The Unix/Linux Wall

Robert Frost once told us, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall." And there is something about human nature that does not love watching somebody else's success. Apparently The SCO Group, formerly Caldera International, is jealous of the strides that Red Hat has made in the Linux distribution business. SCO has flailed about for the past several years looking for a business model, as a succession of backers and CEOs have attempted to make big bucks on free software.
Caldera renamed itself The SCO Group last year in an attempt to pull together its enterprise-oriented Linux distribution and the Unix intellectual property it purchased from AT&T in 1995, which isn't covered by the public license that makes all Linux source code and libraries freely available. SCO was an early player in Unix for the x86 platform. The company's Xenix x86 Unix port was long on the periphery of Unix implementations and was well regarded. Without the support of a major hardware vendor, however, the port never achieved dominance.
The SCO Group has combined its old Xenix IP with the AT&T IP in a new division, SCOsource, specifically to extract a tax from other Linux players. It has hired high-profile lawyer David Boies to build a case for the company, starting with the $1 billion attention-getter filed against IBM. The SCO Group has published a rather amazing chart of the history of Unix, or rather the history of Unix according to The SCO Group. It's called the SCOsource Unix Intellectual Property Pedigree Chart, and you can find it at www.sco.com/scosource/unixtree/unixhistory01.html. It's based on a Unix history chart drawn by Eric Levenez (www.levenez.com/unix/history.html), but SCO has drawn its own self-aggrandizing Xenix line straight down the middle, as though this somehow proves that everything good in Unix/Linux happened there.
The chart shows that Unix is an amazing cross-pollinated pastiche. What it doesn't show is that most of the Linux code was written fresh, not derived from The SCO Group's old x86 code. So proving infringement will be incredibly difficult if not impossible.
This also shows The SCO Group's startling lack of understanding of the open-source community. If code is found to be infringing, thousands of programmers will come out of the woodwork to rewrite it until it isn't.
Hang the Lawyers, Again
Misery loves company. The most miserable idea to come along so far this year was Intuit's decision to use Macrovision's digital rights management software SafeCast on TurboTax. Then somebody had the equally miserable idea to file a class-action suit against Intuit.
Yeah, I'm writing about this again. In our previous issue, I laid out all the reasons why Intuit's implementation was a disservice to its customers and ultimately to itself. At this writing, Intuit continues to be pummeled in the press and in the court of public opinion. The company is working with Macrovision to make the DRM less onerous and trying to salvage what's left of the years of goodwill toward TurboTax. See www.extremetech.com/turbotax for background.
The last thing Intuit needs is a class-action suit. And the last thing we need is a class-action suit. The suit, filed by California-based law firm Stanbury Fishelman, seeks class-action status to cover all U.S. purchasers of TurboTax products for the 2002 tax year. The suit also seeks financial compensation for people who say they were defrauded by Intuit when they purchased TurboTax.
Hauling Intuit into court and making it prove or disprove intent, damages, fraud, and so on is very counterproductive. Meanwhile, people are flocking to H&R Block's TaxCut, switching to Microsoft Money, and looking at just about any alternative to TurboTax. But if you're a TurboTax customer, what do you need right now? A clean, trouble-free install that doesn't interfere with other programs or limit your ability to upgrade your system. The freedom to move the program to your laptop. Customer support treating you like a customer and not a criminal. You don't need your $30 back for damages or some guy telling a clueless jury how much you've suffered because SafeCast wrote to an undocumented sector on your boot track.
Clearly, Intuit has the wrong business model. Turbo Tax should be free, and the company should charge a fee to print or file a return. That would put the ambulance chasers out of work.

HP Expands Unix Server and StorageWorks Portfolios

HP has announced enhancements to its Unix server and HP Storage Works systems portfolios.
Included is a faster HP-UX 11 i operating environment, which now runs on both HP 9000 and HP Integrity servers and includes new features for running high-performance data centers and clustered environments.
A new multi-OS (operating system) version of the HP Virtual Server Environment has more fine-grained control and two allin-one virtualization suites.
Enhanced HP Storage Works Enterprise Virtual Arrays with tiered storage offerings are based on a new class of Fibre Channel drives developed by HP, Hitachi Global Storage Technology and Seagate.
AlphaServer systems feature new, faster processors and price reductions on current models.
"HP innovation builds a broad foundation for customers to choose their own path to becoming an Adaptive Enterprise," said Ann Livermore, executive vice president, Technology Solutions Group, HP.
"For example, HP's extraordinary achievements in Unix with HP-UX have paved the way for us to deliver industry-leading capabilities across multiple operating environments. This enables customers to reduce costs and simplify change through standardization without compromising on agility."
Additionally, HP unveiled enhancements to its VSE for HP-UX 1 Ii, providing more control, high availability and greater partitioning capabilities. HP also plans to bundle its virtualization solutions into two all-in-one VSE solution suites.
HP also introduced HP-UX 1 Ii v2 for HP 9000 and new AlphaServer processors that simplify the transition to Integrity platforms. HP-UX lli v2 offers a common operating system for HP 9000 and HP Integrity servers with data center enhancements, including 128-way support, virtualization capabilities, high availability, disaster tolerance, hybrid clustering and up to a 25 percent performance increase for HP 9000 customers upgrading from HP-UX 1 Ii vl.
HP said it had made available the industry's first storage area network (SAN) arrays to integrate a new class of hybrid disk drives called Fibre Attached Technology Adapted. Developed by HP, Hitachi Global Storage Technology and Seagate, and designed specifically for Fibre Channel arrays, the drive technology, branded as FATA drives by HP, has been integrated into the HP Storage Works Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) family to address the growing need for businesses to cost-effectively store less critical or infrequently accessed information in a more economical fashion.
The HP Storage Works EVA3000 Starter Kit is a 2-gigabyte Fibre Channel SAN array bundle that integrates hardware, management software and specialized services to enable simple and first-time SAN implementation. The EVA3000 Starter Kit provides first-time SAN customers with a fully functional and highly expandable array solution.

Vendor extends patch tools to Linux, Unix

Patch management vendor New Boundary Technologies is expanding the range of its software beyond Windows to answer user demands for cross-platform support that will address vulnerabilities, regardless of where they exist on the network.
Prism Patch Manger 6.3 features support for Red Hat Linux and Solaris, as well as Windows versions, from NT to the latest XP desktop, and Windows Server 2003.
"Usually with larger enterprises you have many different systems so you need to figure out how to manage all of them," says Jasmine Noel, a principal with Ptak, Noel and Associates."It's no good to secure your Microsoft system if you have a Linux or Unix system with a gaping hole."
On top of cross-platform support, New Boundary also is adding an uninstall feature and support for Microsoft Visio and Project. The software also includes new management controls for grouping machines for those users who are not using Active Directory
Users are beginning to recognize that patch management is key to their security goals. Savvy companies are beginning to make patch tools part of a larger process that includes a set of internally developed policies and procedures to ensure known vulnerabilities are resolved before they can be exploited. The result is configuration management, asset management and network management vendors adding patching to their tool suite.
New Boundary - along with Shavlik Technologies, BigFix, PatchLink and other pure-play patch management vendors is finding this domain a crowded one these days. Microsoft is expected to introduce new patch tools later this year, including a free server called Windows Update Services.
New Boundary says its cross-platform support, and support for Microsoft operating systems and applications, gives it an attractive set of tools.
Prism Patch Manager, which works in agent or agent-less mode, supports Red : Hat Linux and Solaris. Its Windows support extends from the operating system into Microsoft applications such as SQL Server, Exchange and Office.
The new rollback feature in 6.3 ensures that any system can be returned to a known and good configuration if problems with a patch arise.
"The rollback was one feature that we were lagging on," says Kim Pearson, CEO of New Boundary "Another key was getting into Linux and Solaris."
Prism also lets users scan their network by IP range, which lets users who do not use Microsoft's Active Directory create groups of machines they can target with specific patch deployments.
The management console for Prism Patch Manager 6.3 also has been upgraded to let administrators manage from one console multiple Prism patch repositories, which is a proprietary database developed by New Boundary.
The software also has been translated into Swedish and Chinese versions.
Prism Patch Manager 6.3 costs $11 per user,per 100 users.

Microsoft to Highlight Unix Services in Windows Server R2

At this week's LinuxWorld conference, Microsoft officials are planning to play up the Windows-Unix interoperability and cross-platform application-portability strategies that will be enabled Microsoft's pending Windows Server 2003 R2 operating system release.

Bill Hilf, the head of Microsoft's Linux lab, is planning to talk up during his LinuxWorld session on Wednesday the elements of Microsoft's Services for Unix subsystem that the company is integrating into R2. Hilf tipped his hand during a Q&A with Slashdot readers posted to the Slashdot Web site on Monday.
"I can confirm that the next-generation of several components of Services for Unix are being integrated into Windows Server 2003 R2. The Network File System (NFS) client, NFS Server, User/Name Mapping, Telnet Server & Client, Password Sync and NIS Server components of Services for Unix are all present in the Windows Server 2003 R2 builds," said Hilf, in response to one of the Slashdot questioners. "In addition, a revamped POSIX subsystem, the 'Subsystem for Unix-based Applications' or 'SUA' is also available as an optional install in R2.

"Integrating this functionality in Windows Server 2003 R2 provides native support of cross-platform management tools, Windows/Unix interoperability and Unix to Windows application portability. This is a big help for many of the customers I talk to and something I will demonstrate at my LinuxWorld session this
R2 is a fairly minor version of Windows Server, built on the recently released Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1) code base. R2 integrates a number of the myriad Windows Server 2003 feature packs that Microsoft has shipped since April 2003, plus adds a few new features. Among the new features slated for inclusion in R2: a new file migration toolkit; simple-SAN management tools; a new storage-resource-management subsystem (code-named "Corral") and centralized file and print management facilities.

The R2 release is slated to ship by the end of calendar 2005.

Microsoft officials have said to expect R2 to ship with three UNIX interoperability components, specifically, Microsoft Services for NFS, the SUA subsystem, and Identity Management for Unix subsystem.

According to Microsoft, Microsoft Services for NFS component requires no software other than what will ship as part of Windows Server 2003 R2. The SUA subsystem requires additional components to be installed on Windows Server 2003 R2 and on the Unix servers and clients respectively, the company has said.