will lay low for a bit, and then try it again. It can't beat Linux on price, it can't beat Linux on quality, it can't beat Linux on security."

Unfortunately, it "can" beat Linux on applications--which, ultimately, is where it counts. Hopefully, that will change.

Or, alternatively, "Linux Community Acts as IBM Shill"

You are just silly sometimes B2K.

I ran across Linus himself in 1991 and have been using Linux for many years. Currently, we have numerous Linux servers. IBM had nothing to do with that. We have numerous Windows 2003 servers too. IBM had nothing to do with that either.

I've seen your posts that either bash Linux or cheerlead for Microsoft. Over and over and over. So many and so often it's bizarre. The Linux/Microsoft topic just isn't important. At least not enough for someone to spend so much time on the topic like you do.

Get a life.....

Who knows, much less cares. These foreign websites you guys constantly peddle aren't worth the time they waste.

These foreign websites you guys constantly peddle aren't worth the time they waste.

Yeah, sites from the country that's our biggest ally, with a government that has massive Microsoft contracts across the board.

It's just that I've already seen a thousand "blah blah blah, Microsoft will die" articles from those guys for many years, none of which ever remotely come true. Here's a more likely prediction of the future from American journalists:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1550914,00.asp

However, bogus IT predictions aside, this IS an interesting article from a foreign website:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3520636.stm

Totally offtopic: one of my vendors has something up with his email. The body of the email they send has a php file in it. All I can get from this vendor is "we have a problem with our email system and are working to correct it."

My virus scanners (today's definitions) on my windows boxes are not detecting a virus. My email client on my windows boxes say that activex will not run due to our security settings.

Any ideas what is up? When I open the php file with my text editor on my imac, all it says is "windows update."

The vendor is using an exchange/outlook system.

How do you know they are using Exchange? PHP is not typically used on MS systems, especially mail servers. If there's any web components on Exchange it would normally be IIS for Outlook Web Access which uses ASP.

I can't really see a connection with Windows Update either. All I can guess (without charging a fee, LOL), looks like the introduction of PHP has gunked up their normally perfectly operational MS environment.

That's a joke of course, but it's hard to imagine an internal Exchange MTA or queue malfunction that would be spewing messages of any kind with "windows update" embedded in an attached php file to random recipients (if I understood you correctly). That would mean someone would have originally created that sort of a file. Last guess is that is how they are attempting to update their clients, with some sort of automatically distributed message that contains php logic to autmatically connect them to Windows Update and patch when executed. Doubtful, but what else makes sense.

The body of the email they send has a php file in it

PHP is a server-side technology. The odds of finding a Windows client that has PHP running, and knows to send .php files to the PHP interpreter, are slim to none. It's probably not an attempted virus, it's an idiot at work somewhere in their company.

They keep trying to sell me an exchange system. :-) They've used exchange/outlook for years. We are in the process of replacing our email system now: they got wind of it and their sales weasels were on me like white on rice.

How do you know they are using Exchange?

The forged return addresses, which I forgot to mention, lead me to believe this is/was a virus. They've clammed-up. Won't tell me what is going on. A certain subset of my users keeps getting these messages, which is how we knew where they were coming from even with the fake addresses. Hard to say what's up with them: they turn over a lot of people, so a misconfiguration is certainly not beyond the realm of possibilty.

It's probably not an attempted virus, it's an idiot at work somewhere in their company.

The forged return addresses, which I forgot to mention, lead me to believe this is/was a virus

It takes one idiot virus writer to imagine that he can send a php script to email clients, and somehow get the script executed on the client machine. If somebody really did that, you can almost bet that his "virus" sends you his passwords and credit card numbers... it's that dumb.

Any chance that this is a link? That it's trying to get you to go to "http://www.badguys.com/hoseyou.php" ?

The forged return addresses, which I forgot to mention, lead me to believe this is/was a virus.

That would make the most sense, but your scans are clean, and php is probably not executable without being hosted somehow. The payload could have been stripped by AV software somewhere up the chain, but normally you would get a text notification of that in the delivered message.

Doesn't really add up, but Exchange is an excellent collaborative (including mail) system, I have extensive experience managing a large scale environment (several thousand users) and virus attacks were the only real problems we ever had. Individual mailbox restores are a little cumbersome, but with an available spare system (needed with an operation of that size anyway) we were able to work those issues quite easily with experience. It's probably the best overall product on the market, but I admit I haven't used IBM's offerings personally, only Groupwise, which basically sucked. So what are you going with, and why?

I can't tell: my current work client (Groupwise) won't excecute whatever code is in the email - in fact, I could not even see anything in the body of the mail. The mail looked blank. I went home, logged in and forwarded the mail to my mac to see what I could do with it. It is a php file in the body of the mail. When I opened that up with a text editor, all it says is "Windows Update." Other than annoying me, it does not appear to be doing anything. I just get very concerned when I get mail with faked headers that is attempting to execute - especially when I know it's coming from an MS shop. We've never had a problem with the vendor before, but this was just too much to ignore.

Any chance that this is a link? That it's trying to get you to go to "http://www.badguys.com/hoseyou.php" ?

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