There has been a a marked increase in lawsuits flying between stalwarts of the global IT sector these past few months. The first in this legal lineup is of course the now much-covered SCO vs IBM which has had Linux users in an uproar, in somewhat juvenile form, banding up and inviting more legal action from the purported ‘owners’ of the Unix platform. And then came Oracle’s hostile takeover bid for Peoplesoft, with the latter now suing the former for deliberately interfering with its plans to buy over JDE. To this, Oracle upped its ante by over US1 billion and filed a countersuit yesterday against Peoplesoft and JDE “in response to their collective efforts to eliminate PeopleSoft shareholders’ ability to accept Oracle’s tender offer”. Hours ago, Reuters has reported the state of Connecticut has filed an antitrust suit against Oracle to block its bid.

And just yesterday, Microsoft filed suits against 15 firms for spam.

Well, well, well - one thing’s for sure. The lawyers are laughing all the way to the bank. They always do. Don’t I wish I finished my law degree…