Stories by: Frank Hayes

The SCO Group 's US$5 billion threat against Linux is effectively finished. On Friday, Aug. 10, U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball ruled that SCO doesn't actually own the copyrights that it was using to threaten -- and in some cases, sue -- Linux users.

It didn't require a California law for data-theft victims to be notified after Paris Hilton's phone book hit the Web a week ago. Oh, they knew. Dozens of celebs, ranging from rapper Eminem to tennis babe Anna Kournikova, suffered through hundreds of calls from fans, pranksters and anyone else who found the contents of Hilton's T-Mobile cell phone on the Internet. There were also snapshots, to-do lists and transcripts of Hilton's text-messaging chats. But what caught headlines were the phone numbers of all those poor, beleaguered B-listers, suddenly out there where any nobody with a dialing finger could call them.

Ray Noorda is back. On Dec. 17, the man who built Novell fired his trusted protege, Ralph Yarro, for pocketing upward of US$20 million from "self-dealing transactions" at Noorda's investment company, The Canopy Group. Noorda replaced Yarro and took control again of the venture capital firm he founded and funded.

Yes, Sun Microsystems' new OpenSolaris really is an open-source project. And no, it's not likely to be much like the Linux open-source project. How are they alike? Both projects will produce a production-grade version of Unix, including source code, that we'll be able to download and use without paying for. So from where corporate IT sits, there's lots of similarity.

It's no surprise that Sun Microsystems put the source code for the next big version of Java up on the Internet this week. OK, maybe it's a little surprise. For most of a year, Sun has resisted a campaign by IBM to convert Java into an open-source project. Sun executives have said over and over that Java will not be open-sourced -- no, never, forget it. That's been the word all up and down the Sun chain of command.

You probably thought things couldn’t get weirder with The SCO Group and Linux. Well, they did. Last week, the company that claims all Linux users owe it royalties sued Novell for “slander of title”. That’s weird. Impressive, yes — “slander” gives it a Hollywood-starlet-vs-tabloid sexiness. But unless you’re a lawyer, you don’t have any idea what it means.

The SCO Group just announced it is dropping the suit against IBM and refunding the money it took in the Linux licence blackmail scheme. And it apologised for being so annoying and said Darl McBride would be driven out of town on a rail after being tarred and feathered.

Linux is making lots of vendors nervous these days. Some are throwing money at Linux in the hope to get in on the ground floor of the Next Big Thing. Others, like Microsoft Corp are hoping that the Linux bandwagon crashes and burns.