SCO president and CEO Doug Michels has lashed-out at Linux, describing it as "not particularly scalable" and some kind of packaging operation that has turned into a religion. Michels' reckless assault comes in an interview published this week by Computerworld - as yet we have no reports of vengeful mullahs camped on his lawn. But they may not have noticed Michels' outrageous attack on Linus Torvalds yet. Casting doubt on the viability of the Linux licensing model and, as far as we can make out, Torvalds' parentage, maturity and integrity, Mouthie Mikey says: "The last thing [major companies] want is some kid from Norway to sue for $100 million for misappropriation of intellectual property." Surely Michels means Torvalds here, but if he'd care to supply us with the names of some sample litigious kids from Norway we'll be happy to pubish a correction. The rise of Linux presents a pretty clear threat to SCO's core x86 business, so Michels' willingness to lash-out is understandable. Dell shipping Red Hat on multiprocessor systems is ominous news for him, as is Intel's apparent support for early IA-64 Linux implementations . SCO is hoping to make great strides by getting its own Unix on IA-64 early, so go figure. Taking a pop at Intel and Dell favourite Red Hat, Michels describes it as Linux technology with a lot less value added [than SCO does, we presume he means], and packaged as "better than SCO." Whixh he says it isn't. He says Linux didn't break ground, but is just a re-engineered lightweight kernel that implements Unix APIs. Linux is "just a kernel" that "some punk young kids" have engineered pieces around. It also has weaknesses in that there's no control of the roadmap, it doesn't have millions spent on reliability testing, which he says "isn't stuff that people do for fun at home with volunteers," and it doesn't scale, or handle multiprocessors well. Over to Dell, Intel, and the mullahs on that one then. Goodbye, Doug... ®