Growth of radicalism within Open Source - SCO under attack again

Date: November 24, 2004
Source: mi2g Intelligence Unit

The main SCO Group web site (sco.com) has been intermittently accessible on Tuesday and Wednesday, having been down on Monday, displaying characteristic patterns seen during a protracted Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Several related domains have also been off - and on-line over the last 72 hours.

The SCO Group is at odds with parts of the Open Source community and is emonised regularly by some members within that global fraternity. SCO affirms that source code used in the Linux kernel violates its intellectual property rights, which it owns through Unix.

Reliable sources in the Open Source community have confirmed to the mi2g Intelligence Unit that the SCO DDoS attack is linked to the increasingly radical but small set of members of the Open Source community, who are quite prepared to take the law into their hands and cause reputational damage to those corporations who do not fit the agenda of the Linux and Open Source movement completely.

"The use of the internet as a medium for protest is growing as special interest groups increasingly take the law into their hands to promote a particular ideal over another without thinking long term about the consequences. This has happened with anti-globalisation protestors, Islamist radicals, animal-rights campaigners and now within the Open Source community." said DK Matai, Executive Chairman, mi2g. "We have some sympathy for SCO because we have first hand experience of facing the wrath of the Open Source community in recent weeks much as love them and are in agreement with their overall philosophy."

The main SCO Group web site is presently back online while the alternate site thescogroup.com ( thescogroup.com), created in February of this year, came back online earlier. Thescogroup.com domain was launched as an alternative URL during the MyDoom-related DDoS attacks against SCO in Q1 of this year. The protracted DDoS attacks successfully took down the SCO.com web site for nearly a month and also targeted Microsoft.com without sustained success.

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