Daniel Osburn

Unix software vendor SCO, struggling through bankruptcy and a Unix copyright trial involving Novell, has fired president and CEO Darl McBride. McBride had been CEO and president of SCO since June 2002. The move and a restructuring come after an operations and cost analysis performed by Edward Cahn, SCO's Chapter 11 Trustee. SCO "has eliminated the Chief Executive Officer and President positions and consequently terminated Darl McBride," the company reported last week in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Since the CEO position was eliminated, the SCO management team now consists of COO Jeff Hunsaker, CFO Ken Nielsen and general counsel Ryan Tibbitts. A "modest reduction in SCO's workforce" and other changes will help improve SCO's financial position, the company says. The SEC filing says these three executives "will continue to work closely with the Chapter 11 Trustee and his advisors to implement the restructuring plan, move the intellectual property litigation [against Novell] forward … and emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy." SCO says it will finalize details of the restructuring and reach "cash flow breakeven for core operations" within a month. SCO is attempting to raise additional funding and sell "non-core assets." "These actions, while difficult, are essential to SCO becoming a more agile and efficient company, not just for this year, but for years to come," Hunsaker says in the SEC filing. "This restructuring plan reinforces SCO's ability to continue to sell and support its products while servicing the needs of our customers and partners on a worldwide basis through the stabilization of our financial situation." SCO filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Sept. 14, 2008. The company is also involved in an ongoing legal battle against competitor Novell over the rights to Unix technology. As a result, Novell and SCO are heading to a trial. In 2007, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that Novell was the owner of Unix and UnixWare copyrights, but that decision was http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/082409-sco-unix-copyright-decision... ">overturned in August of this year.

In 2003, SCO attempted to sue IBM for $1 billion in another Unix-related matter. Perhaps tellingly, last week's filing with the SEC says that SCO plans to "pursue litigation against, among others, IBM and Novell." Follow Jon Brodkin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jbrodkin The case was closed in 2007 but may be reopened after SCO emerges from bankruptcy.

Opera Software today released the beta of Opera Unite, a platform for authoring peer-to-peer (P2P) and Web server-based applications that it's promised will reinvent the Web. Opera 10 launched in final form more than a month ago. In June, Opera touted Unite as a collaborative technology that would "enable every single computer to be a two-way street on the Internet." Four months ago, Opera delivered an alpha version of Unite with a preliminary edition of Opera 10, its next-generation browser.

Today, Opera delivered the Unite beta embedded in the preview of Opera 10.10. It's not given up on the idea that Unite will dramatically change the Internet. "We invite developers all over the world to use their creativity and imagination to push the boundaries of what is possible with Opera Unite," Jon von Tetzchner, Opera's CEO, said in a statement Wednesday. "We are moving closer to our goal of reinventing the Web." Opera's pitching Unite to developers, who it hopes will come up with new applications and Web-based services for sharing, collaboration and social networking. That last turns any Unite-equipped computer into a server, letting users host an already-created Web site via a special URL that Opera assigns. The beta of Unite includes a half-dozen Opera-made services that include file sharing, a media player, photo sharing, a Facebook-style "wall" dubbed "Fridge" where users can leave notes and a Web server. So far, Opera has had little luck in convincing developers to commit time and resources to crafting Unite applications and services. The most popular third-party Unite application is a music-streaming service, which has been downloaded approximately 12,000 times. Of the 21 Unite applications now available , 10 come from Opera itself.

Some security experts, however, have questioned Unite's security and wondered whether it was smart to put a Web server on every desktop. "Bad guys always need Web servers," SecureWorks research Don Jackson told IDG News last June . "Anything that runs a Web server is prone to attack." Although Opera 10 is needed to run Unite and its peer-to-peer (P2P) and server-style services, any browser can access the shared content. According to the most recent data from Web metrics company Net Applications, Opera accounted for just 2.2% of all browsers used last month. Although Opera has led development of some browser features - it was the first major Web browser to institute tabs, for instance - the program's share of the desktop market has remained small. Google's Chrome, which has been available for just over a year and only on Windows, held a 3.2% share in September. That case appeared to near a resolution last week when the EU said it had asked for and obtained changes to Microsoft's proposed "ballot screen," which will let European users of Windows to choose which browser they install on their PCs. Opera Unite is available with Opera 10.10, which can be downloaded for Windows, Mac and Linux from the Opera site. The company has received more attention lately as the instigator of the complaint against Microsoft that led European Union (EU) antitrust regulators to charge the U.S. firm with illegally bundling its Internet Explorer with Windows.

Google's Gmail and Yahoo's Mail were also targeted by a large-scale phishing attack, perhaps the same one that harvested at least 10,000 passwords from Microsoft's Windows Live Hotmail, according to a report by the BBC. Microsoft , for its part, said late yesterday that it had blocked all hijacked Hotmail accounts, and offered tools to help users who had lost control of their e-mail. The BBC also said it has seen a list of some 20,000 hijacked e-mail accounts; the list included accounts from Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL, Comcast and EarthLink. Gmail was the target of what Google called a large-scale phishing campaign, the company told the BBC . "We recently became aware of an industry-wide phishing scheme through which hackers gained user credentials for Web-based mail accounts including Gmail accounts," a Google spokesperson told the news network. The latter two are major U.S. Internet service providers. "As soon as we learned of the attack, we forced password resets on the affected accounts," the Google spokesperson also told the BBC. "We will continue to force password resets on additional accounts when we become aware of them." Neither Google's or Yahoo's U.S. representatives responded to e-mails from Computerworld seeking confirmation that their Gmail and Yahoo Mail services were targeted by phishers, or answers to questions about how many accounts had been compromised and what the firms are doing to help users.

Late Monday, Microsoft said it was blocking access to all the accounts whose details had been posted on the Web last week. "We are taking measures to block access to all of the accounts that were exposed and have resources in place to help those users reclaim their accounts," the company said on its Windows Live blog . Microsoft posted an online form where users who have been locked out of their accounts can verify their identity and reclaim control, and also pointed users to a support page from October 2008 that spells out steps users can take if they think their accounts have been hijacked. Neowin.net, the site that first reported the Hotmail account hijacking early Monday, today added that it had seen the same list of compromised accounts as the BBC. "Neowin can today reveal that more lists are circulating with genuine account information and that over 20,000 accounts have now been compromised," said the Windows enthusiast site . "[The] new list contains e-mail accounts for Gmail, Yahoo, Comcast, EarthLink and other third-party popular Web mail services." Microsoft has acknowledged that log-on credentials for "several thousand" Hotmail accounts had been obtained by criminals, probably through a phishing attack that had duped users into divulging their usernames and passwords. After a slump earlier this year, phishing attacks are on the upswing, according to the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG). Its most recent data - for the first half of 2009 ( download PDF ) - noted that the number of unique phishing-oriented Web sites had surged to nearly 50,000 in June, the largest number since April 2007 and the second-highest total since the industry association started keeping records. Yesterday, Dave Jevans, the chairman of APWG, called the Hotmail phishing attack one of the largest ever, but cautioned that the usernames and passwords may have been harvested over several months, and not by a single, defined attack.

Eight months after announcing they would make their virtualization wares interoperable, Microsoft and Red Hat delivered the goods Wednesday on their first major collaboration. Evans emphasized there was no financial arrangement, patent licensing or other deals. "It is straightforward interoperability testing," he said, hinting at other deals Microsoft has cut with Sun and Novell. The two companies announced they have completed testing and validation and that they now fully support virtualization environments that combine Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4. "It was a fairly big deal [in February 2009], there had never been an interoperability agreement between Microsoft and Red Hat," said Mike Evans, vice president of corporate development for Red Hat.

But cooperation on the virtualization front has become the order of the day as virtualization has established itself as an integral part of data centers. Red Hat already supports VMware, while Microsoft has a support deal with Novell and its Suse Linux platform. The work by the duo helps expand support on both platforms. In July, Microsoft shocked the industry by contributing virtualization device drivers to the Linux kernel. Microsoft's Mike Neil, general manager of Windows Server and server virtualization, said in a blog post that the cooperation goes beyond the operating system and both companies "have select applications that would receive technical support when running on certified server virtualization software." Neil said the Microsoft applications include BizTalk Server, Exchange Server, SharePoint server and others.

The completed certifications include: Validation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 using the Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor with Windows Server 2003, 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 guests; and certification of host platforms running Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V,  Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, 5.3 and 5.4 guests. On the Red Hat side, users can run JBoss Enterprise Middleware within a virtual machine guest on Hyper-V and receive coordinated technical support. Microsoft customers without agreements can purchase support per incident. Evans said the agreement grants support to any customer with a valid Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription, while Microsoft customers with support agreements for Windows Server 2008 are eligible for support. Evans said Red Hat is not discussing how it will support Windows Server 2008 guests within its management tools.

Red Hat also will ship a stand-alone hypervisor called Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor that will also support Windows guests. He said there would be more information on that at year-end when Red Hat ships Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager, a set of management tools for desktops and servers. Microsoft supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 4.x and 5.x on its System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2, but will need to update its Virtual Machine Manager software to manage Red Hat guest operating systems on Hyper-V. Follow John Fontana on Twitter: twitter.com/johnfontana

SAP said Wednesday that Siemens has signed a three-year renewal of its software maintenance agreement, an announcement that would seem to quell widespread speculation that the global engineering and electronics company was considering dumping vendor-provided support in favor of lower-cost alternatives. It will use SAP's SRM (supplier relationship management) application in support of procurement efforts around the world. In addition, Siemens has expanded its use of SAP software, according to the announcement.

Siemens' new maintenance agreement includes SAP's high-end MaxAttention service. An SAP spokesman said last month that the rumors about Siemens dropping support created "an inaccurate portrayal about the SAP-Siemens relationship" and that the vendor was "currently working with Siemens to deepen the relationship in a multitude of areas." On Wednesday, an SAP spokesman wouldn't discuss whether the company provided Siemens any sort of discount or other special accommodation in order to sign the new agreement, but said, "this was at usual costs for large SAP customers." If an SAP customer as big as Siemens had chosen to drop vendor maintenance, the high-profile example could have provided a boost to the third-party maintenance market. SAP is also going to provide support for some internally developed applications that are integrated with SAP, the announcement said. But some observers treated the rumors with skepticism. The specter of third-party maintenance has loomed large around SAP since its controversial decision last year to move customers to a fuller-featured but pricier Enterprise Support service.

Right now, there are few third-party SAP support companies, and the best-known one, Rimini Street, probably couldn't handle the job, analyst Josh Greenbaum said in a blog post last month. "I don't see how they can gear up to provide comprehensive maintenance and support ... for what is either the world's largest or the world's second largest SAP installation (Nestle is the other contender)," he wrote. "It would take something more than a Rimini to handle a customer of this size, despite their track record in third party maintenance." In addition, large systems integrators such as IBM would likely be unwilling to take on the project, for fear of alienating SAP, Greenbaum said. After a protracted public debate, SAP and the SAP User Group Executive Network (SUGEN) agreed to work out a set of KPIs (key performance indicators) meant to show the value provided by Enterprise Support. SAP has agreed to hold off on an incremental price increase schedule for Enterprise Support "until the targeted improvements measured by the SUGEN KPI Index are met."