[->Mills<-]

The MyDoom virus has triggered a new wave of attacks on company websites. It is also looks like a new front in a war waged by those who want to preserve the open-source Linux operating system.

It's usually no easier to fathom the motives of virus creators than it is of any other perpetrator of damage for damage's sake. Deep in the darkness of the psyche, vandals and arsonists no doubt have their reasons - and so, presumably, do the run-of-the-mill geeks who wreak damage on the unsuspecting computer user. It's just that the reasoning isn't easy for most of the rest of us to understand.

Patenting Linux

But, in the case of the MyDoom computer worm, the motivation seems clearer. It has attacked a company based in Utah called SCO, bringing down its website with a barrage of data sent from countless computers into which the worm had been insinuated, unbeknownst to the users. There seems little doubt that SCO was targeted - illegally and unacceptably, lest anyone be in any doubt - because it has enraged many people devoted to the Linux operating system. Two years ago, SCO claimed that it owned more than 800,000 lines of the system which had always been available for free and to anyone since its invention in 1991.

New Source = BBC News