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Saturday, October 18, 2003

Linux licencing


SCO's standover tactics, attempting to emulate Microsoft by billing the world for an Operating System that they already have and raise a large fortune by doing so, have attracted a speculative $US50million investment by BayStar Capital Management. Speculative as it appears a high risk / huge return punt. It may look like the same kind of pet project obsession that seems to have gripped SCO to read more into the fiction that they own Linux due to copyrights in Unix.


It is high risk as SCO's lawyers make a brilliant and convincing argument that sounds correct. That the international Linux community should get behind IBM in this argument is hardly a shock. IBM charge big corporates what everyone else can use for free. Nothing wrong with that.


SCO seeks to appropriate authorship for technology they do not own. If there are parts of Linux that were lifted from Unix the vast Linux open source community can now rewrite these parts once they are identified. It is SCO's secrecy as to what these are that makes them seem unfair in their actions. It is a byproduct of a disrelated acquisition that SCO suddenly discovered that it could start to create threats and extort sums of money from a huge community.


If they had been moderate, and asked for ten bucks from every Linux installation, then large numbers of users would have been happy to pay, and SCO would have raised more than $US50 million and they could have distributed it to shareholders.


Instead they have turned Linux users against themselves. How long will it be until Linux is certified as "SCO licence free" and their claims become redundant?




See also:


vnunet.com SCO extends Linux licence offer


Linus Torvalds

Wednesday, October 01, 2003

Disaster Recovery


We are moving sites over from existing services due to a serious outage that looks to us to be a denial of service attack. A HUGE amount of very evil fake Microsoft support notices (like one every hour for a few days) with a 145k attachment was sent out to one of our published email addresses in the hope that we would activate it. We took one look at it and decided to use Linux for all customer management tasks and setup new hosting arrangements for the five hosting accounts running on that service.


This is a long process, so if your site is out, please be patient. We are attending to it. Most outages will be resolved in a few hours but some sites will take longer (depending upon how the domain name systems are configured).


Please use my query hot line if you require more information, but services will return more quickly while we are working on it..


All affected accounts receive the upgrade service free of charge. If your account is working (as most are) then you can upgrade to the new type of hosting. Details to be posted when all issues are resolved.