In a statement today, SCO seems to have threatened to sue Linus Torvalds, the inventor of Linux, if more companies don't start licensing UNIX. (Note: Look at the very last paragraph.)

Many articles already explain why you should use Linux and describes its advantages. However, for a potential new user, it's also important to know the other side: what are the disadvantages of Linux? This short article by Carl Simard tries to present this other side so that new users can evaluate much better if Linux is for them to try or if they should forget about it.

Ellison faces pressure from both sides of the database market -- IBM on top, and Microsoft below. A little more than a year ago, Gartner Group principal analyst Colleen Graham issued a study that showed IBM taking the lead over Oracle for the first time in the cutthroat corporate-database market.

In what is being called "one of the largest desktop migrations to Linux ever seen", Microsoft seems to have lost a major account worth "tens of millions of euros" when the city of Munich said on Wednesday it would switch 14,000 computers from Microsoft's Windows operating system to Linux.

As the PostgreSQL developers continue to move forward on the upcoming v7.4 release, several bug fixes have been tag'd as being safe to back-patch into the v7.3.x branch, so there is 7.3.3. Click here for a recent interview with the PostgreSQL team.

If you've read 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' and its sequels, you probably remember the Vogons, the incredibly ugly, disgusting, and bad-tempered aliens charged with destroying Earth to clear the path for an intergalactic highway.

Information and pictures of the new Swing on Java 1.4.2. Elsewhere, this article examines some of these urban performance legends and 'sets the record straight' regarding Java's performance.

KernelTrap has an interview with Nick Piggin, a college student living in Canberra Australia who has been working on an anticipatory I/O scheduler for the Linux kernel.

John Carroll editorializes about the SCO situation and advocates that the worst it could happen to the Linux OSS market is to have a temporary slow down, and not a collapse. Elsewhere, Sys-Con reports that people started all these conspiracy theories when Microsoft licensed the Unix IP from SCO, but in reality the magazine says, it was something that was on schedule to happen as Microsoft needed the license possibly for a new product of theirs.

Microsoft is designing its ever-present Windows operating system to streamline and lower the cost of building and distributing the software. Read the article at C|Net.

FreeBSD Release Engineering team's Scott Long has written a bootloader front-end script that allows one to enable/disable acpi, boot single users, etc. Elsewhere, Matthew N. Dodd has implemented per-executable ELF prebinding in FreeBSD-current. Initial performance measurements are very encouraging. Relocatable objects (executables and libraries) contain elements that require relocation before they are usable. By 'prebinding', much of this work can be done beforehand and speed up the actual relocation process. As a result, apps like KDE and other library happy executables take a little less time to load.

"Can I run my business on Macintosh?" David Coursey answers the question in his editorial at C|Net.

Fabio writes: "Another whole month has gone by, which means that it's time for another status update. Read more about it, and also check the screenshot showing the Zune real time gradients in action!"

This excerpt from "Thinking In Java" shows you how to use operators and execution control statements. It covers precedence, assignment, regular expressions, relational and logical operators, and short circuiting. You'll learn to use Java's execution control statements, including loops and switches. More programming articles, more operating system articles at InformIT.