Microsoft is going to sue Sergio Amadeu, President of the Brazilian government's National Institute of Information Technology for defamation.
Apparently, M$ does not appreciate Amadeu's opinion about their business practises:

"drug-dealer practice" for offering the operational system Windows to some governments and city administration for digital inclusion programs. "This is a trojan horse, a form of securing critical mass to continue constraining the country".

M$ considers in the document that this is "an excess in freedom of speech and freedom of thought" (Ooops!). Just remember Bill Gate's speaking in 1998 to make your opinion about the facts:

"Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software," he said. "Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."

Original document on lessig.org, and funniest comments on slashdot, as usually!

raoult.com hacked! This web site was just hacked. This article was not written by me (just in case ;-)

Something new on kernel.org. The latest stable version of the Linux kernel is no more a 2.4.X, but instead was changed to 2.6.0!

The Release Notes will show you the details of the last changes. If you don't know what is really new in 2.6, just read this article, or this french translation.

So what to do tonight? Install 2.6, or watching The Return of the King, which was also out today?

I already discussed about SCO claims about Linux, but many events came since then, especially since the beginning of this week.

For instance, on Monday, RedHat filled a lawsuit against SCO.

This could be a non-event, as RedHat looks much smaller than SCO, and the SCO-IBM battle seems more important, but I was surprised to learn that SCO market capitalization is no more than 120 millions USD, ten times less than Redhat (and 1,000 times less than IBM). This probably means that RedHat has the power to fight.

Yesterday, SCO announced the Linux runtime licence prices. Are they smoking again? I have a personal server at home and I should pay 700 USD (1,400 after Oct 15th), just because they ask me to do so?

Imagine that someday this story happens in litterature domain: An SCO-like publisher would attack readers for buying a copy of an hidden book, and ask them a $10 licence to read.

But let's come back to SCO adventures... Then answered yesterday to RedHat with this letter:

Matthew J. Szulik
CEO
RED HAT, INC.
1801 Varsity Drive
Raleigh, NC 27606

Dear Matthew,

Attached is the letter I discussed with you during our July 31, 2003 telephone conversation. Instead of actually sending the letter, I thought it was best to telephone you and speak in person to see if we could resolve the issues between our companies short of litigation. We left the conversation with a preliminary agreement to meet and continue our discussions further.

To my surprise, I just discovered that your company filed legal action against The SCO Group earlier today. You, of course, mentioned nothing of this during our telephone conversation. I am disappointed that you were not more forthcoming about your intentions. I am also disappointed that you have chosen litigation rather than good faith discussions with SCO about the problems inherent in Linux.

Of course, we will prepare our legal response as required by your complaint. Be advised that our response will likely include counterclaims for copyright infringement and conspiracy.

I must say that your decision to file legal action does not seem conducive to the long-term survivability of Linux.

Yours truly

Darl C. McBride
President & CEO

Of course you noticed the last sentence. Ooops! I am really afraid!

Stupidity is the great constant in this universe.

According to netcraft , some corporates switch from Linux to Windows Server 2003. Colt.com is one of them, and made this clever move in May. I will make no comment about the uptimes shown on the above graph...

...

I changed my mind, I will make one: Haa-Haa-Hoo-Hii-Hiiii... One reboot a day... Huummphrrrrr....

LOL!

Do you remember the famous Munich decision to switch 14,000 desktops from Windows to Linux, on May 28?

USA Today reported two days ago in this article what Microsoft tried to prevent this switch to the Open-Source OS. This deal was so important for M$ that were really able to give a lot! Here are some examples:

• They authorized Munich to have a new upgrade only after 6 years, instead of the usual 3 years contracts.
• They offered to install only Microsoft Word on some PCs, instead of their usual forced bundling of all Office applications.
• They were going to offer the City millions of dollars for training and support.
• Steve Balmer himself went to meet the mayor end of February, in order to explain why Microsoft had the best solution, and to make some special offers.
• They made a final offer of $21.7 million (from the original $36.6 million proposal).
• And much more!

But the City, mostly for strategic reasons, eventually decided to go for the more expensive Linux solution ($35.7 million against Microsoft's $21.7).

One interesting part is this quote from Christine Strobl (Munich council member): "And the more Microsoft discounted, the more it underscored the notion that as a sole supplier, Microsoft could - and has been - naming its own price".
I know very well some Corporates which did not get that point at all, and prefer to go the opposite way, wrongly thinking that an unique supplier means cheaper prices ;-)

Linus Torvalds announced today in an email to the Linux Kernel Mailing List that the test1 version of the 2.6.0 kernel is ready for testing!

He also asked people, especially the Linux vendors, to start testing it, to make the release of 2.6.0 quicker than the last one - "2.4.0 took about seven months from the pre1 to the final release" - and to have everybody ready when the 2.6.0 comes out.
You can download the test1 version on the kernel.org site. You will also find a small readme file there ;-)

Japan Government is going to switch its 800,000 employees payroll system to a Linux system, designed by Fujitsu Ltd, IBM Japan Ltd, and Oki Electric Industry Co.
The design contract is worth 188 million yens, and the development itself could cost between 2 and 3 billion yens. The new system is supposed to halve the operating costs of the network.

This weblog section will be reserved to the Linux switchs around the world.
As I started it only today, let's start with a June 6th The Register article, which explains the recent Linux moves in Europe.

Linus Torvalds leaves Transmeta after working 6 years there, to work fulltime on the development of the kernel. This should not change a lot for him, as he already spent most of his time working on the kernel at Transmeta.

He will now work for the non-profit Open Source Development Lab. This organization was created by a large group of sponsors (including Transmeta), and received from them a $20 millions investment.

He wrote about his move in a kernel mailing-list post announcing the 2.5.72 version of the development branch.

Have fun!

SCO decided to go on, and annonced yesterday that they "terminated IBM's right to use AIX in their business, development, distribution and sales"

What amazes me is that the offending portions of code contains JFS, RCU, and NUMA:

JFS (Journaled File System) was created by IBM for AIX.

RCU (Read-Copy Update) was created by Sequent for Dynix/ptx system. Sequent was acquired by IBM in 1999.

NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) was also acquired from Sequent, although others implementations were previously created by SGI and others.

None of these technologies were part of the original System V code, but the real claim against IBM is not copyright related; tt is about a breach of contract:

SCO claims that "IBM's 1985 Unix license, originally signed with AT&T, but subsequently transferred to SCO, prevents IBM from distributing software derived from the Unix code base."

They have a very broad vision of the derived term, IMHO ;-)