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<p>Once the undisputed leader, America is now under assault from countries worldwide. How did this happen, and will the U.S. be able to fight back?</p> <p>In the history of the U.S. technology industry, 2004 will be remembered as the year that outsourcing hit home. Consultancy Gartner Group figures that U.S. tech companies will send 500,000 jobs overseas this year -- and indeed, hardly a week goes by without a major U.S. tech outfit announcing a new R&D center in Asia. As outsourcing has begun to hit high-salary jobs in programming and tech services, the trend is giving rise to a wider fear -- that U.S. dominance in high tech is starting to wane.</p>

<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...

Issue: ====== A critical security vulnerability has been found in the Linux kernel memory management code inside the mremap(2) system call due to missing function return value check. This bug is completely unrelated to the mremap bug disclosed on 05-01-2004 except concerning the same internal kernel function code.

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday March 07, @09:56AM from the now-thats-serious-flamebait-1 dept. I confirm writes "The BBC's Bill Thompson summarises the GNU/Linux vs. Microsoft struggle as a " cold war", and in one choice quote says:"It is rather ironic that Microsoft and other closed model companies rather resemble the Stalinist or Maoist model of a command economy with complete centralised control." I'm not sure I accept Thompson's conclusions, however: "So now would be a good time to start thinking about how we persuade governments that market in software may eventually need to be regulated, just as the market in electricity,...

05 March 2004 Two of four SCO licensees deny their purchase Linux licence? What Linux licence? By Robert McMillan, IDG News Service and Kieren McCarthy, Techworld Click here for more information Two of the four companies that SCO has publicly named as having bought a licence from it to use Linux, have denied doing anything of the sort. Both Computer Associates and Leggett & Platt have been held up by SCO as purchasing a $699 (£384) licence to cover the alleged SCO copyrights in the open-source operating system. But both have publicly stated that they have done no such thing....

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 [...].....

Document shows SCO prepped lawsuit against BofALast modified: March 4, 2004, 12:25 PM PST By Stephen Shankland and Scott Ard Staff Writer, CNET News.com exclusive The SCO Group filed lawsuits this week against DaimlerChrysler and AutoZone, but the Unix seller's attorneys also had prepared a complaint against Bank of America, according to a document. A Microsoft Word document of SCO's suit against DaimlerChrysler, seen by CNET News.com, originally identified Bank of America as the defendant instead of the automaker. This revision and others in the document can be seen through powerful but often forgotten features in Microsoft Word known as...

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...

Link to ArticleI just downloaded Knoppix Linux, burned it to a CD and am writting this after my second boot. The main feature is, The entire system runs from a CD! No need to install anything to a harddrive. Probally will run with out any harddrives hooked up to the computer. It recognized all my hardware, usb, soundcards, video, etc, right away. (however I couldn't get on the net the first boot?) The CD is loaded with Apps. It plays my MP3s, has an MS Office like application, several Web Browsers and many other Apps, I've yet to explore. It...

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...

SCO to sue Linux user Tuesday Last modified: March 1, 2004, 4:35 PM PST By Stephen Shankland Staff Writer, CNET News.com SAN FRANCISCO--The SCO Group plans to expand its Linux legal attack on Tuesday by filing a lawsuit against a large company using the open-source operating system. SCO Chief Executive Darl McBride announced the plan Monday at the Software 2004 conference here, but he didn't identify the company beyond saying it would have a recognized name. SCO, which owns a disputed amount of Unix intellectual property and claims some of the code was improperly used in Linux, threatened in November...

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...