Free Republic

Linux Loyalists LeeryDaniel Lyons, 03.31.04, 1:49 PM ETNEW YORK - Two years ago, when Rick Carey was chief technology architect at Merrill Lynch, he was crazy about Linux and especially about Red Hat, the leading Linux distributor. At the time, he was leading the charge to migrate all of the computer systems at Merrill to Linux. But these days, things have changed. Carey, who is now chief technology architect at Bank One (nyse: ONE - news - people ), says that although he still likes Linux, he's not rushing into any deployments of the open-source operating system. Chicago-based Bank One...

A recent court filing from IBM Corp. appears to indicate a growing confidence on the part of the Armonk, New York, computing giant that it will prevail in its legal dispute with The SCO Group Inc., according to lawyers following the case.    ADVERTISEMENT    RELATED LINKS [an error occurred while processing this directive] In an amended counterclaim to SCO's lawsuit that was filed Friday, IBM asked the District Court for the District of Utah to enter a declaratory judgement in its favor. IBM asked the court to rule that it has not infringed on SCO's copyright and has not breached...

NEW DELHI (AFP) - Turning the tables on the outsourcing controversy in the United States, India's largest private telecoms firm, Bharti Televentures, awarded an in-house IT services contract to US computer giant IBM worth up to 750 million dollars. The move by Bharti, one of the most aggressive Indian telecoms players, to outsource its IT needs to the US firm comes amid a raging controversy in the United States about jobs being shifted to India and other developing nations where labour is cheaper. "Arrangements like this will take the sting out of outsourcing," said Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman of Bharti...

The SCO Group, the company that's hoping to profit from its assertion that Linux violates its Unix intellectual property, has threatened legal action against two federal supercomputer users, letters released Thursday show. SCO sent letters raising the prospect of legal action for using Linux to two Department of Energy facilities, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). The letter to NERSC director Horst Simon used strong language in its effort to convince the research facility to buy a license that will let it use Linux without fear of SCO legal action. "I am...

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...

<p>SCO's Suit: A Match Made in Redmond?</p> <p>For months, rumors have swirled around the Web alleging that Microsoft helped finance a small Utah software company's suit against IBM and two corporations that use Linux software. BusinessWeek has learned that Microsoft ( ) did not put up the money, but did play matchmaker for SCO Group ( ) and BayStar Capital, a San Francisco hedge fund which made a $50 million investment in SCO last October.</p>

update Investment company BayStar Capital has confirmed ties between two Linux foes, saying Thursday that a Microsoft referral led to $50 million in BayStar funding for the SCO Group. "Yes, Microsoft did introduce BayStar to SCO," a BayStar representative said RoundupSCO versusthe Linux community Thursday, declining to share further details and repeating the firm's earlier position that Microsoft did not actually invest money in the deal. Word of the Microsoft matchmaking surfaced last week when open-source advocate Eric Raymond published a leaked memo about Microsoft's help in the BayStar investment. SCO Group confirmed the authenticity of the memo but said...

SCO suddenly isn't faring so well in its lawsuit against IBM. The company recently dropped claims that Big Blue had misappropriated its trade-secrets by placing them in Linux. This leaves the SCO argument resting upon two copyright infringement claims. When IBM began building the AIX Unix system, it purchased a license from AT&T, the company that created Unix. AT&T's Unix business was later sold to Novell, which subsequently sold part of that business to SCO. Get Up to Speed on...Open sourceGet the latest headlines andcompany-specific news in ourexpanded GUTS section. SCO subsequently contended that under the terms of the Unix...

Analysis: Microsoft, SCO have a lot more explaining to do Monday March 08, 2004 - [ 03:40 PM GMT ] Topics: Legal , News and Trends By: Chris Preimesberger Whether or not Microsoft is secretly bankrolling the SCO Group for more than $100 million to attack Linux and the general open source community through questionable intellectual property lawsuits, NewsForge has learned that U.S. federal regulators may have begun investigating the relationship between the two companies -- and may also be looking closely at a number of other people and companies connected to them through stock or other business transactions. Although...

LETTER TO THE EDITOR--Groklaw's Pamela Jones responds to SCO's Darl McBride's claim of IBM connection: In Dan Farber's excellent interview with Darl McBride, Mr. McBride made the statement that IBM sponsors Groklaw. That isn't true, so I appreciate the opportunity to set the record straight. Groklaw is my Web site, so I can speak authoritatively on this subject. I don't have any connection to IBM professionally or personally. I never have had any such connection. I have never even been inside an IBM building. They haven't given me any financial support of any kind. Not a dime. Not a promise....

update The SCO Group dismissed a leaked memo that connected Microsoft to $86 million in investments in the company, saying the author of the e-mail misunderstood the venture deal.The SCO Group on Thursday acknowledged the authenticity of an e-mail sent Oct. 12 from Michael Anderer, CEO of Salt Lake City venture firm S2 Partners, to SCO Vice President Chris Sontag and Chief Financial Officer Robert Bench. The memo appears to be a discussion of the compensation that Anderer received for facilitating venture deals on SCO's behalf. "Microsoft will have brought in $86 million for us including BayStar," stated the e-mail,...

Halloween X: Follow The Money 3 Mar 2004 Excuse me, did we say in Halloween IX that Microsoft's under-the-table payoff to SCO for attacking Linux was just eleven million dollars? Turns out we were off by an order of magnitude ? it was much, much more than that. The document below was emailed to me by an anonymous whistleblower inside SCO. He tells me the typos and syntax bobbles were in the original. I cannot certify its authenticity, but I presume that IBM's, Red Hat's, Novell's, AutoZone's, and Daimler-Chryler's lawyers can subpoena the original. Explanatory comments are interspersed in [...].....

Client Server NEWS & LinuxGram 537.1 NewsFlash Competitive Intelligence about Servers, Storage & Related Phenomena IBM CEO Ordered To Turn Over Linux Secrets to SCO By Maureen O'Gara Wednesday, March 3, 2004 - The magistrate judge doing the legal housekeeping in the run-up to the $5 billion SCO v. IBM trial next year gave the SCO Group what it wanted today and ordered IBM to cough up the discovery that SCO claims is vital to its charge that IBM copied Unix code into Linux. IBM has been told to turn over the releases of AIX and Dynix that SCO's lawyers...

It's Autozone Wednesday, March 03 2004 @ 07:53 AM EST It's AutoZone. They are asking for "injunctive relief against AutoZone's further use or copying of any part of SCO's copyrighted materials and also requests damages as a result of AutoZone's infringement in an amount to be proven at trial." The case was filed in Nevada. The paid Pacer site for Nevada federal court is here but I checked and nothing is up there yet. It usually takes a day or two to make it into Pacer. Note the page says Internet Explorer is required, but it isn't. You might remember...

LAS VEGAS - IBM will create a $25 million, two-year training fund to assist employees who fear their that jobs are at risk of being shipped away to lower-cost locations, company executives said Monday at IBM's PartnerWorld conference. The growing clamor in the U.S. about jobs lost to outsourcing unnecessarily begrudges the employment gains of "countries that are simply trying to improve the standards of living of their people," IBM Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Sam Palmisano said during a keynote address at the conference, which is being held in Las Vegas. Called the Human Capital Alliance, the fund will...

CATALONIA, Spain, Feb. 28 (UPI) -- Spain announced plans Saturday to build the world's second most powerful computer, the BBC reported. The supercomputer will be at the heart of a center to research climate change, medicine and industrial design. The system will be able to process 40 teraflops -- 40 trillion calculations per second, equivalent to the processing power of 18,000 personal computers, the BBC said. The new center will be located in the northeast region of Catalonia, the high-tech hub of Spain. It's construction will need an investment of 70 million euros, or $87 million. Still reigning as the...

Judge accepts expanded SCO lawsuit By Stephen Shankland CNET News.com February 27, 2004, 5:42 PM PT A judge has accepted the SCO Group's changes to a lawsuit against IBM that now seeks $5 billion in damages for Big Blue's alleged moving of Unix intellectual property into Linux. Because IBM didn't oppose SCO's motion to amend its claims--a motion that was "subject to IBM's right to move against the amended pleadings"--Magistrate Judge Brooke Wells accepted SCO's new legal attack, he said in a filing Wednesday in the U.S. District Court in Utah. The second amended complaint drops SCO's claim that IBM...

An Open Letter from the USENIX Association Regarding SCO's Position on Open Source Software The SCO Group, Inc. (SCO), has recently sued IBM and Novell and launched broad attacks on the legality of and the economic justification for so-called open source licensing, including the free licensing of Linux (see SCO's open letter to Congress). As an organization dedicated to advancing the skills and contributions of computer researchers and developers, the USENIX Association is compelled to address and refute the position SCO has taken regarding open source software. USENIX is sending this letter (PDF) to Congress. SCO letter link http://www.osaia.org/letters/sco_hill.pdf Usenix...

<p>JOHN Kerry has found a theme for Super Tuesday: the economy. The Dem front- runner is targeting voters in New York's struggling Upstate communities with a new pitch - "State of New York Under Bush: Bad for Workers and Families." His campaign will hit Upstate this weekend with custom-made statistics and purported solutions - but the candidate's proposed economic fixes don't withstand much scrutiny. On Tuesday, Kerry threw a bunch of numbers up on his Web site to prove that President Bush is squeezing the Empire State. While Bush resolutely doles out "tax cuts for the wealthy" and toils at "sending jobs overseas," says Kerry, New Yorkers are suffering.</p>

Jurors Rule in Favor of IBM in Cancer Lawsuit Brought by Ex-Employees Feb 26, 2004 By May Wong / The Associated Press SANTA CLARA, Calif. (AP) - In a major victory for the electronics industry, a jury decided Thursday that IBM Corp. was not responsible for the cancers that developed in two former employees at a disk drive plant. The jury deliberated for less than two days before clearing the computer giant of claims that the harsh chemicals used in its factory caused the retirees' illnesses. The former workers, who were diagnosed with cancer in the 1990s, were seeking damages...