SlashNOT

Just a Guy writes: Filed Wednesday in California Superior Court in Santa Clara County, the suit charges Linus Torvalds with implementing and encouraging unfair trade practices in the development and deployment of the Linux operating system.

The suit alleges that the Linux operating system (available as an alternative for personal and corporate computing) uses unfair trade practices to make finding and using exploits much more difficult. A party to the class action suit, Symantec, commented that Linux, by NOT upholding the standards to which other operating systems are exploitable, has an unfair market advantage by not requiring the purchase of generally inexpensive and somewhat effective third party tools.

The main remedies sought in relief of the suit are summarized:

1) Force all users to use Linux as the administrator (root for the technically savvy)
2) Remove all included firewalls in the software.
3) Make all files installed on the system world writable
4) Enforce a mandatory delay between exploit detection and patches.

Of the four remedies above, number 4 is deemed the most important at leveling the playing field. In normal circumstances, when an exploit is detected, there is time for malicious code writers to take advantage of it, and therefore time for software security companies to develop fixes and keep the cycle of normal computer security rolling. An anonymous source stated “what good does it do anyone when a security exploit is closed before it can be taken advantage of”.

In a phone conversation, Linux responded “I think I will have waffles for breakfast”.

The lead plaintiff, Arron Semple, deceased, could not be reached for comment.