Free Republic

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...

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...

I've just gone through the experience of trying to configure CUPS, the Common Unix Printing System. It has proved a textbook lesson in why nontechnical people run screaming from Unix. This is all the more frustrating because the developers of CUPS have obviously tried hard to produce an accessible system --- but the best intentions and effort have led to a system which despite its superficial pseudo-friendliness is so undiscoverable that it might as well have been written in ancient Sanskrit. GUI tools and voluminous manuals are not enough. You have to think about what the actual user experiences when...

It started as a secure, single floppy, bootable Linux distribution for storing PGP keys and then encrypting, signing and wiping files. At some point it became an exercise in over-engineering. Tinfoil hat is useful if: You're using a computer that could have a keystroke logger installed. http://www.keyghost.com is an example of a tiny & cheap hardware logger. You need to use your personal GPG keys at work, school or a web hosting facility where you don't trust or own the equipment. If you maintain a PGP Certificate Authority or signing key and have to have a safe place to use...

To the outsider, and even to me for some time, the various lawsuits involving the SCO Group follow a relatively simple story line. I'm not a lawyer, but after many interviews with the involved parties and lawyers, the case boils down to divergent interpretations of the subject matter. The Linux operating system was coming on strong. A group of individuals, some with a history of using litigation to extract wealth from other parties, started to behave like pit bulls. They clamped onto the Linux ecosystem in hopes of exploiting it for riches that for the most part have not accrued...

Apple's Mac OS X has been declared one of the world's safest operating systems by London-based security experts, mi2g. The security firm's Intelligence Unit has run a comparitive study of the variety of operating systems available today. It states: "The world's safest and most secure online server Operating System (OS) is proving to be the Open Source family of BSD (Berkley Software Distribution) and Mac OS X based on Darwin." It's also claimed that Linux has become the most breached online server OS in the government and non-government spheres for the first time, while the number of successful hacker...

Open source group complains to ACCC about SCO licence By Online Staff February 18, 2004 An open source industry cluster in Victoria has asked the consumer watchdog to investigate concerns which it says have arisen from the SCO Group's announcement, on January 20, of the availability of a licence in Australia and New Zealand which "permits the use of SCO's intellectual property, in binary form only, as contained in Linux distributions." Open Source Victoria wrote to Graeme Samuel, chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission on January 22, saying that the issuing of a press release by SCO about...

SCO Group's demands on fees may spark action 17.02.2004 By JUHA SAARINEN The SCO Group, locked in a bitter war against Linux and embroiled in a US$5 billion ($7 billion) lawsuit against IBM, may be heading into trouble with the regulatory authorities in New Zealand and Australia. Asserting it holds the rights to the Unix operating system, SCO's Australia/New Zealand subsidiary is demanding licence fees of A$285 ($320) per desktop and A$999 per server from all Linux users. SCO says that Linux contains code copied from Unix, but to date its claims remain unproven. Asked if SCO ANZ's demands for...

FEBRUARY 16, 2004 ( COMPUTERWORLD ) - Today's the day. On Nov. 18, 2003, The SCO Group announced that it would sue some corporate Linux user within 90 days. That put the deadline at Monday, Feb. 16. Has SCO sued? I don't know -- I'm writing this a few days before that deadline, and my time machine is in the shop, so you'll have to go to Computerworld.com for the latest news. But regardless of whether SCO has already sued a user or is just running a little behind schedule, winning any Linux lawsuits may have just gotten a lot...

EXCLUSIVE BetaNews has learned that Thursday's leak of the Windows 2000 source code originated not from Microsoft, but from long-time Redmond partner Mainsoft. The leaked code includes 30,915 files and was apparently removed from a Linux computer used by Mainsoft for development purposes. Dated July 25, 2000, the source code represents Windows 2000 Service Pack 1. Analysis indicates files within the leaked archive are only a subset of the Windows source code, which was licensed to Mainsoft for use in the company's MainWin product. MainWin utilizes the source to create native Unix versions of Windows applications. Mainsoft says it has...

The recipe for Coca-Cola is one of the most closely guarded secrets in the world. Yet a small Canadian software firm has sold 150,000 cans of a rival fizzy cola, which tastes very like Coke, and has made the recipe public. The firm behind the drink, Opencola, makes software, not drinks. It used the drink (and its open recipe) as a metaphor for the most important trend in software today. Unlike most traditional software firms, Opencola produces open source technologies. Open source is a philosophy for software licensing designed to encourage the improvement and use of software by anyone who...

Novell says waiver cancels SCO's claims on Linux By Bob Mims The Salt Lake Tribune     Novell Inc., claiming it sold only limited rights to the Unix operating system in 1995, has issued a waiver it says negates the SCO Group's claims on the offshoot, freely distributed Linux operating system.     Claiming the purchase excluded control of "derivative works," or improvements to the program's code by independent developers, Novell had given SCO until noon Wednesday to retract its claim that Unix code was illegally imported into Linux.     That allegation is at the heart of SCO's federal lawsuit against...

I'm never going to get any sleep, I guess. Not this amazing week. Because here is Novell's Motion to Dismiss. And their Memorandum in Support of the motion is absolutely fascinating, too fascinating not to read right now. Here's the pdf. Essentially, they've done something very clever. They are trying to get SCO's action dismissed on the pleadings alone. Shazam. From media reports, I couldn't figure out why they didn't argue that there was an absence of malice shown. On reading the memorandum, I see they've chosen to try to avoid anything that would require a trial to resolve. They...

News.com is reporting that Novell has filed a motion to dismiss, on the grounds that SCO hasn't proven that Novell doesn't own the copyrights and thus SCO can't establish that it owns Unix and UnixWare copyrights. The motion also seeks dismissal on the grounds that the allegations don't establish specific grounds for damages. "They are precisely the type of general allegations of some speculative injury that the special damages pleading requirements for a slander of title action are meant to avoid." SCO released a statement from whatever cave they have been hiding in all week. Here is a snip from...

Now They Own It, Now They Don’t: SCO Sues Novell to Stay Afloat ~ Eben Moglen February 5, 2004 The SCO licensing campaign—which has been all bark and no bite since its introduction by way of threatening letters to the Fortune 1500 last summer—lost a wheel last month, and is now headed for the wall. From the beginning of this irresponsible attack on the freedom of free software, SCO has promulgated public positions about the nature of its supposed rights that conflicted with facts known to the free software community, and relied upon legal positions that were untenable given the...

SCO's suit not all that simple By Bob Mims The Salt Lake Tribune     U.S. Magistrate Brooke Wells met for nearly 30 minutes in chambers Friday with attorneys for Utah's SCO Group and IBM, hoping to keep their open-court debate simple and to the point.     But when arguments ended shortly before noon, nearly 90 minutes later, Wells acknowledged she would need time to unravel competing motions related to SCO's claims that its proprietary Unix operating system was illegally incorporated into the Linux OS.     Noting the "complicated" nature of the issues, Wells told her tiny, standing-room-only courtroom that...

SCO abandons trade secret attack on IBM By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco Posted: 07/02/2004 at 03:14 GMT The SCO Group abandoned a major rationale of its case against IBM by dropping its trade secret claims. These were the basis, last June, for SCO revoking IBM's UNIX license. IBM didn't blink, and has simply carried on selling its AIX Unix without blinking. But today SCO dropped the trade secrets and claimed breach of copyright instead. But such claims need proof, and it proved to be another hearing in which the SCO Group vs. IBM without the Utah company showing any...

Industry watcher Rob Enderle no longer responds to angry e-mails from Linux supporters. The principal analyst for the Enderle Group (San Jose, Calif.) says he replied to the first thousand or so. But after that, the anger and profanities that many of the missives contained began to wear on him. "I've been threatened and other analysts have been threatened, as well," Enderle said. "Some of the e-mail is incredibly vile, and it just doesn't seem worth it to respond anymore. The senders view a response as a license to write again, in even greater detail." Enderle's experience is part of...

Culturecom Takes on Wintel with V-Dragon By Doug Young HONG KONG (Reuters) - Watch out, Wintel -- a new "Draglin" is coming to China. Hong Kong's Culturecom Holdings Ltd. has combined its Chinese-friendly V-Dragon central processing unit (CPU) with the open-source Linux operating system. The plan is to take on the dominant "Wintel" combination of PCs that run on Microsoft Corp's Windows software using Intel Corp CPUs. In its drive to take on Wintel, Culturecom has found powerful allies in IBM Corp, which is making and supporting the new chips, and the Chinese government, which is promoting Linux...

U.N. report says open source produces better software The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development has made available an Internet edition of its E-Commerce and Development Report 2003, which features Free and open-source software: Implications for ICT policy and development as a chapter. The report, like many open source advocates, proposes that the open source process produces better software. It argues that open source development's division of labor is more efficient than that of proprietary coders. The report says that OSS software is better for four primary reasons: More people looking for defects means more defects are found and...