:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::
"Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough." -Walter Cronkite, RE TV news. The Web has changed that for many, however, and here is an extra dose for your daily news cocktail. This prescription tends to include surveillance and now war-related links, along with the occasional pop culture junk and whatever else seizes my attention as I scan online news sites.:: 6.23.2004 ::
:: Tux Redux ::
The Linux Killer
From Wired Mag
They call him Microsoft's sock puppet, the most hated man in high tech. SCO's Darl McBride is fighting a war for the future of free software. And he wants to make you pay.
Last February, Darl McBride received a Federal Express package at his home in Salt Lake City with a sticker proclaiming in big, bold letters: live worms.
Understandably cautious, McBride's wife brought it into the garage. When her husband discovered that there were, in fact, worms wriggling inside the cardboard box, he threw it away.
It was just another indignity for the chief executive of the widely unpopular SCO Group. McBride has also received death threats, a challenge to a fistfight, and a flood of denial-of-service attacks targeting his company's email servers and his home phone. He's started carrying a gun for protection. Friends tease him that in two short years, he has displaced Bill Gates as the most hated man in high tech.
It took Gates decades of hard work to achieve that distinction.
What has the son of a farmer, a devout Mormon, and the father of seven done to so swiftly earn the honor? McBride has transformed SCO into a legal missile aimed at the heart of the open source software movement. His strategy threatens to undo the progress of Linux and other free operating systems developed by programmers who believe that collaborative efforts have produced the most robust and reliable code.
SCO claims it owns the intellectual property rights to the Unix operating system and that contributors to Linux have pilfered that code. It further asserts that IBM in particular has illegally diverted the SCO family jewels into the Linux system. Every Linux user, SCO concludes, owes it money. To press these allegations - and scare the stuffing out of Linux users - SCO brought out the heavy artillery: Early last year, McBride hired famed litigator David Boies, who led the federal government's antitrust case against Microsoft and represented Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election recount.
SCO's legal fusillade has exploded over the past 18 months with jarring repercussions. SCO has either initiated or is defending itself in seven lawsuits before five judges in four states and two countries. It is taking on IBM and Red Hat, two companies that sell Linux-based products, as well as AutoZone and DaimlerChrysler, two that use them. Another claim, against Novell, centers on whether that company actually transferred the copyrights when it sold the Unix business in 1996 to the Santa Cruz Operation, one of SCO's precursors. These lawsuits have generated thousands of pages of legal briefs at costs that exceeded $3.4 million in the first quarter of 2004 for SCO alone. Hopeful Linux advocates predicted that courts would quickly dismiss SCO's claims. But the lawsuits plod along like horror-flick zombies that won't die.
Read more here.
posted by me
:: 5:29:00 PM [+] ::
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