Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Eager and ready to get Linux 2.6 a try, but youre not a kernel hacker? Well, you dont have to wait any longer. Red Hat Inc.s released a 2.6 distribution, the community based distribution Fedora Core 2 test 1, late last week. Fedora, which is not supported Red Hat, is an experimental distribution for Red […]

Eventually, everything secret leaks. The fact that you ate the last cookie, that you didnt take out the trash, or that you looked at the source code for Windows 2000 Service Patch 1… it all comes out eventually. But lets face it, peeking at W2Ks source code is a much, much bigger deal. Most of […]

While the Utah federal court in Salt Lake City continues to decide whether The SCO Group will be allowed to add copyright claims in its case against IBM in place of its dropped trademark claims, Novell Inc. has been going after SCO with copyright claims hammer and tongs. Earlier this month, Novell informed SCO that […]

Microsoft recently landed several blows in Europe against Lindows.com Inc. in its ongoing “Windows” trademark battle. However, the Redmond firm on Tuesday suffered a potentially major setback stateside. The U.S. District Court in Seattle ruled in favor of Lindows.coms assertion that the jury should consider the historical use of the term windows in graphical user […]

On Feb. 10, the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), an industry consortium dedicated to accelerating Linuxs adoption, published Columbia University professor and general counsel for the Free Software Foundation Eben Moglens latest position paper on The SCO Groups anti-Linux legal efforts. In this latest document, Moglen focuses on the war over who actually owns Unixs […]

In another sign that Microsoft can no longer simply dictate the future of the personal computer desktop, it appears as if maybe, just maybe, at least some customers wont have to wait until Longhorn shows up in 2006 … or 2007 … or … You see, as Mary Jo Foley reports in Microsoft Watch, in […]

You might suppose that after all the Sturm und Drang of SCO vs. IBM that The SCO Group Inc. had sued IBM on Linux copyright violations. Youd be wrong. It was only late on Thursday that SCO finally added copyright violation to its list of IBM wrongs in its hearing in the Utah federal court […]

Open Source Risk Management, LLC (OSRM), an open-source risk management company, announced today that Pamela Jones, the editor and moderator of Groklaw.net has agreed to become the companys Director of Litigation Risk Research. Groklaw.net is the most popular sites devoted to reporting and commentary on the SCO case and other present and threatened litigation against […]

In MyDooms aftermath, once more Im confronted with the old lie that if Linux were only as popular as Windows, it too would have Windows-sized security problems. What nonsense! Yes, Linux has security problems too. Yes, by sheer count of security problems patched, Linux (not Windows) has more holes. But thats not important. Whats really […]

The main SCO Group Web site (www.sco.com) was made inaccessible, as expected on Sunday. However, SCO announced Monday that will shift its Web site to another domain, www.thescogroup.com as the destination for the companys Web site through the end of Feb. 12. The outage, almost certainly is the result of a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) […]

The SCO Group Inc. confirmed that by midnight EST today, a large-scale, DDoS (distributed-denial-of-service) attack had rendered its Web site completely inaccessible. The MyDoom (dubbed Novarg.A by Symantec Corp. and MiMail.R by Trend Micro Inc.) DDoS flood began building momentum on Saturday evening, and hours later the SCO Web site was completely swamped. The attack […]

A Netherlands judge last week granted Microsoft Corp. a preliminary injunction against desktop Linux vendor Lindows.com Inc. and its resellers. The decision by the Amsterdam District Court “orders Lindows.com within eight days of service of this judgment to cease and desist from the infringement of … the WINDOWS trademark … by using the signs “Lindows”, […]