Frankly, I've been indifferent to this law suit. In IRC Greg and Opera Guitarist often post links to articles that reference the SCO lawsuit and/or nerdly response. I promptly put those links on /ignore. The code is already publically available. If I want it, then I can get it. If the Linux kernel is proven to contain SCO proprietary code, then it will be quickly written out. In my not so humble opinion, this is no big deal.

The real problem began when SCO antagonized nerds, many of whom were simply GNU/Linux users, not the authors of the kernel. Most people, when confronted by similar annoyance, simply vent to their wives or girlfriends. In time, steam is released. The dispute is then settled by those with an actual stake in the conflict. But these are nerds, remember? They don't have wives or girlfriends. Instead they have thousands of hours to spend in solitude in front of their computer. For them, aggrevation boils over. And that's exactly what happened.

The banner was hoisted by an extremely small set of nerds for whom feminine contact is limited to alt.binaries.pictures.erotica. Their solution, of course, was a technical one. They exploited the ignorance of windows weenies in order to bring down SCO's website. (If you try it now, you probably won't get to it.) Last week an email virus was released in order to launch the attack.

Since the UNIX security model is significantly better than the one offered by Microsoft -- do they have a security model? -- the anti-SCO camp chose to exploit that weakness in order to assault their intended quarry. The virus is propagated by email. It instructs recipients to run the attached program. They do and guess what? Their machine loads a virus that floods SCO's website with data to render it inoperable. It also runs through the recipient's address book in order to send a copy of itself to every address it finds.