Current sailing conditions for Linux aren’t so smooth
OK, the verdict is in. Or rather, it isn’t. Last week I posed a trivial technical terminology question: Do applications run “on” operating systems (my esteemed editor, Mr. Dix, says this is correct) or do they run “under” them (that is my choice).
Well, dear reader, the vote split roughly 50-50.
Perhaps the most complex response came from reader Bob Hayes: “I must confess that I tend to use ‘on’ and ‘in,’ but rarely ‘under’ to describe my applications’ running habits (that is, ‘I’m running Entourage on Mac OS X right now,’ but ‘I’ve used programs in Classic’ in the past.) So, ‘in,’ ‘on’ and ‘under’ all seem to be valid states.”
Bob continued: “There’s a mnemonic I remember from school that a preposition is anywhere a cat can go, but apparently a preposition is also anywhere an application can run. I’ve heard of applications running ‘behind,’ ‘over,’ ‘with’ and even ‘through’ other applications. Hmmm.”
So now that we’ve totally failed to reach a verdict about that, we’ll move on to more important cases.
Last week my esteemed editor penned his take on the state of Linux after a visit to the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in Boston. Mr. Dix’s verdict? The title of his editorial said it all: “Linux: Ready, willing and able.”
Despite that thumbs up, the current sailing conditions for Linux aren’t so smooth. As the editorial noted, “the most troubling questions about Linux aren’t technical, but legal in nature.”
Indeed, just last week Judge Dale Kimball for the District of Utah denied IBM’s motions to dismiss and for partial summary judgment in The SCO Group’s $3 billion lawsuit against it over alleged copyright infringement of Unix code owned by SCO.
The judge commented that “it is astonishing that SCO has not offered any competent evidence to create a disputed fact regarding whether IBM has infringed SCO’s alleged copyrights through IBM’s Linux activities.”
Despite that, and a stack of other issues in the way SCO has acted in the case, the judge was unwilling to grant summary judgment. I am not a lawyer nor do I play one on television, so the reasoning behind denial seems a little arcane to me. As far as I can understand, it is apparently because the judge does not want to risk seeing his final ruling reversed on appeal, something that is, so I understand, a terribly embarrassing thing for a judge.
But it is not just SCO creating fear, uncertainty and doubt. Just consider the heavy media coverage of a study presented at the recent RSA Conference that rendered a surprising verdict: Windows is more secure than Linux .
The researchers, Richard Ford, a computer science professor at the Florida Institute of Technology, and Herbert Thompson, director of security research and training at security company Security Innovation, compared Windows Server 2003 with Red Hat Enterprise Server 3.
Unfortunately, the report won’t be publicly available until the middle of March, but according to the The Seattle Times report, the research considered a range of factors that “included the number of reported vulnerabilities and their severity, as well as the number of patches issued and days of risk – the period from when a vulnerability is first reported to when a patch is issued.”
What I can find out about the report’s conclusions doesn’t sound conclusive. But it’s weird that so many media outlets would cover the story so profoundly despite the report being vaporware. Why delay releasing the report? Given the predictable interest in its conclusions, it seems odd that they would. The jury is out until the report is released.
