Sunday, February 01, 2004

myDoom Hits it's target

Well, it seems like the myDoom virus that has been spreading like wildfire had hit it's target. Rueters has the story on their site, as do countless other news sources.

MyDoom Net Worm Scores Hit, Knocks Out SCO Site

This virus was responsible for 10% of all emails on the internet last week. Which is just an amazing number. SCOs CEO Darl McBride is offering an reward for information that leads to the arrest of the person or persons that are responsible for writing this virus. Though I don't think anyone is going to come forward. What SCO did with it's IP (Intellectual Property) lawsuit against Linux and IBM struck at the core of a very tightknit and powerful community. Some of the best programmers in the world work on and write code for Linux. I also find it interesting that SCO itself had a Linux program going and it stopped work on that after it had sold Microsoft rights to Unix. Humm, a big influx of money from Microsoft and then SCO stops their Linux program and starts going after anyone else that is working on linux.

I can't condone whoever wrote this virus, even if the intentions are good, this is causing more work to an already over worked IT staff. And in the end the people that will be affected by it have no idea about the SCO/Linux controversy. However, the person(s) that wrote this virus probably don't have all the money that a big corporation does to fight this out in the court system for years and years. I can see both sides of the story. I can't condemn them either. The DoS attack that they are launching is in essense a digital version of a protest. I know that not everyone sees it that way. But what is the differents between the Grocery Strike here in CA. where the striking employees were physically preventing the deliever trucks and customers from entering the parking lot. They are simply digitally not letting customers get to the web store front of SCOs parking lot.

At the root of this controversy is one word "Monopoly". (No not the board game) There is a good chance that if SCO wins this suit, that microsoft will have a Monopoly on the Intel based computing operating systems. Now don't get me wrong, I am not anti-Microsoft, in fact I make my leaving writing in microsoft's C#. However I do think that computing needs are too diverse for one company to be the end all be all. I want to be able to have different operating system running on my machine. I also think that there are some computing tasks that Linux is the only platform I would choose. Also did the government split of Bell because it had a Monpoly of the phone/communication systems? How is this any different then that?

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