Santa Cruz Operation will lay off 190 people and take a $5 million to $6 million charge this quarter as part of its sale of Unix operating system software and services to Linux company Caldera Systems.
The layoffs, 19 percent of the company’s work force, will occur in the parts of the business being transferred to Caldera, SCO said. CNet has the story.

Song-swap company Napster Inc., which is being sued for copyright infringement by the recording industry, attempted to distance itself Thursday from a federal judge’s strong ruling against MP3.com Inc, according to a story by Reuters.

Their job is to watch the Linux, Unix and NetWare competition. But some rivals claim that spreading FUD is part of Doug Miller & Co.’s job, too, reports ZDNet.

The Federal Trade Commission has announced a $37.5 million judgment against the operators of at least six Internet pornography sites who billed customers for services they didn’t purchase, reports CNet.

In a surprise move following Wednesday’s release of the patent on the main security algorithm used in digital security products, Baltimore Technologies will offer one of its key developer toolkit products for free from its website. Dublin-based Baltimore, the third-largest company marketing security products following its January merger with U.S.-based CyberTrust, hopes the free availability of the toolkit will encourage developers to incorporate public key cryptography into many more applications, reports Wired.com.

LinuxWorld takes a look at several new products,including VA Linux’s new 4U Database Server, Rave Systems’ SPARC Rackmount Servers, American Megatrends’ new embedded Linux system (called Indium), IBM’s open source Andrew File System (AFS), and Eazel’s Nautilus file manager.

From a column at Upside: “I’m not usually in the business of second-guessing a federal judge, but U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff’s order that MP3.com pay $25,000 per CD, or as much as $250 million, to Universal Music strikes me as lunacy.”

Inprise/Borland this week announced JBuilder 4, the latest version of its Java-based cross-platform development environment. The JBuilder 4 productivity environment supports EJB 1.1-compliant development on Windows, Linux, and Solaris platforms. The story is at InfoWorld.

Shares of online music provider MP3.com plunged to a new 52-week low in Thursday trading on the Nasdaq, one day after a federal judge ordered it to pay damages of up to $250 million US for copyright infringement, the CBC reports.

BSD Today reviews the two Web mail applications.