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<p>The battle between The SCO Group and the Linux and open-source communities is apparently taking some innocent bystanders hostage.</p> <p>Take Centershift, a small startup ASP, based in Salt Lake City, that provides services to specific real-estate markets such as self-storage and multi-family residential housing. While Centershift is completely independent of SCO, it does share significant infrastructure with SCO as both companies host portions of their operations from the same hosting facility in Lindon, Utah.</p>

from: http://armedndangerous.blogspot.com/2003_08_17_armedndangerous_archive.html#106157186387886957 Mr. McBride: Late yesterday. I learned that you have charged that your company is the victim of an insidious conspiracy masterminded by IBM. You have urged the press and public to believe that the Open Source Initiative and the Free Software Foundation and Red Hat and Novell and various Linux enthusiasts are up in arms not because of beliefs or interests of their own, but because little gray men from Armonk have put them up to it. Bwahahaha! Fire up the orbital mind-control lasers! Very few things could possibly illustrate the brain-boggling disconnect between SCO and reality with...

SCO Defends Against Open Source Advocates By Mitch Wagner SCO defended itself against criticism by the open source community, saying Unix code used in Linux comes from its own, copyrighted version of Unix, not - as Linux advocates argued last week - earlier versions that have been released into open source. SCO also said the General Public License (GPL), a popular license for releasing software into the open source community, violates U.S. and international copyright law. SCO, which owns intellectual property of Unix, is fighting a legal and marketing campaign to show that Linux contains sufficient proprietary Unix code that...

Excert due to copyright restraints. SCO: to pay or not to pay SCO has started invoicing Linux users that it claims are illegally using copied Unix code. August 26, 2003 11:58 AM GMT (Datamonitor) - SCO [SCOX] is beginning to invoice Linux users for their use of Unix code that it says has been illegally copied into the open source operating system. This leaves IT shops around the world with a deceptively simple decision: pay the fine, or take a chance. MORE at: SCO: to pay or not to pay SCO has started invoicing Linux users that it claims are...

IBM dismisses OpenOffice as child's play By Ashlee Vance in Chicago Posted: Ashlee Vance at 02:26 GMT IBM claims to have put more than $1 billion behind open source software, but the company is failing to pay even a modest amount of lip service to one of free software's most needed products. Karen Smith, vice president of Linux strategy and market development at IBM, has been telling a number of publications that no open source equivalent of Microsoft Office exists. Lest you think Smith has been living in a cave, rest easy. She does appear to be acquainted with OpenOffice...

Microsoft has made a big deal out of asserting that Linux (news - web sites) is not fit for the enterprise (news - web sites). But Microsoft itself is using Linux to help protect its servers against denial-of-service (news - web sites) attacks. According to a post on the Netcraft Web site, Microsoft changed its DNS settings on Friday so that requests for www.microsoft.com no longer resolve to machines on Microsoft's own network, but instead are handled by the Akamai caching system, which runs Linux. Akamai runs a service to help boost Web site performance by caching copies of Web...

Has all the talk about viruses scaring you away from MS Windows? Considering switching to Linux, but afraid to make the leap? Consider going to www.knoppix.org (or do a Google search) where you can create a bootable Knoppix CD-ROM. Boots up the Linux OS without writing to your harddrive. In fact, you don't need a harddrive to use it, just a CD-ROM.There are lots of Linux support groups in your area where people enjoy sharing their Linux knowledge. Been playing with Knoppix and plan on using it for Internet access and keeping a MS Windows partition for games, the wife...

  Technology - TechWeb Microsoft Is Using Linux To Protect Its Own Web Site Thu Aug 21, 3:35 AM ET Add Technology - TechWeb to My Yahoo! Microsoft has made a big deal out of asserting that Linux (news - web sites) is not fit for the enterprise (news - web sites). But Microsoft itself is using Linux to help protect its servers against denial-of-service (news - web sites) attacks. • More On Storage • More On Security & Privacy • More On Software • More On Small Biz • More On Mobile & Wireless • More On Product...

The author is the CEO of Cybersource Pty Ltd, a Melbourne-based IT & Internet Professional Services company. These are his personal views.SCO, in its ever-twisting, ever-turning battle to remain in the press release TOP 40 has trotted out the concept of trying to invalidate the GNU General Public License. This is the same license under which the Linux operating system kernel is published. Does SCO have any chance of succeeding? As information technology managers, it is imperative that we are at least mildly versed in simple matters of law and copyright. This helps us to provide better raw material grist...

SCO's Evidence: This Smoking Gun Fizzles Out Version 1.0 -- first general release 20 August 2003. Version 1.1 -- note significance of the missing 32V copyright. Version 1.2 -- corrected description of the locking calls, added SIII. Executive summary: There are three pieces of good news for SCO about the evidence they revealed on 18 August 2003. One is that the evidence does support a claim of code-copying; the second is that GPL is not in this case a usable defense; and the third is that BSD probably doesn't save us either. But the rest of the news is all...

Sterling Ball, a jovial, plain-talking businessman, is CEO of Ernie Ball, the world's leading maker of premium guitar strings endorsed by generations of artists ranging from the likes of Eric Clapton to the dudes from Metallica. But since jettisoning all of Microsoft products three years ago, Ernie Ball has also gained notoriety as a company that dumped most of its proprietary software--and still lived to tell the tale. In 2000, the Business Software Alliance conducted a raid and subsequent audit at the San Luis Obispo, Calif.-based company that turned up a few dozen unlicensed copies of programs. Ball settled for...

Analysis of SCO's Las Vegas Slide Show Bruce Perens, Perens LLC <bruce@perens.com> With help from Linus Torvalds and the Open Source community. You may re-publish this material. You may excerpt it, reformat it and translate it as necessary for your presentation. You may not edit it to deliberately misrepresent my opinion. An SCO presentation shown in Las Vegas on August 18th alleged infringement by the Linux developers. The presentation, in Microsoft PowerPoint format is here, and a conversion of the presentation that can be viewed using a web browser is here . SCO released the presentation to Bob McMillan, a...

The ruckus erupted when SCO showed its "smoking gun" to delegates at its conference in Las Vegas yesterday. A German journalist photographed some of SCO's presentation slides, despite attendees being required to sign non-disclosure agreements before attending the event. The slides then came under the full scrutiny of Linux advocates, with one, former Hewlett-Packard open source strategist Bruce Perens, publishing a damning analysis online. Perens claims the code can be traced to AT&T, which developed the Unix code eventually sold to SCO, and was written as far back as 1973. Since then it has been released under varying licences as...

SCO Preparing Legal Action Against CustomerBy Matthew Aslett SCO Group Inc is preparing to take a Linux user to court to speed up the legal process in its claim Unix code has been illegally copied into Linux, and also encourage Linux users to take out a license for its intellectual property. The company has signed one large customer up to its Intellectual Property License for Linux, but faces opposition from many more who believe SCO must prove its claims in a court of law before they will hand over the $700 per CPU for the license. Speaking at SCO's Forum...

Getting a glimpse at SCO's evidence By Lisa M. Bowman CNET News.com August 19, 2003, 6:22 AM PT LAS VEGAS--When SCO Group first filed its lawsuit against IBM in March, critics characterized the move as the last gasp of an ailing company hoping to strike a series of lucrative licensing deals. Since then the company has come out swinging even harder, bashing its detractors, standing by its allegations, and most recently, posting a profit that SCO said would allow it to continue its aggressive intellectual property fight. At the SCO Forum here Monday, the company pulled out its latest weapon:...

Analysis of Linux Code that SCO Alleges Is In Violation Of Their Copyright and Trade Secrets. Bruce Perens <bruce@perens.com>, with help from many members of the Linux community. On August 18 at their trade show in Las Vegas, SCO showed code that they claim was copied into Linux in violation of their copyright or trade secrets. The German publisher Heise photographed two slides of SCO's code show and made them public on their news ticker. Heise publishes c't, a popular German computer magazine. These are the slides: This slide has some of the "System V" source code comments deliberately...

LAS VEGAS--When SCO Group first filed its lawsuit against IBM in March, critics characterized the move as the last gasp of an ailing company hoping to strike a series of lucrative licensing deals. Since then the company has come out swinging even harder, bashing its detractors, standing by its allegations, and most recently, posting a profit that SCO said would allow it to continue its aggressive intellectual property fight. At the SCO Forum here Monday, the company pulled out its latest weapon: lines and lines of disputed code that were allegedly copied from SCO's Unix into IBM's version of Linux....

SCO puts disputed code in the spotlight By Lisa M. Bowman CNET News.com August 18, 2003, 2:07 PM PT LAS VEGAS--SCO Group's legal battles against Linux took center stage at the company's partner and customer conference, as executives displayed the lines of disputed code and vowed to continue the fight. The Lindon, Utah-based company has rattled Linux users by suing IBM, claiming that the company inserted unauthorized code from SCO's Unix into Linux. SCO has also sent letters to corporations with Linux systems, warning them that they may be violating copyright laws by using the increasingly popular operating system. During...

There has been quite a chorus of frogs in the pond calling out, indemnification, indemnification, indemnification. Red Hat's CEO says his customers have not been asking for it, but SCO's McBride says we GNU/Linux users need it and so he has taken it upon himself to lobby on behalf of other companies' customers: "'For the first time in the history of the industry, we have a major operating system platform that's being pushed on end users and at the same time the users take it, they're being told 'Buyer beware -- you own all the inherent intellectual property risks with...

THE NATIONAL SECURITY Agency, the government's security arm, along with help from Network Associates, last week announced it has made a security-enhanced version of Linux available for download. The NSA said it realizes that operating system security is necessary and that mainstream operating systems often lack critical security features that could enforce the confidentiality and integrity of network communications. Dubbed Security-Enhanced (SE) Linux, the NSA's version allows programs to have only the slimmest security permissions to run. SE Linux has a strong, yet flexible, access control architecture incorporated into the kernel to foil tampering and bypassing of security mechanisms. The...