SCO Offers $1/4M Reward, Alleging Virus To Be Part of the 'Linux War'

"The SCO Group late Tuesday offered a $250,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of the writer of a fast-spreading mass-mailing virus that is programmed to launch a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against the SCO home page. The W32.Novarg.A@mm (MyDoom) virus, which has emerged as an unlikely weapon in the ongoing 'Linux War' between SCO and the open-source community, is set to launch the DDoS attack against SCO on Feb. 1 and has a trigger date to stop spreading on Feb. 12.

As anti-virus experts continue to maintain high threat levels on the virus, SCO issued a statement calling for an end to the 'criminal activity.' 'The perpetrator of this virus is attacking SCO, but hurting many others at the same time. We do not know the origins or reasons for this attack, although we have our suspicions,' SCO said without offering details. The company said it was working with the U.S. Secret Service and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to determine the identity of the perpetrators. This one is different and much more troubling, since it harms not just our company, but also damages the systems and productivity of a large number of other companies and organizations around the world,' said SCO chief executive Darl McBride."

Reported at InternetNews.com, January 28, 2004

 

Debian is Fastest-Growing Distro

"Over the six months from July 2003, Debian has been the fastest growing Linux distribution according to Bath-based Internet researcher Netcraft. Netcraft counted active sites containing the name of a Linux distribution in the Apache server header.

In percentage terms, Debian is closely followed by SuSE, now owned by Novell, and Gentoo. Red Hat has a far greater number of sites but -- quite typically for larger players in the market -- a much slower growth rate. Its share fell this month, following widely publicised and controversial changes to its licensing and security update policies, which saw the company move to a more commercial model to which many in the open source community were unaccustomed. However, with a hit rate of over 1.45 million, more than the rest of the distros combined, Red Hat won't be too upset.

A distribution name was present in a little over a quarter of Linux based Apache sites, according to Netcraft, and the overall growth rate of Linux servers was just under 15 per cent."

Reported at Techworld.com, January 29, 2004

MandrakeSoft reports first profitable quarter since 1999

"We have good news for the Mandrake Linux user community. During the latest fiscal quarter ending December 2003, MandrakeSoft reported a net profit for the first time since 1999. If you would like to learn more, please see the latest shareholder letter."

Mandrake newsletter, January 28, 2004

Schwab Goes Linux

"Charles Schwab & Co. last month went live with a Linux-based grid-computing system in an effort to speed up some of its compute-intensive investment management applications. David Dibble, executive vice president of technology services at Schwab, said the grid system was jointly developed with IBM and currently connects 12 two-processor servers that are based on Intel chips and located in the discount brokerage's Phoenix data center.

Later this year, San Francisco-based Schwab plans to begin rolling out the grid technology across a thousand or more low-cost servers with spare CPU capacity that could be tapped to help boost application performance. Dibble wouldn't disclose the cost of the project or the throughput that Schwab has achieved on an initial retirement planning application, citing the performance levels as a competitive advantage. But he said the system lets Schwab turn around end-user requests for retirement planning data in seconds instead of days.

LinuxInsider, January 28, 2004

Switch between Linux and Windows

"At Pogo Linux we sell custom-built desktops loaded with both Linux and Windows, letting you easily switch between the two OSes. Outside of hardcore Linux enthusiasts, we sell mostly to universities and government agencies. Linux helps these sorts of organizations save money and they employ people who are already familiar with Unix."

Tim Lee, President of Pogo Linux
[at LinuxWorld Conference & Expo, January 25, 2004]

"It works 98 per cent of the time"

"[Linux] works 98 per cent of the time. But it's the 2 per cent of the time it doesn't that kills you."

Jeremy White, CEO of CodeWeavers 
[at LinuxWorld Conference & Expo, January 25, 2004]

• "MyDoom vs SCO" Begins...Or Does It?