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Flaws threaten Microsoft SEATTLE — Microsoft Corp.'s offer this week of cash bounties for informants who help it collar virus-writers reflects more than just an escalation of the war on those who would exploit the dominant power in software. The campaign reveals just how much of a threat to Microsoft's bottom line security flaws now represent. When the Blaster worm hobbled hundreds of thousands of computers around the world in August — only the latest plague to exploit a flaw in Windows operating systems — it also hurt Microsoft's ability to book new contracts with corporate customers. For the first...

OCTOBER 23, 2003 How Microsoft's Misunderstanding of Open Source Hurts Us All By Robert X. Cringely This week, speaking at a Gartner conference in Orlando, Florida, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said some fascinating things about Linux and about Open Source software in general. And thanks to those remarks and the blinding realization they caused for me, I finally understand exactly why Microsoft doesn't understand Open Source. Ballmer asked, "Should there be a reason to believe that code that comes from a variety of people around the world would be higher-quality than from people who do it professionally? Why is its...

Dear Microsoft: I've long admired your warrior spirit, your commitment to winning, and your drive for success. Lots of companies and individuals have enjoyed many of your products and derived significant value from them; your financial success has made many people inside and outside of your company very wealthy; and you have created a global brand that's the envy of marketers around the world. Several years ago, realizing the Internet and the Web were about to make you as relevant as Gray Davis, you executed what could well be the fastest and most dramatic corporate reorientation anyone's ever seen. You...

<p>BOSTON -- With more than $32 billion in sales last year, Microsoft Corp. doesn't usually worry about losing one customer. But this one may be different.</p> <p>In a memo sent last month, Massachusetts Administration and Finance Secretary Eric Kriss instructed the state's chief technology officer to adopt a policy of "open standards, open source" for all future spending on information technology.</p>

Stolen from SlashDot... An anonymous reader writes: "A couple of interesting releases by mozilla.org. First of all Mozilla 1.5 was released. This is supposed to be the last version of the old Mozilla suite. Mozilla Firebird 0.7, the stand-alone browser by mozilla.org was also released today. It includes many new features, e.g. Web Panels. For more information see the newly designed product page for Firebird. A third release is the stand-alone version of the Mozilla mail-program Thunderbird , which has now reached version 0.3. The Mozilla Foundation also launched new end user services, like CD Sales and Telephone Support. As...

Copyright Lawsuit Is Turnabout for SCO By JOHN MARKOFF Published: October 13, 2003 AN FRANCISCO, Oct. 12 - The SCO Group, the company that touched off a computer industry slugfest last spring by suing I.B.M. over its use of Unix software, may find itself embarrassed by a similar claim against a company once related to SCO. Since filing a lawsuit claiming that I.B.M. added parts of the Unix operating system to the freely distributed Linux software, SCO has threatened other computer companies, the open source software movement and hundreds of corporations that rely on Linux, saying they are unfairly using...

An open-source letter October 1, 2003, 4:00 AM PT By Joe Firmage The current flap between SCO Group and the Linux community brings back memories of summer 1995. It was an unforgettable time for me, in a bad way. As vice president of strategy for Novell's Network Systems Group, I had been working for more than a year to help plan the integration of NetWare and Unix into a next-generation network operating system. Our engineering teams were a year into a three-year development plan, targeting 1997 or 1998 for the release of a breakthrough converged platform to be called NetWare...

LINDON, Utah, Sept. 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Darl McBride, CEO of The SCO Group, sent the following letter, dated Sept. 9, 2003, to the Open Source community: The most controversial issue in the information technology industry today is the ongoing battle over software copyrights and intellectual property. This battle is being fought largely between vendors who create and sell proprietary software, and the Open Source community. My company, the SCO Group, became a focus of this controversy when we filed a lawsuit against IBM alleging that SCO's proprietary UNIX code has been illegally copied into the free Linux operating system. In...

Closed because of "Software-Patents" In the next few days, the European Parliament will decide about the legalisation and adoption of so-called "software patents" in Europe, which are already used by large companies in other countries to put competitors out of business. This can lead to the termination of many software projects such as KNOPPIX, at least within Europe, because the holders of the over 30,000 already granted "software patents" (currently without a legal foundation) can claim exclusive rights and collect license fees for trivial things like "progress bars", "mouseclicks on online order forms", "scrolling within a window" and similar. That...

"Why aren't Apple Macintosh computers more popular in large mainstream organizations? Whatever the gigahertz numbers say, Macintoshes are comparable in performance to Windows or Linux machines. Whatever the conventional wisdom or the Microsoft marketing message, Macs aren't dramatically more expensive to buy and on a Total Cost of Ownership basis they are probably cheaper. Nobody would argue that Macs are harder to use. Clearly, they are easier to use, especially on a network. So what's the problem? Why do Macs seem to exist only in media outfits," asks Robert X. Cringely for PBS? Cringely writes, "Apple is clearly wondering the...

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...

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...

Open source code as flawed as proprietary: Study By Stephen Shankland, CNET News.com Wednesday, July 2 2003 9:54 AM The source code for a newer version of the Apache Web server software is of the same quality as that of proprietary competitors at a similar stage of development, a new study has found. The review compared version 2.1 of the Apache Web server software, which is used to house Web sites, with several commercial packages that handle the same chores. Reasoning, a company whose business is analyzing code quality, compared the recently released version with code of competitors at a...

For those of you who are interested in such things, the Mozilla Group has announced the release of Mozilla Version 1.4. This is a major stable release and should have all the latest bells and whistles included. The following is a brief feature list: Mozilla on Windows now has support for NTLM authentication. This enables Mozilla to talk to MS web and proxy servers that are configured to use "windows integrated security". Mozilla's bookmarks have been overhauled. Bookmarks now include a root level folder, the ability to have two differently named bookmarks pointing at the same location, site icons in...

It's been a torrid few weeks for the open-source movement, but good news came last week when the local government in Munich said it would spend about 30 million euros ($61 million) switching 14,000 computers from Microsoft's Windows and Office productivity software to the open-source Linux operating system and OpenOffice. The news was a huge blow to Microsoft, which is so worried about the Linux threat to its dominance that it has set up a special Linux fighting fund to provide super-discounts to win contracts from schools and Governments. The good news follows a bombshell legal claim that Linux was...

By Reuters May 15, 2003, 7:32 AM PT Microsoft has had a strategy to discount its products heavily when the software giant competes for orders against the emerging license-free Linux operating system, according to a report. The International Herald Tribune newspaper said Thursday that according to internal Microsoft e-mail it obtained, Microsoft's chief sales executive, Orlando Ayala, last summer authorized executives to offer steep discounts. "Under no circumstances lose against Linux," Ayala was quoted saying by the newspaper, adding that the discounts could be paid for by a special fund. The newspaper also cites a Microsoft marketing manager as saying...

I keep reading all these tales of woe of people having bad experiences with Linux. Sure, I've had my own bad experiences, across many an OS, but just lately I've been running a Red Hat Linux 9 desktop full-time at home and have yet to run into any major issue. What follows is an overview of my personal experiences with Linux. But first, a bit about me. Linux Just Works, Part I Editorial Notice: All opinions are those of the author and not necessarily those of osnews.com I've been involved with computers since my Dad brought home an Atari 400....

Put yourself in his/her shoes. You're a budding young technical writer and the one word you hear popping up in almost every tech-related conversation is, you guessed it, Linux. Now look in the mirror and try to tell yourself you're more than a writer. After all, you write about technology because it not only interests you, but you're accurate and fair enough to tell it like it is. Maybe not. We've used the word Linux here to signify Linux as an OS. Thus unless it is specifically mention Linux as a kernel within the context of the article it means...

“Microsoft bigots” is how Scott Akers describes users and administrators who won’t consider so-called solutions outside the Microsoft realm. “For them, it’s 100 percent Microsoft and that’s the end of the discussion,” said the chief administrator of technical support for the Massachusetts Department of Revenue, a government entity with 3,500 users. “I feel like there should be an alternative to Microsoft. My intent is to make it free, and it’s looking extremely promising.” To that end, Akers is advocating a DOR switch to open source/Linux, and he speaks of the possibility with the fervor of an activist. Charged with the...

SCO sues Big Blue for $1 billion; HP, Sun reassure customers The SCO Group last week announced a $1 billion lawsuit against IBM Corp. for allegedly sharing SCO’s proprietary technology with the open source software (OSS) community. SCO also claims to have warned Big Blue in a letter that if IBM doesn’t address its concerns, SCO will revoke its Unix license within 100 days. The implications of this move are unclear for IBM’s AIX installed base, but some industry watchers concede it could at least temporarily prevent IBM from shipping AIX. “That’s exceedingly unlikely, however,” stresses Rob Enderle, a senior...