In a frontal assault spreading across several fronts, Sun Microsystems yesterday unleashed a set of announcements at its first-ever China-based Networked Computing event designed to make one thing loud and clear: the Sun shine is back.

Linus Torvalds, the undisputed - except by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute - inventor of Linux, has let LinuxWorld have his immediate comment on the AdTI president's claims that the parentage of Linux is somehow in doubt. Read his startling admission exclusively here: Linux is in reality the handiwork of the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus.

[Over 49,000 readers have enjoyed this article since Friday.] SCO CEO Darl McBride, whom Maureen O'Gara calls 'the most hated man in the computer industry,' says he's reached for an analogy to describe SCO's experience since suing IBM. Reports O'Gara: 'This is like...,' McBride's said to himself, groping for an elucidating comparison, only to conclude, 'Nothing...Nothing compares to what's happened in the last year.'

As predicted in the May issue of JDJ the proprietary application server market is being dominated more than ever before by IBM, with BEA's share slipping for the second successive year.

In yesterday's annual strategy memo to Microsoft employees, CEO Steve Ballmer declared: 'Noncommercial software products in general, and Linux in particular, present a competitive challenge for us and for our entire industry, and they require our concentrated focus and attention.'

(From JDJ May Print Edition) The annual Gartner Research Report analyzing the application server market share among leading vendors is expected to be out this month. Open-source JBoss has used its technical and business innovation in the J2EE app server market to take on the software industry giants, but the main race remains between BEA and a Big Blue gorilla 30 times its size - IBM's market cap as of April 2004 was roughly $150 billion vs BEA at around $5 billion. Who'll win...and who'll lose?

A month ago, a trial version of a little-known Linux application called 'CoLinux' was released that is the first working free and open source method for optimally running Linux on Microsoft Windows natively. It's the work of a 21 year-old Israeli computer science student and some Japanese open source programmers; in Israel, analysts are already saying it could help transform the software world.

Internet whizz Marc Andreessen took the 3rd annual 'Open Source in Government' conference by storm last week, at George Washington University in Washington DC, when he came up with his personal top twelve reasons for why open source will boom over the next 5-10 years.

HP has supposedly been selling MandrakeSoft Linux on the desktop for a while but has been so quiet about it that for all intents and purposes it's been a stealth operation. That's all about to change, with two new Linux desktops ready for rolling out by HP to the North American SMB market, both boxes to be sold with Mandrake Linux.

A piece of juicy compromising e-mail written by a SCO consultant to SCOsource VP Chris Sontag and SCO CFO Bob Bench last October suggesting that Microsoft had quietly funneled $86 million to SCO and that it was good for at least $106 million before tapping all possibilities happened to turn up on open source philosopher Eric Raymond's web site Thursday.

The magistrate judge doing the legal housekeeping in the run-up to the $5 billion SCO v. IBM trial next year gave the SCO Group what it wanted today and ordered IBM to cough up the discovery that SCO claims is vital to its charge that IBM copied Unix code into Linux.

After weeks of threats and repeated delays, the SCO Group has finally sued two Fortune 500 end-user companies, DaimlerChrysler and AutoZone.

Nathan Hand - a Linux developer and enthusiast who represents what he himself admits is the 'vanishingly small percentage of the Linux community' still believing The SCO Group's CEO to be 'a reasonable man' - proposes what he calls a truce between SCO and the Linux community. Terms include: 'You must stop distributing Linux, Samba and GCC unless you are willing to agree to the terms of our General Public License (GPL).'

'I wasn't brought in to have warm fuzzies with Slashdot. I was brought in to increase shareholder value.' Thus spake Darl McBride, The SCO Group's CEO, when interviewed by The Boston Globe.

Eben Moglen of Columbia University and the Free Software Foundation has entered the SCO-Novell-Linux debate again, saying customers using Linux needn't concern themselves unduly until a final decision has been made in the courts as to whether the copyrights to Unix are owned by Novell or by SCO. Similarly, Moglen says that the SCO Group can't file a major copyright infringement claim against a Linux customer - as it has announced it will do this month - until the final legally-binding resolution of its copyright dispute with Novell.

The SCO Group has amended its $3 billion worth of charges against IBM and, according to SCO CEO Darl McBride, has added copyright complaints to its largely breach-of-contract suit.

Craig S. Bruce, who says of himself 'Depending entirely on context, I'm either a very quiet and withdrawn person or a cynical, opinionated, outspoken egomaniac,' has one undeniable gift: a knack for storing away choice technology quotations.

SYS-CON Media, the world's number one i-technology magazine publisher, announced last month at LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in New York the winners of its first annual LinuxWorld Magazine (www.linuxworld.com) Readers' Choice Awards. Read the full results here.

Experts say the perpetrator of MyDoom is a 'clever strategist combined with being a sophisticated programmer.' Certainly the first of the hundreds of thousands of MyDoom-infected PCs worldwide today started bombarding the SCO Group's Web site www.sco.com on what was still Saturday in the US as Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China, Singapore and other Asian countries moved into Sunday February 1, when MyDoom had scheduled the attack on SCO to start.

'Linux cannot be distributed under any kind of 'viral license' for future development,' writes Daniel Wallace. 'All those enterprise users will be stuck with the version of Linux they are now running with no way to repair or upgrade because the license is fatally flawed,' he adds. Read his full Letter to the Editor here.

At LinuxWorld Conference & Expo last week a company by the name of Tadpole made technology history by becoming the first Sun OEM to announce its laptops will henceforth come equipped with what's being called 'the first viable alternative to Windows in 15 years' - namely the (Linux-based) Java Desktop System.

In what is being interpreted as either a preemptive move against IBM's plan to migrate to Linux on the desktop, a direct challenge to software vendors who want to interoperate with Word through XML, or just a more general confirmation that it is worried about Open Source, Microsoft last week filed - in the European Union and New Zealand though not in the US - for various XML patents.

Wednesday morning Novell came up with a formal retort to SCO filing suit against it. Basically an exercise in name-calling. It said, 'This lawsuit illustrates that SCO's campaign against enterprise adoption of Linux is foundering. It seems that litigation has now become SCO's principal line of business.'

The SCO Group today filed suit against Novell for what is called in legal circles slander of title for disparaging SCO's ownership of Unix.

In Australia to attend a conference, where he has been following GNOME sessions with particular interest, Linus Torvalds has been saying that he thinks that in all likelihood 'normal users' won't see a Linux desktop for 10 years.

'Network computing is at a tipping point, as the race to connect everything of value is driving widespread adoption of innovations like Java technology, and hundreds of millions, and soon billions, of devices get on the network and need to share information securely and reliably.'

In the course of putting the January 2004 issue together, the LinuxWorld editors circulated forward-looking questions to a wide selection members of the Linux community whose opinions we respect. Here's what they had to say.

In 1994 he founded World Wide Web Consortium at MIT, and in 1999 he became first holder of the 3Com Founders chair. Time magazine once named him one of the top 20 thinkers of the 20th century. Now Queen Elizabeth II, his monarch, has made him a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Arise, Sir Timothy Berners-Lee!

UserLinux - intended to be a system for business people - will be GNOME-based and will not include Qt or KDE components by default, says project leader Bruce Perens. 'Most of the software consolidation in UserLinux is going on by consensus,' he explains. However, he saw that no consensus would be possible regarding the GUI. 'So, I made a decision by fiat to get the project moving past the GUI issue.'

Just as, in the Java world, there are many competing MVC frameworks for JSP development, so many Open Source developers - says LinuxWorld senior editor James Turner - 'scratch the same itch.' In this week's installment of our 'Point-Counterpoint' series, LinuxWorld editors James Turner and Steve Suehring slug it out over that most contentious of issues: does the Open Source community on occasion shoot itself in the foot? James says it does, constantly; Steve disagrees.

Well is it, or isn't it? LinuxWorld senior editor James Turner thinks it's not. Linux desktop technologies editor Mark Hinkle on the other hand - as you might given his role at LinuxWorld expect! - thinks it is. Read the arguments here, then join in the discussion yourself.

LinuxWorld Magazine is in the process of collecting predictions about what will be happening with Linux in the upcoming year for an article to appear in our January issue. We're having such fun with it, we thought we'd share it with linuxworld.com readers and let you get in on the action!

Mark R. Hinkle, Linux.SYS-CON.com's Desktop Technologies Editor, muses on what his his ideal incarnation of a Linux desktop would be. Bruce Perens, whose idea it was, chips in with detailed comments.