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By Martin La Monica, 26 August 2003 08:07

NEWS A denial-of-service attack took place over the weekend which took down the website of the SCO Group - the controversial organisation locked in an increasingly acrimonious row with the open-source community over the company's legal campaign against Linux. SCO's website was largely out of commission until Monday morning. Performance measurement statistics from Netcraft indicated that the site had been down since Friday night. In a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, numerous computers simultaneously send so much data across a network that the targeted system slows to a crawl while trying to keep up with the traffic it's receiving. The SCO representative could not say where this weekend's strike originated. However, unofficial open-source spokesman Eric Raymond suggested in a posting on Sunday to open-source news website NewsForge that the attack was launched by someone angry at comments from SCO executives criticising the open-source community's role in the legal battles over Linux. SCO claims that IBM illegally inserted Unix code into its version of Linux and has sent letters to corporations, warning them that they may be violating copyright laws by using the Linux operating system. Raymond, president of the Open Source Initiative advocacy group, urged the hacker, if a member of the open-source community, to stop the attack, because it could do more harm than good. He said: "We're the good guys. But that doesn't matter if we aren't seen to be the good guys. We cannot fight our war using vandalism and trespass and the suppression of speech, or SCO will paint us as crackers and maybe win." In the posting, Raymond also made a reference to a planned counterattack by members of the open-source community against SCO to demonstrate the weakness of its legal case, but did not go into detail, saying "the element of surprise is part of it." Martin La Monica writes for News.com