Linux Solutions

Yesterday, after years of legal fighting against Linux, the SCO Group Inc. has had the tables turned and been ordered to pay $2.55 million to Novell for collecting Unix Licensing revenue from Sun Microsystems Inc. that it wasn’t entitled to collect.

When the battle started in 2003, SCO was intent on ensuring companies like IBM, Novell Inc and others would pay them large amounts of money for alleged infringements on SCO-owned Unix code. This 43-page decision, made by District Court Judge Dale A. Kimball in Salt Lake City, ruled that the money was owed to Novell under an arrangement made by SCO’s predecessor, the former Santa Cruz Operation, which was later bought over by Caldera International Inc. and became the SCO Group.

In the 1980s Novell acquired the Unix systems business of AT&T Corp. Novell broke up and sold off its Unix properties in 1994 and 1995, including a deal with the former Santa Cruz Operation.

Kimball’s ruling found that SCO owes $2.55 million to Novell through a 1995 Unix purchase agreement. In 1995, the Santa Cruz Operation didn’t have enough cash to buy all of Novell’s Unix business, so as part of the deal, Novell allowed the sale to take place on the condition that Novell would receive 100 percent of the royalties for Unix System V Release X (SVRX, all versions) licenses. Any revenue was to collected and passed on to Novell, minus a 5 percent admin fee that was returned by Novell.

The court ruled that Novell were owed the $2.55 million after a Unix licensing deal made by SCO with Sun Microsystems was deemed unlawful.

SCO have made an un-attributed statement following Kimball’s ruling, who believe that it does not owe money to Novell.

“We are reviewing today’s ruling by Judge Dale Kimball with our counsel and will be assessing the next steps over the coming days and weeks.

“This ruling is an important step in our ability to pursue the appeals to try to get all of our claims heard by a jury as soon as possible. We are pleased, however, that the court agreed that Novell is not entitled to anywhere near the more than $20 million it was seeking. Importantly, the court ruled that Novell has no right to any royalties from UnixWare or OpenServer sales by SCO, which is where the bulk of SCO’s revenue is earned.

”We continue to disagree with the premise of this trial and believe that Novell is not owed anything, but that they have interfered with SCO’s UNIX rights.”

Novell has not commented on the ruling thus far.

This part of the five-year legal battle began in September but stalled when SCO filed for bankruptcy protection while the company reorganised. In August, Kimball undercut much of SCO’s case in a ruling that said Novell was the rightful owner of the Unix and UnixWare copyrights. That earlier decision has led to this ruling, after the court went on to determine how much SCO had to pay Novell for Unix licensing revenue it incorrectly received from Sun Microsystems. The courts found that SCO didn’t have to repay Novell for any licensing revenue from Microsoft Corp.

A few months after SCO filed its bankruptcy application, in February, SCO unveiled plans to take the company private.

SCO has been causing a stir since its 2003 lawsuit against IBM, when it alleged that IBM improperly contributed some of SCO’s Unix intellectual property for use in Linux. SCO then took it upon themselves top sue Novell, claiming that the company had falsely claimed to own the legal rights to Unix.

While Linux continues to grow in popularity we thought it might be interesting to take a look at the man who has changed the operating system landscape forever, the man who created the Linux Kernel and the man who so many think has Microsoft of the run. Step forward Linus Benedict Torvalds!

Linus Benedict Torvalds was born in Helsinki, Finland in 1969 and while there is some debate about the connection between his first name Linus and Linux, the truth is that there is no relevance. He was actually named after a Noble Prize winner, Linus Pauling!

It will come as no surprise to those who have come across Torvalds to learn that he studied computer science at the University of Helsinki between 1988 and 1996 where he produced his thesis entitled Linux : A Portable Operating System and became heavily involved in choosing the standard binary format for Linux and Unix. This was really the start of his close relationship with Linux something which has pushed him to the forefront of the industry where he still holds a very high position with regards to the ongoing development of the operating system.

While Torvalds is not one who courts the press, the very fact that just over 2% of the current Linux Kernel code is still his original coding is a testament to his skill and foresight. This may not sound like an awful lot on the surface but when you consider the amount of people who are now working on the open source system and the millions of work hours which have been spent on developing the Kernel further, it really is an amazing achievement.

It is difficult to think of Linux without Torvalds as many still look back to the days when he created his own Operating System for his Sinclair QL – an event which many believe gave him the will and determination to succeed in challenging the big players like Microsoft Windows.

As the popularity of the Linux operating system began to grow, it soon became obvious that there would need to be some form of central point to ensure the code was developed in the correct fashion, and all source code made available to the masses. The merger of Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and the Free Standards Group (FSG) brought about the Linux Foundation. So what is the role of the Foundation?

In simple terms the Linux Foundation promote, protect and standardise use of the Linux source code in order that the code is able to compete with commercial competitors. While this is something of a simplified version of their full role, there is a lot more work goes on behind the scenes.

The Linux Foundation hold an annual “get together” at which point those involved in the Linux environment will sit down and chat about their thoughts and hopes for the future. These brain storming sessions, together with the array of speeches by prominent players in the industry, have fostered something of a Linux community, a community which has worked closely for some years (even prior to the merger which formed the Foundation).

The Foundation, in unison with the Foundation members, has also put together a massive database of devices which are compatible with the Linux operating system. This service gives members the chance to not only update comments on certain products but also see at a glance which devices are compatible with Linux.

The Linux Foundation is a major part of the Linux movement and with the support of major players such as Red Hat they are now central to the progression of the industry. It will be interesting to see if the commercial profile of the Foundation, and the code itself, change as the popularity of Linux continues to grow.

While Linux is not the only Open Source operating code in the market place, it is by far and away the most successful of any Open Source code there has ever been. As the likes of Wordpress and JAVA continue to expand their spread in the commercial markets, the market for Linux based services and applications literally runs into billions of dollars a year. So will it ever be rivalled?

It is difficult to see how any new Open Source operating code could even manage to register on the radar with Microsoft and Linux dominating the markets, although the wider picture may not be as clear cut. We are seeing a massive growth in mobile communications, something which has seen JAVA pushed heavily to the fore. The recent announcement that Sun Microsystems will be releasing the total JAVA base code to the Open Source arena has not only increased the profile of JAVA but is sure to see increased use in the market place.

Content Management Systems (CMS) is another market which has shown great progress over the years, with the likes of Wordpress leading the field (although it has to be said there is a field of many!). However, like most Open Source codes, Wordpress does have drawbacks, it does have limitations and there is a feeling that these limitations may soon be “found out”.

The major benefit for Linux is the fact that the more machines that use the code, the more demand for Linux based software and the more people “join the party”. Like Microsoft’s impressive growth over the years, the more people that depend on you at an early stage (i.e. the operating system level) the more chance you have of expanding and pushing your markets forward.

Will we see success stories such as Linux again? Never say never in the world of computing, because none of us know what is around the corner!

A quick search for Linux on Google will show you that there are literally hundreds of millions of pages dedicated to the open source code which is becoming so large a part of our everyday lives. While Linux does not receive the recognition of perhaps better known operating systems, it is something without which many of our systems today could not operate. We hereby list a number of areas of industry which have been touched by Linux :-

In Flight Entertainment

Virgin Airlines are a heavy user of the Linux operating system which is used to control passenger in flight entertainment, computing and music services. While it was not the first choice of the airline it soon became apparent that it offers some what more flexibility than a number of competing codes.

Film Animation

It will perhaps surprise many that a lot of the leading animation companies actually use Linux operating systems for their animation networks. It has been shown to be very reliable, quick and scalable – meaning that the size and depth of the users of the network can be increased with very little extra work. In an industry where computers need to react at lightening quick pace to ensure motion shots look correct, it seems that Linux has no competitor at the moment.

Wikipedia

Many surfers will also be interested to know that one of the open source giants, Wikipedia, actually uses a version of the Linux operating system. The Wikipedia system holds literally hundreds of millions of pages and it seems very apt that the largest open source information exchange should use the most popular open source operating system!

This is just a snap shot of some of the areas of industry which Linux has touched and while we may not always be aware of its existence, it really is everywhere around us.

While there are many open source programming codes in the open market, Linux is one of the more popular options in the industry and one which has seen an ever increasing number of uses. The programming code is flexible, easy to use and the amount of help and assistance online is probably second to none, but why is it so successful? Has the open source situation really made a difference?

The Linux code can be traced directly back to 1991 but there are examples of the code being used prior to this in differing forms. Since the very early days the code has been open source giving more and more people the opportunity to create their own Linux based products and help each other to push the code to another level. While normally programmers would be working against each other to bring new and exciting products to the market there has been much team working in pushing Linux to where it is today.

Many people will not be aware but Linux is the operating system for such well known products as the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3, not to mention an array of other arcade gaming systems. While there are few systems which have actually suffered from their open source status, Linux seems to have benefited from this combined approach more than most. Even now we are seeing daily announcements of Linux based mobile phone gaming and communications systems, a market which is sure to grow and grow.

Quite where Linux is heading in the future is unsure because the flexibility that if offers over many other programming codes will always attract the major players of the industry. Even though many none computing people will have heard of the Windows operating system, they will not have a clue what Linux is, but the chances are that they will encounter a Linux system on a daily basis.

The History of LINUX

Linux is a very well known operating system for the computer. This operating system lies on the Unix family and it can be said that LINUX is graphical user interface or GUI version of the Unix. The kernel used in the Linux operating system is of the monolithic format. The Linux is one of the best examples among the software family that are available for the free circulation. Now it should be noted that this is an open source code type of software and one can modify and develop the source code at own wish. One can redistribute the Linux softwares if they want.

The kernel of Linux was first out for the first time to the civic on 17th of September 1991. The kernel was created for computers based on the Intel x86 computer architecture. The Linux kernel was amplified with the system utilities and the libraries from the well-known GNU project to generate the utilizable operating system for the computers that led to a substitute term called the ‘GNU’ or the ‘Linux’. Linux is enclosed for the different utilizations in the Linux distributions that contain the sometimes-modified kernel with the diversity of the other ‘software packages’ modified for the special necessities.

Mainly known for its utilizations in the servers, Linux is carried with help by the corporations like the International Business Machines, Red Hat, Oracle Corporation, Dell, Novell, Hewlett-Packard, and also by the Sun Microsystems. It is utilized as the operating system for the wide diversity of the computer hardware, like the desktop computers, video game systems like the PlayStation 2 or the PlayStation3, the supercomputers, some of the arcade games, and most importantly the entrenched devices, like the mobile phones and the routers.

Let us come to the features of the Linux distribution now. The Linux distribution or Linux sharing, frequently simply the ‘distribution’ or the ‘DISTRO’, is an associate of the family of the LINUX, which are the computer operating system like the Unix as mentioned earlier. These systems are developed from the kernels of Linux and mixed with the other packages, like the ‘X Window’ scheme and the software from the mentioned ‘GNU project’. The sharing is optimized for size tends to exploit more of the dense options like the uclibc, the busybox, or the dietlibc.
Since the majority of the kernels and the supporting correspondences are the free software or the open sourced software, the ‘Linux distributions’ have used a very broad range of the forms.

The distributions range from the completely attributed desktop computers and the operating systems for the servers to the smallest environments, like the availability for the utilization in the entrenched systems or for the booting from the floppies. Away from some custom software, like the installers or the different configuration tools, a ‘DISTRO’ merely refers to the exact range of the functions married with the predominantly compiled kernel, like the ‘out-of-the-box’ potential of it, convenes most of the requirements of its exact ‘end-user base’.

It should be noted that there are over three hundreds of the ‘Linux distribution projects’ in active build up range currently, continuously modifying and improving by the respective sharing system of them. You can differentiate between the commercially sponsored Linux distributions, like the SUSE Linux (sponsored by the Novell), Mandriva Linux, Ubuntu Linux (sponsored by the Canonical Ltd.), and the Fedora Linux (sponsored by the Red Hat) and the distinctive ‘community distributions’ like the Gentoo and the Debian. The actions for the assembling and the testing the sharing previous to the release lean to suit more complicated the superior the ‘user base’ is.

Now this is the time know the little bit of the ‘user interface’ of the Linux. Let me tell you the components that can control the Linux. The components are the different ‘command line interface’ or simply the CLI that are based on text, the ‘graphical user interface’ or simply the GUI, which is the default for any desktop as usual, and of course through the controls on the gadget itself. The last component is utilized in the entrenched gadgets.
There is a large variety of Linux interfaces are available for the desktop computers. But among all of the interfaces GNOME, Xfce, and KDE are the most popular among the Linux users. Mentioned and the other famous user interfaces generally run on the ‘X Window Scheme’ (or X), that offers the network clearness, allowing the graphical applications executing on a machine to be shown and handled from another.

The uses of Linux are very much versatile in these days. The Linux is being used in the fields of desktop computers, super computers, servers, embedded devices, market shares and the up stakes. Basically this is a very little overview on the Linux within a very short space. You can find many other features and information regarding the LINUX any time.