IDG News Service —
1. "Skype Issues May Continue Through Friday,"
CIO.com, August 17
Millions of Skype customers remained without VOIP service Friday as a massive outage went into its second day. The service outage was caused by "a deficiency in an algorithm within Skype networking software," the company said, ruling out as possible culprits the planned maintenance of its Web-based payment service on Wednesday or a cyberattack. The company had said it would restore service within 12 to 24 hours, but it was quickly running out of time to meet that pledge as the week wound down. Business users were particularly vexed by the problem, according to analysts and those posting messages on discussion forums and the like.
2. "Novell Won't Pursue Unix Copyrights,"
PC World, August 15
"SCO to Partners, Customers: It's Business as Usual,"
LinuxWorld, August 16
The big news of last week, which hit after the installment of the Top 10 had been posted, continues into this week with fallout from the federal court ruling that Novell does in fact own Unix copyrights that SCO tried to claim it owned. The copyrights were the basis for SCO's still ongoing Linux patent-infringement lawsuit against IBM. Even though it prevailed, Novell says it doesn't have any interest in pushing its own copyright-infringement claims on SCO. There are still claims that will go to trial next month, including payments SCO got from Microsoft and Sun for Unix licenses. Meanwhile, SCO CEO and President Darl McBride said in a letter filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this week that SCO intends to keep doing business as usual and that the ruling has no effect on its ability to continue to develop and support UnixWare and OpenServer. Although the issue is more likely to be whether, and how quickly, customers are willing to be forgiving.
3. "Update: IBM Extends Support for Sun's Solaris,"
CIO.com August 17
IBM will support Sun's Solaris in more of its x86 servers and blades, the rivals announced this week. IBM wants to offer a bigger range of operating systems and Sun wants Solaris to be on more hardware, so the match was made. Sun has for a while now been promoting Solaris as an alternative to Linux, but hasn't gotten much support in that effort from server vendors. IBM has historically been out in front promoting Linux, so the deal is a big move all the way around. IBM will distribute and resell Solaris and Sun will offer support for the OS, under terms of the agreement.
