03.31.08
Links 31/03/2008: Adobe Joins Linux Foundation; LiMo is Released
- LiMo Foundation Unleashes Mobile Platform
- Confusion about the features of the latest Eee PC
- Adware slips between pages of e-book
- Asian Linux user groups aim wide
- Increasing Linux Participation in China: Our Symposium
- Adobe Joins Linux Foundation with Focus on Linux for Web 2.0 Applications
- The Vista Capable fiasco: to hell with system recs!
- Apple has biggest impact on world consumers: survey
- Three years of gaming down the drain
- Microsoft’s Canadian Move a Swipe at Stiff US Visa Policies [subs]
- Cheers not jeers to Speaker Chopp on the Microsoft tax concession
- Shareware Report: GNU money versus old
- Full-throttle Productivity and Web-Work With Ubuntu
- Secure doesn’t mean anything.
- One step forward: a review of GNOME 2.22
- Zenwalk Live 5.0
- When in Rome: engineering the Firefox 3 user experience
- The open source dilemma and the IT sandwich
- Communicating With the Other Half: NTFS Support in Linux
- P2P plug-in could detect net neutrality violations
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy.
Yuhong Bao said,
March 31, 2008 at 1:02 pm
I once used something similar to this as an excuse for some of the parts of OOXML:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html
Until I realized that MS would be better off moving these parts to an extension to ODF, which would preserve interoperablity while still supporting these parts.
Roy Schestowitz said,
March 31, 2008 at 6:06 pm
Yes, it’s unnecessary duplication at the lowest level, with ODF being a lot better. Joel is a former Microsoft manager by the way.
Robert Millan said,
April 1, 2008 at 5:24 am
Completely unimpressed at Adobe’s movements. When they finally decide to unbreak the web by releasing their browser plugin under the GPL, Gnash will have already catched up and it will be simply too late for them.
But then, of course, F*cklight will be the real problem…
Roy Schestowitz said,
April 1, 2008 at 5:43 am
There ought to be some sort of regulation to ensure sites cannot just violate the principles on which the Web was built. It’s not the ‘binarisation’ of the Web that’s the only problem, but the fact that companies use it as a junkyard to gain control, gain discrimination against rivals and gain vendor lock-in.