Sun plans legal protection for Solaris

Details of the protection plan will be revealed when Sun announces its licensing terms for open source Solaris in coming weeks, according to CNET News. Intellectual property protection of open source software has become a hot topic as a result of matters such as SCO\'s ongoing attack on Linux, which involved a now-scrapped charge that IBM stole parts of SCO\'s Unix source code and used it in Linux, and still involves a claim that AutoZone\'s use of Linux violates Unix copyrights. Responses to this growing threat have been a Hewlett-Packard indemnification plan against SCO attacks and a warranty from Linux seller Red Hat promising to replace any infringing code. Full CNET News report

Meanwhile, Microsoft\'s CE Steve Ballmer has warned Asian governments that they could face patent lawsuits for using the Linux operating system, instead of its own Windows software, reports CNN. He said: \'Someday … somebody will come and look for money owing to the rights for that intellectual property.\' Interest in open source software is growing in Asia, with Singapore\'s Ministry of Defence last month switching 20 000 PCs to run on OSS rather than Windows. In addition, China, Japan and South Korea have agreed to jointly develop applications running on Linux. Full CNN report

Staying with intellectual property issues, Savvysoft has said that it is facing a trademark infringement challenge by Microsoft over the use of the term \'Excel\'. Savvysoft founder Rich Tanenbaum claimed that Microsoft has never been granted a registered trademark on Excel, and that the legal challenge against his company\'s TurboExcel spreadsheet acceleration and migration tool is invalid. Microsoft dismissed his claims stating that the company had \'common law trademark rights to Excel based on [its] usage of the name for nearly two decades\', according to Vnunet. Full Vnunet report