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Here's an interesting and insightful article on patents, and why a well-stocked patent portfolio is so dangerous. It uses the SCO vs. IBM case and Unisys as examples, but the concepts are true of all large businesses.

Here's the full story.

C|Net is carrying an interview with Sterling Ball, CEO of Ernie Ball, one of the leading guitar manufacturers in the world. A couple years ago, Ernia Ball made headlines by being one of the first major companies to completely switch away from Microsoft, focusing mostly on Linux and other free software.

This interview discusses what caused them to switch, how they've faired, and some of his thoughts on the future.

I want to mention that this interview is quite educational (you rarely hear a CEO speak this way), and definitely worth taking the time to read.

Here's the full interview.

A new article on The Inquirer takes a look at SuSE/IBM's recent CC Enterprise Assurance certification, and compares/contrasts it with Red Hat/Oracle's similar attempt at certification.



However, the article goes on to further discuss the value of these certifications, pointing out that:

As we've recently seen, these certifications don't guarantee that these platforms are secure. These Microsoft "certified" operating systems have just been compromised on a massive international scale by the "LoveSAN" or "MSBlaster" worm. Microsoft has had to front-end its "WindowsUpdate" site with about 15,000 Akamai servers this weekend (and very ironically, those Akamai servers are all running Linux). This vulnerability is even suspected as the root cause of Thursday night's extensive power blackout throughout the Northeast and Upper Midwest US and extending into Canada, as this SecurityFocus posting posits. At this juncture, one might really wonder how much the DoD formal certifications are actually worth, in terms of effective IT infrastructure security.

It also goes on to discuss recent U.S. DoD problems relating to Linux vs. Microsoft, and even political bias against Europen vendors. Overal, a very good read.



Full story

I just read an article discussing the new Active Directory features of Samba 3 (which just reached RC1). In short, the article discusses pros and cons of migrating to Samba 3 in various scenarios. This is a must read for anyone managing file and print servers for Windows.

Full story

There's a fairly interesting article on NewsFactor about making the pitch for Linux and other Free/Open Source Software to corporations. Because FOSS enthusiasts understand and recognize the value of open source code, they tend to base their sales pitches on that as well. However, in an environment (aka Microsoft customers) where source cose access is a completely alien concept, this will only turn off and/or confuse the managers.

It goes on to state that in recent years, as more corporate entities themselves get involves in Linux (Red Hat, SuSE, etc.), pushing source code access has taken a back seat to simply pushing it's reliability and performance.

Pretty good read, overall. Here's the full story

Here are a couple intersting articles on wireless networking over on the O'Reilly Network.

First up is "When Is 54 Not Equal to 54?", which provides an examination of the 802.11 a, b, and g protocols, and explains why you may not be getting the advertised speed.

Second is " Dispelling the Myth of Wireless Security", which, obviously, deals with wireless security, and offers tips to test the strength of your network's security and encryption.

Yes, I know there've been a bunch of posts about this lately, but it's been dominating the news. Here's a couple more tidbits.



OSDL has released a Q&A paper on the SCO Lawsuite:

In his paper, Rosen identifies some of the legal issues raised by the SCO Group's claims as they relate to Linux development and usage. He does not offer legal advice, but rather frames some of the key questions that companies should ask their own counsel about their use of Linux. He points out that SCO has a long way to go before it can assert broad intellectual property claims against an operating system that was written by thousands of open source programmers worldwide.

The press release can be found here, and the actuall paper can be found here.



Also, in the latest (and possibly strangest yet) turn of events, SCO is apparently arguing that U.S. copyright law invalidates the GPL. Supposedly, since the copyright law only permits one backup copy for "fair use," and the GPL is copyright, then the GPL cannot grant permission to make more than one backup copy because it is superceeded by copyright law. Umm... More information can be found in the Inquirer article.