Operating System Wars

The company that owns SCO is called Canopy Group. It was started in 1995 by Ray Noorda. Canopy Group funds technology companies out of Utah. It seeks companies to fund into a mature growth. Back in the 80s Digital Research came out with DR DOS - a much improved incarnation of MS DOS functionality without using its code. Indeed, it was written from the ground up and was more able and stable than MS DOS.

DR DOS featured GEM, a valid competitor to the early Windows offerings. In the meantime, we admit to a growing excitement that Red Hat have a version 9.0 of their productive Linux system: the version 8.0 incarnation is good to use. Better than Windows, in my experience. Windows runs more games and does multimedia stuff far more brilliantly than Linux so far. But so did BeOS. And so does Mac OS X, today's vastly superior Operating System, based on a BSD Linux core, Apple have created the best Operating Systerm yet. But Linux with its Gnome environment is better for us gnomes to be productive.

The Operating System wars have twisted and turned on basic capabilities of a machine. The ability of the machine to function impertectly has addicted us to imperfection. When something more appropriate comes along, and we start to see economic advantages for using it, we start to adopt it with a snowballing political shift. That shift will not occur. I think the market will rationalise that each Operating System has its advantages, and Security is NOT Microsoft's strong card. Not yet. Capability muscle is good for multimedia. Office software that allows anyone to publish the companies figures in any font and with natty presentations have convinced America that is the way to do business. "Naw - the first presentation has better colours. Lets throw our billion dollars at those boys!". And that is how the world turns.

Back to Caldera and Ray Noorda. It appears to me that Caldera was one of the products of the delta effect of giant investments only having access to 5% of the potential market. By following a policy of inventing a better wheel, Noorda's companies have created alternatives. But offering the alternatives in competion has proven costly.

Caldera bought out Digital Research, obstesibly the leading technology company of the 70s and 80s for PC Operating Systems. You can real Marc Perkel's story here. He tells the story and its his story. Microsoft was perhaps a dark horse when it published MS DOS. It was a relatively small company that made BASCOM BASIC compilers and GW Basic. We forget that GW stood for "Gee Whiz". IBM adopted MS DOS and not CP/M-86. The rest is, as they say, history.

Do we have Caldera to thank for its release of Linux, accordint to this strangely formatted news report, it seems we do. Not so sure about that. I thought it was Linus Torvalds, now releasing a new Version 2.6 Linux kernel that forms the basis of Version 9.0 and the Free Software Foundation. But there you go. This is a geek war. What does it costs to fake up a news report these days?

That the recent leak of source code from the Microsoft Vaults is worrying is an indication of the fears Microsoft may have about the vulnerability of its Operating System. When one solution takes 95% of the market, product perfection is deadly, you simply need something to improve upon. A monopoly operates under different rules to the rest of us, or it loses its unnatural market dominance.

Linux is now being fought over by the old giants of computing, IBM and the remains of DR while Microsoft has become so big, it can spend thousands upon thousands of hours of human dedication on a task that may turn out to be futile, and live another day.

Perhaps there is change in the air. Perhaps the age of multiple operating system use will arrive.

MyDoom

The writer of MyDoom may be covering tracks by placing the source code of the virus onto every target desktop. In a gesture that is structurally like poker play, the writer is putting the cards on the table and winning the hand by doing this.

Not only that but the writer and Microsoft have demonstrated a capability of the Windows network nobody has thought of before. Now if Microsoft could just hire the bugger and incorporate the massing of client PCs as a sort of personal MIPS army, I am sure they would pay $250,000 every year and keep him in a Ferarri to boot.

One day he will crash. The Windows will break and one day his magic carpet and network of remote theft will be undone. If ever there was a medium that had a preserved trail of crumbs to follow, it is the internet. It is not a matter of sifting through 20 billion emails or so. It is finding the initial logs that the virus first started to appear from.

Now, since most decent C programmers worth their salt could write a virus we are protected by goodwill rather than just law. It is thus fairly important that companies take defensive measures and at least run parallel systems on Linux or Mac OSX.

myDoom virus Microsoft friendly?

The myDoom virus was thwarted in its supposed attack on the Microsoft website. Although some degredation was experienced, for the most part the attack was thwarted.

Discuss or let us know your myDoom experience

MyDoom virus

SCO Website brought down? MyDoom defeats the company that purports to own the Linux system while Microsoft will be able to take measures to prevent the more virulent version from taking its website down as it, no doubt, has much more control of the IE browser and can patch it so that it stops viruses fairly easily. Whereas Microsoft has dominated through whatever guise of aggressive behaviour by takeovers and such like, in the past, an entity the sheer size of many countries.

Microsoft provided the environment that made it possible to spread MyDoom in the way that it spread its evil wings. The fact that the SCO site is down simply means that efforts to contain its spread failed, and that now it will be some time before it is cleaned up completely. The same environment makes it easier to control the virus's attack or even turn it off.

Someone is trying to convince us that the internet, mainly the email system, needs sentinals. Sure, it does when you provide a bridge that allows executable code to be run on a remote machine that controls resources such as the filing system and memory of the remote machine. That is the crime of weaving ActiveX intimate operating system calls into a public interface like the internet. Pirates can step in and do too many things.

Under the old Unix networking paradigm, the one that SCO purports to own the copyrights of, there was no ability to send an email that made code executable, although implementing one would not have been all that difficult, but the programmer worked in a multi user environment and would never expose remote code operations to a user interface that was not locked to one person by password at the very least. Networking latched into this world in the mid 80s with the Convergent AT&T Unix we used on Convergent Mighty Frame and Mega Frame monsters of their day, and then later with SCO Xenix and SCO Unix, that did their job magically, interfacing with Novell file systems and providing terminal access to desktops.

In the early 90s Linus Torvalds started a project that was to change the world we live in. Linux was borne from a need to circumnavigate the obtuse popularity exerted at a political level my the now state like Microsoft. If it is Russian crimnals or Linux enthusiasts bringing down the SCO site, and who fail to bring down the Microsoft site, then it creates a totally incorrect impression that Microsoft is more able to deal with virus attacks.

Microsoft has a better chance of identifying and diverting the virus when it connects to their website and thus keep it free for users, at least providing protected ports. The fact that SCO could not work out how to identify and eliminate the virus hits from its website by isolating the named ports, well.

Don't lets gloss over this one. The company that wants to be trusted with the trademarks and copyrights of the Unix operating system does not know how to detect and divert the virus hits? Well, well, well. Think about that. Is this conspiracy to make Unix/Linux seem less secure, while bolstering our trust in Microsoft?

Mydoom disables US IT co website - The Times of India