Juan Carlos Perez

(IDG News Service) — Linux and Unix users and vendors beware: The SCO Group has hired high-voltage attorney David Boies, former antitrust Microsoft Corp. slayer, to look into possible violations of SCO's Unix and Linux intellectual property, it said Wednesday. Along these lines, SCO has also created a new division entrusted with managing the company's intellectual property assets, an area over which the company says it wants to keep tighter controls. The idea is for the company to be "a little bit more aggressive than we have been in the past at enforcing our intellectual property," said Chris Sontag, senior vice president of SCO's operating systems division, in an interview Wednesday. "We're doing more research than we have in the past to make sure the use of our intellectual property is appropriate ... which hasn't been done in a few years," he added. In W... (more)

Walmart.com to sell stand-alone LindowsOS

(IDG News Service) — Walmart.com has begun selling Lindows.com Inc.'s Linux-based operating system, the first stand-alone operating system not made by Microsoft Corp. to be featured at Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s online store, Lindows.com announced Tuesday. LindowsOS 3.0 Membership Edition is available now at Walmart.com for $98.72. The operating system comes with a one-year membership to the Lindows.com Warehouse, a collection of over 1,700 software programs. The membership lets users download any of the Warehouse programs for free and keep them for life. Available programs inc... (more)

Mono 1.0 slated for release this year

(IDG News Service) — Project Mono, an effort to create an open source version of the Microsoft Corp. .Net Framework, expects to release version 1.0 of its software this year, probably in the fourth quarter. The project, launched in July 2001, aims to create a runtime environment for Microsoft's .Net Framework for a variety of operating systems, including Linux, Mac OS X, Windows and Unix, said leader Miguel de Icaza, chief technology officer at Ximian Inc., a Linux vendor spearheading the project. By providing a set of open source tools for building .Net applications that run on ... (more)

Novell hits back at SCO on Unix claims

(IDG News Service) — Novell Inc. is taking The SCO Group Inc. to task over SCO's legal claims over Unix and against Linux software. Novell on Wednesday said it never transferred the copyrights and patents of Unix System V when it sold the software to SCO in 1995. SCO claims all Unix flavors in use today are based on Unix System V, and that it owns the software code and licensing rights to that software. Novell, however, said SCO is apparently aware that it lacks these copyrights and patents because over the past few months SCO has "repeatedly asked Novell to transfer the copyrigh... (more)

SCO turns a profit helped by licensing program

(IDG News Service) — The SCO Group Inc. reported a profit in its second fiscal quarter thanks in part to its recently launched initiative to more aggressively collect licensing fees for its Unix operating system software, the company said Wednesday. That initiative includes the filing of a US$1 billion lawsuit against IBM Corp. that alleges IBM engaged in illegal practices to damage SCO's Unix operating system software and benefit IBM's Linux business. This is SCO's first profitable quarter since the company was founded as Caldera Inc. in 1994, said SCO President and Chief Execut... (more)