Re: [A-List] Goodbye Windows

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

The People's Daily writes:

Computer with Chinese CPU just sold at US$250
At the"Seminar to inaugurate China's independent national computer
industry", Hong Kong's Culturecom Holdings Ltd. announced its brand-new
embedded universal system technology structure and "V-dragon Midori embedded
technology industrial standard". The standard, with its wholly Chinese owned
intellectual property, will lower the computer chip price to US$20 to 35.
The price of desktop computer using the chip will drop to US$ 200 to US$250.

-----

I came across a prominent article on this outfit in a recent Financial
Times. I didn't forward it at the time because its significance did not
register. Nevertheless, the emphasis given by the People's Daily on the
"wholly Chinese owned intellectual property" suggests potential disputes in
the making, as any US administration will find it in at least some of its
interests to back SCO's grab attempt as part of a more widely conceived
notion of national security. This, I think, deserves much closer scrutiny.


SCO to enforce its Linux intellectual property rights
Company wants tighter control
InfoWorld
(http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/01/23/030123hnproperty_1.html)
By  Juan Carlos Perez ,  Stephen Lawson
January 23, 2003

MIAMI -- 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 Wednesday's statement, Lindon, Utah-based SCO claims it is "the majority
owner of Unix intellectual property" and that although Linux is an open
source software, "it shares philosophy, architecture and APIs (application
programming interfaces) with Unix." Thus, SCO's licensing push, which
involves launching new licensing programs, will be geared towards making
sure that users and vendors combine Linux and Unix technology
"legitimately," the statement said.

The company's Chief Executive Officer Darl McBride was quoted in the
statement as saying that "SCO owns much of the core Unix intellectual
property, and has full rights to license this technology and enforce the
associated patents and copyrights."

"In some cases, people may have unknowingly assumed (our intellectual
property) was in the public domain," Sontag said, adding that it is SCO's
intention to make its licensing programs "reasonable."

SCO, formerly known as Caldera International, claims its Unix patents,
copyrights and core technology date from 1969 when Bell Laboratories created
the Unix source code.

The new licensing division, called SCOsource, will be aided in its efforts
by Boies and his law firm Boies, Schiller and Flexner. Boies gained
notoriety in the IT world when he served as special trial counsel for the
U.S. Department of Justice in its antitrust suit against Microsoft. He was
front and center in the effort that culminated with the historic judicial
decision in November 1999 that Microsoft had abused its monopoly power in
the market for PC operating systems.

The first new licensing program launched by the licensing division is the
SCO System V for Linux, which will provide access to SCO's Unix System
Shared Libraries for use with Linux to application developers, operating
system vendors, end users and hardware and services providers, SCO said.
Previously, these Unix libraries couldn't be used outside of the SCO operati
ng systems, but now licensees will be able to license the entire SCO
operating systems to use these libraries, SCO said. Other SCO licensing
programs are in the works.