07.01.09
Posted in FOSS, FUD, Microsoft at 4:13 pm by Roy Schestowitz
• IE 8 Get the facts campaign gets it wrong
If Microsoft wants me and others like me, to take IE 8 seriously, I expect them to treat our intelligence with some respect. Anything less, and after a while, we’ll have been taught to discount their bold claims.
• Excellent example for the threat to the openness of the internet
Were you ever worried that the internet could be controlled by single vendor technology? That there is certain information that you can only see and get when using one specific browser? That interoperability is at risk?
You are certainly not paranoid if you have such worries. Microsoft Australia now gives an example for what is possible and done by offering the chance to get $10,000 by finding information on some website - WHICH CAN ONLY BE VIEWED USING INTERNET EXPLORER 8 !!
• Browser Wars: Get the facts! Sort of…
But… consider the situation in Europe where Windows 7 will be supplied sans browser.
Related posts:
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Posted in FUD, Formats, IBM, Microsoft, OpenDocument, Wikipedia at 3:56 am by Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft carries on smearing ODF in public while pretending to support it
Microsoft is still changing ODF’s history and daemonising ODF using Wikipedia. We wrote about that in:
Rob Weir has already complained about this. It is part of Microsoft’s ongoing attack on ODF [1, 2] — an attack which it is defending by buying journalists lunch (now confirmed to us by the journalist) so that is can carry on breaking ODF interoperability [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] without public scrutiny.
Weir has just published another rant about Wikipedia, so obviously he keeps track of the continued manipulation by Microsoft — one that we too are seeing because all edits are visible.
I have a mental model of how Wikipedia works and behaves. This may not reflect reality, but it is how I, as an end-user, expect Wikipedia to behave. I think these are reasonable expectations regarding things like standards of proof and balance and that if the real Wikipedia differs substantially from these expectations, then we have a problem.
[...]
Does anyone know whether the above statements have any basis in the aspirations or actual practice of Wikipedia editors and admins? Sadly, my recent reading of some articles suggests that these reasonable expectations are routinely flouted and bear little resemblance to reality.
It’s obvious what Microsoft must be thinking.
“All those haters…”
But to characterise opposition as “anti-Microsoft” is like describing the police as “anti-criminals” and thus “irrational haters”. Microsoft’s behaviour speaks for itself. █
“Their documents display a clear intent to monopolize, to prevent any competition from springing up. And they have used a variety of restrictive practices to prevent that kind of competition.”
–Judge Robert Bork, former US Supreme Court nominee (on Microsoft)
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06.30.09
Posted in Database, Deception, FUD, Fraud, GNU/Linux, IBM, Marketing, Microsoft, Oracle, SUN, UNIX at 3:34 am by Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft’s advertising is still a scam and should be dealt with appropriately
EARLIER THIS MONTH we wrote about Microsoft coming under threat of lawsuits due to these very same practices. The victim of benchmark fraud was IBM at the time and this time it is Oracle.
One of our readers got us a scan of the advert (see above). “It’s kinda small,” he says, “but you might find it interesting.” Here is the benchmark the advert is mentioning. To quote: “New results from SAP show that on similarly configured systems, SQL Server 2000 running on Windows Server 2003 outperformed Oracle 9i running on HP-UX. The highest Fully Processed Line Items Per hour, 178,000, has SAP certification number 2005017, and the highest 4-way Oracle result in this benchmark is 88,670, with SAP certification number 2004030.”
“Such benchmark fraud should be reported to the ASA for deceptive marketing.”They neglect to say that MSSQL server is 8 cores, whereas the Oracle server is 4 cores. Oiaohm adds that “HP-UX has the lowest benchmarks with Oracle. Solaris and Linux outscore it. Basically, Microsoft cheats on benchmarks at every chance. [...] Also thinking Oracle also runs on Windows. Benchmark was very incomplete. [...] Also lower clock speed processors.”
“It’s a really stacked config,” adds the person who sent us this information. “Even with it not being HPUX, you are looking at 4 dual-core Opterons versus 4 single-core Itanium2 processors. Quite a big speed difference too.”
To conclude, he adds: “The point was to show MSSQL was faster than Oracle. They want you to buy their database, not just the OS. It’s just one more effort on Microsoft’s part to spin bad data into a convincing glossy blurb to appeal to the C-levels I don’t mind if they do a fair comparison and win, but this kind of stuff just hurts their credibility.”
Such benchmark fraud should be reported to the ASA for deceptive marketing. This has happened before and the same should be done about “<vendor> recommends Vista” [1, 2] and other marketing schemes, maybe even “it’s better with Windows” [1, 2].
Microsoft keeps wondering why it is not liked in IT circles. It is not because “it’s a big company.” █
“Microsoft did sponsor the benchmark testing and the NT server was better tuned than the Linux one. Having said that, I must say that I still trust the Windows NT server would have outperformed the Linux one.”
–Windows platform manager, Microsoft South Africa
Reference: Outrage at Microsoft’s independent, yet sponsored NT 4.0/Linux research
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06.29.09
Posted in FOSS, FUD, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft at 7:12 pm by Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Assorted brow-raising items in the news
There has been something fishy about LinuxInsider ever since ECT took over (mentioned here). This is actually pointed out by other independent observers as well because the whole news network gives the impression that GNU/Linux is problematic, either because it serves the advertisers better or because the editor was not even a GNU/Linux user until some time ago (true story). Last week it was claimed that an article sought to give the impression that Mono opposition is irrational and hateful and this week we find an article starts with phrases like “Conspiracy Theories” in the headline (we wrote about this dismissive term before).
It basically seeks to dismiss Groklaw's fundamental claims that Microsoft worked behind the scenes to derail GNU/Linux. Groklaw may have not offered the piles of evidence that we have, but it does put forth a claim which is obvious to those who have been following the saga closely enough.
Groklaw’s reaction: “Mystery solved. Totally blatant… next time you hear Microsoft bragging that people *prefer* their software to Linux on netbooks, you’ll know better. If they really believed that, they’d let the market speak, on a level playing field.”
To discredit Groklaw, the author uses comments from people with names like “hairyfeet” and “drinkypoo”. And since Microsoft has PR folks patrolling Slashdot, to just pick arbitrary quotes like this would be as careless as discrediting valid convictions based on gut feeling or guesswork. To support this whole storyline, the author is again quoting “M$” from the other side, thus discrediting this whole side of the debate. Maybe it is not intentional, but either way, the outcome seems biased.
Elsewhere on the Web, in a news site that we mentioned earlier for its propagation of Microsoft studies, routine guest posts from the Microsoft-funded Rob Enderle (LinuxInsider/ECT allows him to publish too), and other patterns of obvious bias suddenly comes this Google-hostile article, which gently tries to put the “evil” label on Google. Watch who is cited:
Consumer Watchdog managed to get hold of the slides that Google is touting around earlier this month, and it’s clear that Google wants us all to think that it’s just a minnow compared to giants like Microsoft and IBM. Interestingly, it doesn’t include Intel in the figures - Paul Otellini, Intel’s CEO is on Google’s board.
We wrote about Consumer Watchdog last month [1, 2]. It hardly gets more suspicious than this and the Microsoft advertisements do not contribute to confidence in the publication’s motives, either.
Yesterday we wrote about ACT’s report, which was the latest Microsoft-commissioned attack on Free software. IDG gave this some obedient coverage, but Glyn Moody at the UK section of IDG tried adding balance by reminding people what ACT really is.
There you have it: that well-known friend of teensy-weensy companies everywhere, Microsoft, is a “sponsor” of ACT. That would probably explain the fact that ACT’s position, notably in Europe, has been resolutely pro-Microsoft, and anti everything that is anti-Microsoft.
ACT was created to serve as a Microsoft front amid antitrust trouble, just after ATL had been exposed for participating in “letter from dead people” and engaging in corrupt tactics. Jonathan Zuck was behind both fronts. More information about ACT we have already accumulated in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8], so it would be wasteful to repeat it.
Last but not least, watch how one Microsoft-funded site (TechFlash) promotes another (MSNBC).
Zumobi, a Microsoft spin out, has been on a roll lately with a number of high-profile apps for media brands and retailers. It also recently unveiled the iPhone app for the Today show, also a property of NBC.
It all stays in the family. █
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Posted in Deception, FUD, Interoperability, Microsoft, Novell, OpenDocument at 5:00 pm by Roy Schestowitz
Summary: ODF news which is more or less organised and some other picks from the news
A COUPLE of days ago we wrote about lunch that Microsoft was having with at least one journalist, to whom Microsoft lied. It is hardly surprising that this journalist has just published an article commending Microsoft and reciting the same deception he was spoon-fed. It is a familiar sight.
Interestingly enough, the reporter also ended up talking to Laura DiDio, whom we last wrote about right here. For years she has been slamming Microsoft’s competitors and parroting Microsoft/SCO. She was paid by Microsoft to do this inside the Yankee Group [1, 2], part of that Microsoft mill.
Anyway, the reporter, whose article might be verbally ghostwritten by Microsoft, is also using Novell to embellish Microsoft’s image. Here is just a portion from it:
Paoli also highlighted Microsoft’s work with Novell, including Microsoft Operations Manger 2007 Cross Platform Extensions for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server; sponsoring an open-source Eclipse plug-in for Silverlight development; and nurturing the Mono Silverlight plug-in for Linux.
Microsoft’s motivation for working on these projects is twofold: It wants to be more customer friendly, and it needs to compete in new markets, said Laura DiDio, founder of Information Technology Intelligence Corp., a Boston-based consultancy and research firm.
Microsoft has been “steadily trying to learn from its mistakes” and is trying to “turn the lemons into lemonade” with better licensing, security and interoperability, she said. The company is also entering into new markets that have higher profit margins to spur its growth—beyond its operating system and Office businesses, she added.
So, after lunch with Microsoft (and lies from Microsoft employees) he promotes the Microsoft party line. Why is nobody surprised? And yes, that’s DiDio right there who offers ‘independent’ perspective. Classic!
“[T]hat’s DiDio right there who offers ‘independent’ perspective.”One person in Twitter adds that “Microsofties should really stop trying to slant #Wikipedia articles to smear #ODF. It’s not like we can’t see the page history.”
hAl has been very busy at Wikipedia today, adding anti-ODF contents (about 12 more edits) to Wikipedia’s article on ODF. Here are just two examples among many others. Of course he is also linking to the blogs of Microsoft employees, keeping it where it’s warm and showing how much Microsoft really hates ODF, whose interoperability it knowingly subverts [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. One of our readers writes to say: “I am reminded in this piece by the efforts that Microsoft has gone to in preventing interoperability even with interoperability specifications like ODBC.”
The person in Twitter writes: “If everyone and their dog can properly support #ODF except #Microsoft, then that’s likely either incompetence or malice on their part.”
Microsoft is of course not interested in interoperability. It never was. It is not good (for shareholders) to allow people to choose office suites based on technical merits, as opposed to pure lock-in and preconceptions. That’s where Microsoft’s FUD and perception management [1, 2] helps, as whisper campaigns surely illustrate. Microsoft Office remains one of the few Microsoft products that are really profitable and that too is at great risk as the following new article suggests:
For now, according to the BW article, Microsoft will continue to deliver its core Office package as server-based package while offering a free neutered online version. Some may embrace the free one because they are dealing with a known commodity, but many have likely switched already to another vendor and won’t give it a look. Microsoft could go all the way here and offer a tiered online pricing model and compete directly with Google at something it does well, but it’s afraid of costs spiraling out of control and killing their cash cow.
Moving again to more positive news, Rob Weir concludes the ODF Plugfest.
We had an ODF Plugfest last week in the Hague. Although we’ve had interoperability workshops and camps before that attracted a handful of vendors, this was the first one that had nearly universal participation from ODF vendors. I’m not going to recap the details of the plugfest. Others have done that already. But I will share with you some of my conclusions, based on long discussions with other participants, from whose insights I have greatly benefited.
In the KDE camp, another important milestone for KOffice 2 is being reached and marked.
Today, exactly one month since the release of KOffice 2.0.0, the KOffice team releases the first bugfix release in the 2.0 series. This release contains no new features but lots of bugfixes for almost all of the components in KOffice 2.0. We are planning at least two more bugfix releases of 2.0 before starting the 2.1 series in October this year.
The OpenOffice.org project has this important post about federating its community.
Nevertheless, one still needs the political infrastructure in order to constitute a Foss community that has any chance of sustaining itself. Mere spirit won’t do it in the long run. This means that there must be in place the mechanisms by which any member of the project can communicate to another and freely discuss project matters with the expectation that discussions have effect and are not just politely ignored. As well, it is generally important, though I no longer think it requisite, that members have a sense of “ownership” in the community or at least in what they are doing. It’s a feature more important in some areas than others, and as Foss continues to move away from its origins in the West and find welcome homes in Asia and Africa and India, that model becomes less essential.
All the same, this is just another way of saying that what global participatory communities need is a structure of governance that can accommodate difference within the community itself. Governance means here the guidelines by which authority is coordinated. Given the global nature of, especially, large Foss projects, or even smaller ones (the Internet knows now boundaries), flexibility is crucial―but so are guidelines that ensure impartiality and nullify arbitrariness.
Lastly, having covered Free software that is honestly compatible with ODF, here is another piece of software called Oxygen XML Editor. It has a new release which the ODF aggregator seems to endorse. █
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06.28.09
Posted in FOSS, FUD, Microsoft at 4:12 am by Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft front attacks FOSS in a new paper which IDG gives visibility to
IT IS NOT UNUSUAL for Microsoft to reach out to the likes of Alexis de Tocqueville Institution for attacks on Free software. It is just so much better than appearing like an aggressor. These attacks are safer when they seem to come from ‘independent’ (Microsoft-funded) lobby groups.
It is well established that Jonathan Zuck’s Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] is a Microsoft lobby group which was created specifically to defend Microsoft in Washington (and later on in Brussels). Grant Gross from IDG seems to not be aware of it because he gives attention to ACT’s latest attack on Free/open source software.
The report’s goal is to help “avoid creating any kind of expectations that there is such a thing as a free lunch in IT,” said Braden Cox, a co-author of the report and research and policy counsel at ACT.
Let is be emphasised that Microsoft, the company behind many such smears against FOSS, is the funding source of the above FUD, yet it is invited to speak at OSCON 2009, also in exchange for payments. This brutally corrupt culture of attacks on competitors via lobbies absolutely must end. For IDG to not mention what is happening here is truly a shame, but then again, IDG too is financially tied to Microsoft [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] (although nowhere to the same extent). This is part of a pattern where IDG gives ACT exposure. █
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06.27.09
Posted in Deception, FUD, Microsoft, OpenDocument, Standard at 3:49 am by Roy Schestowitz
Summary: ODF — just like Java — has Microsoft getting close to it only to break it
Microsoft, an ODF Slugfest
NOT much has changed since Microsoft bought dinner for ODF panels and even flew over journalists to nice places where they got brainwashed against ODF and in favour of OOXML. In general, this practice of pampering the press to control news coverage is particularly important when the products in question are simply terrible [1, 2]. Sponsorships, beer and bribes of some form are also common and those with impact are being stalked by Microsoft. It is part of its strategy to even keep dossiers on journalists.
It is with all that in mind that we found curious the following Microsoft encounter with David Worthington from the SD Times. He was having lunch with Microsoft and they told him lies. For example:
Paoli indirectly responded to recent criticism that Microsoft was engaged in a FUD campaign against ODF (I forgot what the criticism was exactly) by pointing out that Office 2007 adds support for the format, and that Microsoft has included ODF in its developers’ tooling and plug fests.
This is a lie. Microsoft has been engaging in FUD against ODF all along [1, 2]. The examples are well documented and it continues to this date. Microsoft perhaps hopes that by having lunch with journalists it can rewrite history and make people less aware of its real motives.
Microsoft’s editing of the Wikipedia article on ODF has not quite ended yet. Here is where one can find Alex Brown and Albert (HAl) telling people what to think about ODF. Also see:
Over at Twitter, the Microsoft partners/MVPs/others still mock IBM regarding ODF. They also mock ODF, thus showing how much Microsoft hates ODF. Microsoft gets close to ODF only to cause it damage while pretending to support it [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. Microsoft used the exact same tactics against Java.
ODF Plugfest
In more positive news, Rob Weir shares the ODF TC timeline, which he first presented at the ODF Plugfest. There is a lot of good coverage from the Plugfest, such as this from Heise.
The first ODF Plugfest has brought together both corporate and independent developers to test the interoperability of Open Document Format (ODF) documents. As Microsoft showed earlier this year, it is possible to comply with the ODF specification but not offer useful interoperability with other software that reads ODF. The Plugfest, held in the Hague, Netherlands, was initiated by the Dutch government which is promoting the “Three Os”, Open Standards, Open Content and Open Source, and is pushing for the adoption of ODF as an open document format. The Plugfest opened with a speech from Frank Heemskerk, the Netherlands’ Minister of Foreign Trade, who asked the attendees “to go beyond compliance and help achieve broad-based open standards”.
There is also some coverage in German, not to mention the following article where a Dutch minister fails to see that ODF interoperability issues are mostly caused by Microsoft.
The Dutch Minister for Foreign Trade, Frank Heemskerk, wants Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Google, Adobe and open source software developers to work together on interoperability in applications using the Open Document Format (ODF).
The minister’s opened the ODF Interoperability Workshop that took place in the city of The Hague on Monday last week. “ODF applications must have the right degree of interoperability. We have to come up with a joint course of action for developing effective ODF support in each other’s products.”
The FSF’s position is that “Microsoft Office tries to break ODF”. Microsoft is indeed trying to break ODF (in French), so Frank Heemskerk should be notified.
Here is KDE’s report from the event.
The first ODF Plugfest was held on the 15th and 16th of June 2009 in the Royal Library in the Netherlands. The meeting was initiated by the Dutch government and the OpenDoc Society. Jos van den Oever, brand new employee of KO GmbH and Sven Langkamp, proud developer, went on behalf of the KOffice team. With over forty organisations and a total of sixty representatives from businesses, public sector organizations, open source projects and research institutions, the meeting was an incredible success.
OpenOffice.org has meanwhile augmented language support [1, 2] and the OOo Ninja blog shows that Microsoft Office just keeps getting more and more bloated.
What’s worse is this diagnostic took at least 20 minutes to finish on a nice dual-core with 2GB RAM.
[...]
OpenOffice.org isn’t necessarily have a reptutation for being lean itself, but developers are pushing hard to make OpenOffice.org 3.2 the fastest version yet. Stay tuned for more.
Yet Microsoft insists that Office is a quality product. To ODF, Microsoft Office does more harm than good. It’s in the interest of shareholders, not computer users. █
“It’s a Simple Matter of [Microsoft’s] Commercial Interests!“
–Microsoft on OOXML
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06.25.09
Posted in FUD, Java, Microsoft, Mono, Open XML, OpenDocument, Oracle, Patents, SUN at 12:39 pm by Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Old lessons about Microsoft’s intentional sabotage through “embrace and extend”; use of the Windows API with software patents (like Mono’s problem)
T
ODAY’S INTERESTING exhibit arrives after a lot of work on the Wiki. We have hundreds more coming. We will summarise key observations drawn from Exhibit plex_5906 (1997) [PDF], which contains an E-mail from Aaron Contorer to Bill Gates. The full exhibit is available as plain text at the bottom, but here are the bits worth paying attention to, as well as corresponding background.
We start with the realisation — as Microsoft confesses to it — that Windows is at great risk.
Today we face the largest threat Microsoft has faced since the success of Windows For the first time, there is a really credible threat to our position as the leading platform for ISVs to write to.
Fear of Java comes into play:
There are three possible ways to address the threat of the Java platform. One is to do nothing and gradually die as others innovate around us. The second is to join the parade of people who are saying “let’s kill Microsoft and share their market among us” - good for everyone else, but reducing us to the much smaller role of a common software company like Lotus or Borland or even Symantec. Thats a great way to make all our stock options worth zero, even If we would not technically be out of business. The third choice is to make major innovations to our platform so people still prefer to write to us instead of some tepid cross-platform Java layer. This is our only real option.
We have already revealed the gory details about Microsoft’s attack on NetPC (sometimes referred to as “NC”). The Gartner Group helped Microsoft's attack, as always. Here is some more information from Microsoft:
Our competitors are not stupid, so they are pushing the Java platform as the solution for programs that really need to run closer to the user. Sure, its a half-assed solution and isn’t compatible with anything and in fact scarcely exists, but hey, at least it’s not Windows. With Oracle and HTML-generating code on the server and a browser with Java on the client, you have a very crude, complicated, but functional platform for developing line-of-business applications more specifically distributed applications which take advantage of all the interactivity and media-richness that purely centralized mainframe apps never had
Microsoft is then defining “Embrace and Extend”:
In economics there is a well-understood concept called switching costs - how much it costs for a trading partner to change partners. Our philosophy on switching costs is very clear: we want low switching costs for customers who want to start using our platform, and we want to provide so much unique value that there are in effect high costs of deciding to move to a different platform. There is a name for this: it is called Embrace and Extend.
Embrace means we are compatible with what’s out there, so you can switch to our platform without a lot of obstacles and rework. You can switch from someone else’s Java compiler to ours; from someone else’s Web server to ours; etc. Customers love when we do this (as long as we don’t spend our energy embracing extra standards no one really cares about); our competitors are not so sure they like It because they prefer us to screw up.
Extend means we provide tremendous value that nobody else does, so (A) you really want to switch to our software, and (B) once you try our software you would never want to go back to some inferior junk from our competitors. Customers usually like when we do this, since by definition it’s only an extension if it adds value. Competitors hate when we do this, because by adding new value we make our products much harder to clone - this is the difference between innovation and just being a commodity like corn where suppliers compete on price alone. Nobody builds or sustains a business as successful as Microsoft by producing trivial products that are easy to clone - that would be a strategy for failure.
If we fail to embrace, we can lose because there are big barriers to buying our products. But if we Fail to extend, or do only humble work that is easy to clone or to surpass, we automatically lose because our competitors will spend literally billions of dollars to clone our work and replace us.
With that in sight, think about MSODF and how Microsoft broke interoperability in other malicious ways [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].
The “Windows API” is then described as “Embrace and Extend” against NC specifically:
Windows was a very successful embrace-and-extend move. People already had DOS machines and DOS apps, and we were able to go in and say “add this to your machine and it wLll just get better.” Wow! What a deal! It seems to have worked out all right so far. NT is a very similar move; although It’s not trivial to upgrade from Win95 to NT. in general you can use the same computer, same apps. and same APIs as before, plus more.
The really big win in Windows is the API. An app that calls the Windows API is effectively calling upon thousands of person-years of engineering work to help their app get its job done in a very specific way. You could argue !hat the API is too hard to use, that not every library is as fast as it should be, or other serious imperfections, but the fact remains: if you took away Windows, that apphcation would no longer work.
The Windows API is so broad, so deep, and so functional that most ISVs would be crazy not to use it. And it is so deeply embedded in the source code of many Windows apps that there is a huge switching cast to using a different operating system Instead. You can’t just take a Windows app and stick it on some weird Java NC from Oracle, for example, and expect it to work - the guts just are not there. For many customers, the cast of reworking all their apps would be huge.
Watch this:
In short, without this exclusive franchise called the Windows API, we would have been dead a long time ago.
Think about the role of Mono and why it helps Microsoft. Remember that this whole memo is about fighting Sun’s NC and Java, which is cross-platform. Oracle, which now owns/buys Sun, was part of this programme at the time.
Watch how Microsoft intends to use software patents to shield its territory (it is just as though Mono is history repeating itself):
We are doing all of this. We are fixing TCO and further improving our dev tools. We are providing new value such as Viper and great multimedia and unified storage. We are making sure that Windows, not some new platform, is the most attractive place to run apps written in this now programming language. We are building the best virtual machine in the world, and optimizing it to run on Windows. We are even making sure you can run your Windows apps remotely on an NT server if all you have on your desk is a GUI terminal. As if all this work were not already hard to copy, we are also getting a bunch of patents to further protect It against cloning.
On the role of ActiveX and DirectX in merely preventing platforms from becoming a commodity, to use Bill Gates' explanation:
Let me be dear we have no problem with the Java language or with running Java apps really really well on our platform. But we are explicitly not in the business of making it easy for people to write apps that get all the features of Windows on a non-Windows platform. “Pure cross-platform portability” is another way of saying “commoditize the OS.” In this vision, every OS is just an engine for running this layer called Java as fast as possible, and adding any value below the Java layer Is explicitly against the rules.
Sun has already figured this out and has launched its 100% pure Java” marketing program, which literally certifies apps as running the same on any client OS. Programs that call a Windows API or use ActiveX or DirectX, or any platform-specific feature, are by definition not 100% Pure Java, and are therefore evil. Hey, If you were Sun, you would say this too!
As usual, there is a lot to be learned from this. Although it is over a decade old, this was not seen before in the public arena, just in courts for the most part. Microsoft settled to keep it away from the public eye. █
“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
– George Santayana
Appendix: Comes vs. Microsoft - exhibit plex_5906, as text
Read the rest of this entry »
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