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LOS ANGELES, May 30 (Reuters) - SCO Group Inc. (NASDAQ:SCOX), in a dispute with IBM and others over claims its intellectual property rights to the Unix operating system have been violated by competing software, on Friday said it will begin to open its code in a bid to show it has been improperly used. On a conference call with reporters and analysts, Darl McBride, the president and chief executive of Lindon, Utah-based SCO, said the company was willing to give proof to the technology industry and others that code from Unix appears in the Linux operating system as well. SCO...

Microsoft Co-Opts Open Source On Its Terms May 26, 2003 SCO license deal highlights Microsoft's endorsement of for-profit development By John Foley, with Larry Greenemeier and Aaron Ricadela In the controversy that pits the SCO Group, owner of one of the original Unix operating systems, against Linux distributors, Microsoft has come down on the side of SCO. Yet, overlooked in the stir created when Microsoft recently licensed SCO's Unix for use in some of its products is the fact that Microsoft has been easing restrictions on its own code. May marks the second anniversary of Microsoft's so-called shared-source initiative,...

Computer Hardware & SoftwareBoies' TakeVictoria Murphy, 05.28.03, 6:03 PM ET SAN FRANCISCO - Hired gun David Boies can't understand why no one likes his client. All SCO Group did was file a billion-dollar lawsuit against IBM claiming the computer giant was sharing code secrets with open source developers. Somehow, everyone thinks SCO is in it for the money and out to thwart Linux. In Boies' eyes, it's hard to see how anyone could jump to that conclusion. The $1 billion in damages and future royalties SCO (nasdaq: SCOX - news - people ) is seeking won't put a mere dent...

Bruce Perens writes: "We knew that SCO's attack on Linux was a lie. But we never dreamed of the big lie behind it. "This morning, Novell announced some of the terms of the company's 1995 agreement to sell its Unix business to SCO. The shocking news is that Novell did not sell the Unix intellectual property to SCO. Instead, they sold SCO a license to develop, sell, and sub-license Unix. The title to Unix copyrights and patents remains with Novell. To back up this assertion, Novell refers to public records at the Library of Congress Copyright Office and the U.S....

Microsoft threw its weight behind SCO Group's battle against Linux Monday by declaring that it would license Unix technology from SCO in order to "ensure intellectual property compliance across all Microsoft solutions." Microsoft's license covers a patent and source code from Unix.SCO claims that the Linux kernel holds Unix intellectual property owned by SCO. The company has moved to hold IBM (Quote, Company Info) responsible, unleashing a $1 billion lawsuit against the company for misappropriation of trade secrets (though not copyright infringement, to date). Still, the company has conceded that some of the alleged Unix code in the Linux kernel...

Outside and in-house legal counsel advised the SCO Group to send a warning letter about Linux use to the CEOs of 1,350 companies Monday, SCO CEO Darl McBride says. In a letter dated May 12, SCO Group, which holds the license to the original AT&T Unix operating system, warned commercial users of the open-source Linux operating system that "Linux infringes on our Unix intellectual property and other rights." McBride also said in the letter that "legal liability that may arise from the Linux development process may also rest with the end user." In an interview Thursday, McBride said the company,...

Was the story about you embarrassing a Microsoftie at a conference true? Specifically, that he was insisting that their implementation of ksh in their unix compatibility kit was true to the "real" thing and trying to argue the point with you. The argument ended when someone else finally stood up and informed the speaker who he was arguing with.Just curious ...Korn: This story is true. It was at a USENIX Windows NT conference and Microsoft was presenting their future directions for NT. One of their speakers said that they would release a UNIX integration package for NT that would...

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...

Major Internet vulnerability discovered in e-mail protocolBy DAN VERTONMARCH 03, 2003The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been working in secret for more than two weeks with the private sector to fix a major Internet vulnerability that could have had disastrous consequences for millions of businesses and the U.S. military. Since Feb. 14, the DHS and the White House Office of Cyberspace Security have been working with Atlanta-based Internet Security Systems (ISS) to alert IT vendors and the business community about a major buffer overflow vulnerability in the sendmail mail transfer agent (MTA). Sendmail is the most common MTA and...

Critical flaw exposes Internet e-mail Servers that process most e-mail messages at risk MSNBC By Bob Sullivan March 3 — A newly discovered flaw in a critical piece of Internet infrastructure software could put more than half the Internet’s e-mail servers at risk, researchers say. The flaw exists in Sendmail, a program that sorts and delivers most e-mail. A single message sent at a flawed e-mail server could allow an attacker to take control of the server, read its contents and use it to organize a massive denial of service attack. But officials are hopeful that a month’s work of...

A consulting group that scrutinises the source code underlying several operating systems has found that a key networking component of Linux is of higher quality in many regards than competing closed-source software. Reasoning, which sells automated software inspection services, examined part of the code of Linux and five operating systems, comparing the number and rate of programming defects. Specifically, Reasoning examined the implementation of TCP/IP, a key networking technology, and found fewer errors in Linux. Reasoning declined to disclose which operating systems it compared with Linux, but said two of the three general-purpose operating systems were versions of Unix. The...

<p>Will the licensing efforts of a key patent holder derail Linux's corporate growth?</p> <p>Every so often in the tech world, an intellectual-property lawsuit comes along that gets the coders clucking, predicting that it's the end of the digital world as we know it. A year ago, it was British Telecom's attempt to collect royalties on hyperlinks. And Amazon now and then comes under fire for some of its business-process patents.</p>

Langa Letter: Linux Has Bugs: Get Over ItFred Langa contends that some Linux proponents harm their cause by hiding from the facts--it's just as buggy as Windows XP. By Fred Langa, InformationWeekJan 27, 2003 (12:00 AM)URL: http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20030124S0013I made a private bet with myself when I ran an item in my newsletter called "Linux Hacks On The Rise". It cited a study of software problems reported by CERT--the Computer Emergency Response Team that impartially tracks computing security threats. (CERT is part of a federally funded research and development center at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.) Among other things, the article said:...

November 26, 2002  | Paul ThurrottMost Unsecure OS? Yep, It's Linux According to a new Aberdeen Group report, open-source solution Linux has surpassed Windows as the most vulnerable OS, contrary to the high-profile press Microsoft's security woes receive. Furthermore, the Aberdeen Group reports that more than 50 percent of all security advisories that CERT issued in the first 10 months of 2002 were for Linux and other open-source software solutions. The report muddles the argument that proprietary software such as Windows is inherently less secure than open solutions. And here's another blow to the status quo: Proprietary UNIX solutions were responsible...

An Interview With Andy Hertzfeld (9/20/2000) Andy Hertzfeld was a member of the original Apple Macintosh team back in 1981, at which time he designed and implemented much of the original Macintosh system software. In that light, it's not surprising that he's still on the cusp of GUI development today as cofounder of Eazel. Eazel's first project, Nautilus, is one of the first open source development projects to aim for commercial success; its innovative file and system management model is poised to open up the world of Linux to a much wider audience. At this year's LinuxWorld Conference in San...

The Japanese government is contemplating to replace Microsoft Windows, used in much of its computer networks, with another operating system to bolster security. According to the local newspaper Asahi Shimbun, the planned move came in the wake of recent event of leakage of secure data from Japan's military network. Instead the government is looking the possibility of adopting open source programs like Linux. Reuters TOKYO: The Japanese government will consider replacing Microsoft Corp's Windows, used in much of its computer networks, with another operating system to bolster security, a newspaper said on Saturday. The safety of computer networks is under...

According to a report published November 12 by Aberdeen Group^, "Security advisories for open source and Linux software accounted for 16 out of the 29 security advisories - about one of every two advisories - published for the first 10 months of 2002 by Cert (www.cert.org^, Computer Emergency Response Team)." Aberdeen says Microsoft products have had no new virus or trojan horse advisories in the first 10 months of 2002, while Unix, Linux, and Open Source software went from one in 2001 to two in the first 10 months of 2002, that in the same 2002 time period "networking...

This paper provides quantitative data that, in many cases, using open source software / free software is a reasonable or even superior approach to using their proprietary competition according to various measures. This paper examines market share, reliability, performance, scalability, security, and total cost of ownership. It also has sections on non-quantitative issues, unnecessary fears, usage reports, other sites providing related information, and ends with some conclusions. You can view this paper at http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html (HTML format). Palm PDA users can view it in Plucker format(you will also need Plucker to read it). Old archived copies are also available. 1. Introduction...

High-powered computers are the "tech" in biotechnology. So it's no surprise that Cambridge-based biotech giant Genzyme Corp. uses lots of muscular workstation machines, most of them running the sophisticated Unix operating system. But what is surprising is that some of these powerful Unix boxes bear the trademark of Apple Computer Inc. They're Macintoshes — the same user-friendly computers that have earned Apple a loyal following among artists, publishers, and home computer users. Apple is in the midst of a high-profile effort to persuade consumers to abandon computers using Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system in favor of the Mac. It's a...

CERT: Flaw could allow root access in some Unix, Linux systems A buffer overflow in the ToolTalk RPC database server used in the Common Desktop Environment (CDE) on systems from vendors such as Sun Microsystems Inc. and IBM could allow an attacker to run code with root privileges, according to a security alert released today by the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC). CDE is a graphical interface used on Unix and some Linux systems. The ToolTalk component of the software allows applications to communicate with each other across different platforms and hosts via remote procedure calls (RPC). The RPC database server...