06.27.08
Posted in Formats, Office Suites, OpenDocument, Open XML, OpenOffice, Google at 4:36 am by Roy Schestowitz
ODF = A portable Web; OOXML = The Microsoft .Net
O
n two separate occasions so far this week [1, 2], we happen to have mentioned Microsoft’s remarks where they claim ‘OOXML innocence’. They claim not to have known the rules and add that they have no regrets for breaking the process using bribes, bullying, blackmail, and lies.
Andy Updegrove finally gets around to commenting on Microsoft’s remarks. He too does not buy these excuses.
How ‘Ignorant of Standards’ was Microsoft Really?
[…]
Why “Huh?” Because Microsoft has been playing the standards game, butting heads over prior technologies such as ActiveX, Java and much, much more with the best of them for decades as a member of hundreds of standards organizations. Moreover, it has held many board seats along the way, and has had a staff of attorneys for some time dedicated to standards matters. That staff includes the former General Counsel of the American National Standards Institute.
In the mean time, Microsoft does not deserve the benefit of the doubt. There is no doubt.
Moving on, it’s worth considering a new case of ODF support. This time it comes from EditGrid.
To use EditGrid , you need a broadband internet connection and a web browser that supports JavaScript (as most do). After signing up for a free account, you can up - load up to 2GB (8GB in the paid version) of existing spreadsheet files created in Excel, OpenDocument, or Lotus 1-2-3.
As you can see, it’s Web-based and it support ODF (nothing explicit there about OOXML). We shall be seeing plenty more of that, and not just from leaders like Zoho and Google. There’s plenty of room for specialised applications (niche) and portability of data depends greatly on open standards like ODF.
Sun, whose crown jewels include OpenOffice.org, is not shy to admit that the future may be in cloud computing. Published just a couple of days ago:
Speaking at the Structure 08 conference here, Sun Microsystems CTO Greg Papadopoulos predicted that by the beginning of 2010 the majority of systems sold would be for Web, high performance computing and software-as-a-service applications. “We are going through this phase change in computing in a big way,” he said. He made a similar prediction last year.
Papadopoulos also advocated a free market in which all interfaces and formats are based on open standards; customers own their data, relationships, and metadata; and customers can extract, synchronize or purge their data unilaterally. This echoes recent efforts to promote openness and data portability.
Computer Weekly has just reviewed OpenOffice.org and its conclusions are very telling too. We wrote about this before.
OpenOffice.org: a viable alternative to Microsoft Office?
[…]
Ironically, by striving to overcome the inertia and the sense of devil-you-know security that keeps most users with Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org may be fighting last year’s battle. In fact, too close an identification with Microsoft Office means OpenOffice.org risks becoming associated with an obsolete IT model, as attention moves to online applications and “the cloud”, where deployment and version compatibility problems are a thing of the past - as long as your connection holds and your browser behaves itself. This would be unfair to OpenOffice.org, which is already available online as part of the Ulteo Virtual Desktop. Other major OpenOffice.org suppliers will follow as they square up to the challenge of Google Apps.
This serves as further proof that ODF is not just about a limited set of native office suites, but also about the ability to change SaaS vendors while grabbing data along with the user. ODF is hugely important because it is not tied to a business model of lock-in.
Microsoft wishes to exploit its broken OOXML — with SharePoint tags (as part of the ’standard’) — to build a Web-based framework of lock-in. Call it Live Lock-in if you will… █
From the Campaign for Document Freedom
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06.25.08
Posted in Microsoft, Patents, Europe, SUN, Interoperability, Google at 7:02 am by Roy Schestowitz
Many stories about software patents make an appearance at the moment (it’s clearly a hot topic) and there’s little time to expand on them, so here is just a sample of news worth reading if you care about the legal fight against Free software.
Patents Down in Europe, Sun
It was interesting to discover that patents in Europe are on the decline, but the reasons for this decline was discomforting. [via Glyn Moody]
European Patent Office issued fewer patents in 2007
[…]
Nonetheless, the EPO staff’s morale seems to have never been lower. A survey conducted among several thousand staff members found that only 4 per cent have faith in the management board. Only 6 per cent said they were satisfied with their direct superiors and the president. The auditors have also long been complaining that they are chronically overworked.
We previously wrote about Sun’s view on software patents. While not much has changed, it’s reassuring to find this:
On his blog, Sun’s general counsel Mike Dillon provides an explanation as to why his company took the decision back in 2005 to reduce the number of patent applications it files…
Aside from our focus on patent quality, there is another reason we are filing fewer patents. It has to do with our business model. Unlike some companies, we don’t have a corporate goal for revenue derived from patents (and patent litigation).
For a company that suffers financially and reduces its workforce perpetually, the above seems like a bold statement. Reasons below.
Downturn/Recession Turns “Defensive” to Offensive
Digital Majority turns its readers’ attention to this article.
Why Patent Applications Increase in a Down Economy
[…]
In September, in a case known as “Re: Comisky,” the U.S. Patent Office held the inventor’s method for conducting mandatory arbitration involving legal documents was not patentable, essentially finding that a business process that does not require the use or implementation of technology, but depends on steps of human intervention, can not be awarded a patent.
Europe’s Back Door Again
Glyn Moody is well aware of the little scheme that’s apparently cooking in the EU. It’s partly about shoving in some software patents by the backdoor, using the help of Commissioner Charlie Mccreevy:
…where those “opportunities” almost certainly amount to sneaking in software patents by the backdoor.
Be alert for more of this stuff: the price of freedom is eternal vigilance etc. etc. etc.
Watch Don Marti’s critique of the Commission’s toothless and lawless (as in tiger) fight against RAND and the likes of it. We highlighted this problem before [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12].
You can’t have it both ways: if “Intellectual Property” should be treated like actual property, then you put it at risk when you use it in a crime. The European Commission isn’t picking on a US-based company for no reason here. In fact, the Commission generally advocates for expansions of exclusive rights in information that tend to benefit US-based companies at the expense of Europe. And in this case, the Commission didn’t even limit Microsoft’s use of the patent system. It only limited the company’s ability to make vague anticompetitive threats based on unspecified parts of a large patent portfolio, and handed over some protocol information that Samba was in the process of working out anyway.
A common-sense patent regime would limit the tools available to future software monopolists, and might make the next antitrust action unnecessary.
Copyrighted Datasets
Here is an interesting observation from Brendan Scott. He points out that his local laws may impose artificial barriers on interoperability.
The current authorities still hold that the reproduction of a data set, even for the purpose of interoperability, will be an infringement if there is copyright in the data set. Moreover, the courts have simply looked for a causal connection between the original work and the reproduction. The re-implementation of a work by piecing it together from observation may still result in an infringement.
The legislature has introduced an interoperability exception but it seems to be worded in a way limited to reproductions for the purpose of gaining information - and therefore doesn’t seem to be a lot of help in practice.
What would that mean if not only copyrights were involved? What if someone obtained a patent on a data transformation tool, which describes mapping between fixed objects? Watch this one from the news.
Start-up sues Google over e-mail switching tool”
Google was named on Monday in a trade secrets lawsuit alleging that the company’s business software unit copied a tiny start-up’s tool for moving customers off of Microsoft software onto Google’s.
LimitNone filed a complaint in an Illinois circuit court alleging that Google at first began promoting the smaller firm’s tool for migrating Microsoft Outlook customers to Gmail, then copied the idea and went into competition with it.
It sounds as though LimitNone got back-stabbed by Google, but patent laws certainly would not work here. The idea is by no means innovative and the solution not unique (it’s mathematics in the sense that data gets systematically translated). It’s important not to let such cases permit junk patents to exist. █
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06.18.08
Posted in Novell, Google, xandros at 4:51 am by Roy Schestowitz
Con indeed?
Some people dislike Sys-Con because of the hugely-obtrusive advertisements that they push over there. However, it’s possible to only ever link to printer-friendly (and therefore ‘clean’) versions of the articles, many of which are about Novell. Other sites are no friends of Sys-Con due to a particular incident and a specific writer, but the habits of warping press release is nothing new, either. This was noted before in some Saturday postings,
Here is a newly-published press release from Microsoft’s partners at Xandros. (highlighted are examples of similarities)
New Xandros Management Tool Facilitates Red Hat Server Administration
BOSTON, MA–(Marketwire - June 17, 2008) - Red Hat Summit — Xandros, Inc., the leading provider of custom OEM Linux solutions, next-generation Linux desktop and server products, and advanced cross-platform Windows-Linux management tools, today announced the release of the all new Xandros Bridge Ways Management Console for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, to be showcased at the Red Hat Summit in Boston. The BridgeWays Management Console, immediately available as a free download from the Xandros web site, brings powerful graphical management of Red Hat servers to system administrators who may have Windows Server skill sets, but no prior Linux experience.
Watch how Sys-Con turned it into Xandros publicity, merely by tweaking the press release.
Xandros Management Tool Facilitates Red Hat Server Administration
Xandros announced the release of the all new Xandros BridgeWays Management Console for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The BridgeWays Management Console, available as a free download from the Xandros web site, brings powerful graphical management of Red Hat servers to system administrators who may have Windows Server skill sets, but no prior Linux experience.
It might be worthwhile to keep an eye on Sys-Con publications in the future, if only just to keep track of ‘reused’ press releases. This is not an isolated incident.
What was already alluded to (albeit very briefly) a week ago is the fact that Sys-Con might be messing about with Google News results, using keyword saturation. Maybe it’s not deliberate, but the site did once vanish from Google News (for about a year) until just recently. An anonymous source suggested to us that it’s worth informing Google. Completely unrelated articles show up where they do not bear any resemblance to the search query.
It ought to be noted that reproducing press releases is fine, but rewriting them and presenting them as though they are article (original work) is a separate and problematic subject. Apparently it’s more of a problem in Japan too, based on the opinion of those more familiar with legal issues. █
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06.03.08
Posted in Formats, Red Hat, Microsoft, GNU/Linux, Novell, SLES/SLED, Deals, OpenDocument, Open XML, IBM, Google at 10:56 am by Roy Schestowitz
Solution? Collaboration? With Novell?
The relationship between IBM and Novell has always been an interesting one. It’s perplexing. IBM supported Novell’s acquisition of S.u.S.E. and later attended and endorsed the deal with Microsoft, which is a big rival of IBM. Despite this, its VP of Open Source and Standards is far from fond of Mono and he sticks with Red Hat or Ubuntu on his desktop (well, a laptop in practice).
Reader Gopal has altered us about a release of Symphony and now comes this press release, which Chris Ward would probably care about because its targeted at the British crowd.
IBM, Novell Offer A Microsoft-Free Desktop To UK Users
The so-called IBM Open Collaboration Solution uses open document format, or ODF-based software, running on Suse Linux, a version of the Linux open-source operating system software owned by Novell.
Why SUSE? Could they have moved away from Red Hat (Open Client) after their changes of plans? Or are these totally separate ’solutions’ (very bad word in the context of Free software)? There’s room for research here because IBM did announced something around August last year (LinuxWorld) about a proprietary collaboration framework that would be built on top of SUSE. We have it somewhere in this site’s archives.
Either way, it’s a step in a positive direction for ODF only assuming it does not cannibalise adoption of software like OpenOffice.org, which is not proprietary.
There are other emerging threats to Microsoft Office and thus to uptake of OOXML. Among them you now have Adobe, not just Google, Zoho and their counterparts that rely more on Web standards and JavaScript. Here you have a new video that explains Adobe’s plans.
CNET’s Charles Cooper and Elsa Wenzel discuss the new beta release of Adobe Acrobat, which will compete with Microsoft and Google.
Adobe Flash is required in order to watch this video about Adobe. It’s not so egocentric if you consider the fact that Microsoft is now publishing videos on its own Web site as Silverlight objects. It’s trying to seed adoption. █
“I’d be glad to help tilt lotus into into the death spiral. I could do it Friday afternoon but not Saturday. I could do it pretty much any time the following week.”
–Brad Silverberg, Microsoft
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06.01.08
Posted in Microsoft, GPL, SUN, Google, FOSS at 12:10 pm by Roy Schestowitz
The open source validity index
MilkingTheGnu.org (MTG) has just officially announced a new project/initiative. It is called Equitable Open Source (EOS).
EOS comes after a recent suggestion which was brought up and cited very broadly by anxious or curious members of the open source crowd. To give a rough idea of what it might be all about, here is part a comment that I left in MTG’s blog just over a week ago:
Over the past few years I’ve learned, based on very many articles and rants, which companies are open source/FS fakers and which ones are not. That’s one index we/you could set up.
Another one that comes to mind is vendors (software *and* hardware) that are Linux-hostile/friendly.
That first index [free software credibility index] has become quite a popular one for those who do not know who’s who. In the earlier days I used to just ask PJ, who knew the journalists’ history.
I add not based on single incident[s], but based on recurring patterns (like gauging speed to identify speedy drivers based only on a *sample* of incidents).
MTG, which seems to be looking into a Wiki to sort this out, explains the rationale for this.
…this also resulted in a situation where the balance of power has somewhat shifted from community-centric to commercial-induced interests.
And since commercial interests don’t always correspond (why would they?) to the spirit and the principles of free and open source software, there is a need to balance more equitably commercial and community interests through new initiatives.
There are many examples of the problem that MTG is aiming to address. To give 2 examples which were posted in Tux Machines a few hours ago (both related to Mozilla Firefox):
Are your Firefox extensions proprietary software?
In the last-post, I went through the most popular Firefox extensions and talked about whether they were good ideas or not. However, it seems that not a lot of people think about another side to this, i.e. what are your Firefox extensions licenced under?
It turns out that a lot of the extensions available through Firefox are not free/open source software at all.
One example is the StumbleUpon Extension.
[…]
For example, here are five popular extensions that are free software/open source:
* Firebug: Mozilla Public License 1.1
* Flashblock: Mozilla Triple Licence (MPL 1.1/GPL 2.0/LGPL 2.1)
* AdblockPlus: Mozilla Public License 1.1
* FireGPG: Mozilla Triple Licence (MPL 1.1/GPL 2.0/LGPL 2.1)
* NoScript: GPL
Eventually, after a bit of digging and Googling, I found their Toolbar-License and guess what? Yes you guessed it, it is proprietary software. So if you want to run free software/open source, then get it off your system now!
Firefox 3 RC1 forces you agree to EULA before usage
While Mozilla has had a EULA since Firefox 1.5 or so they have never brazenly shoved it into the end-user’s face until now. It immediately set me on edge because this behavior is indicative of proprietary software and not something you would expect to see when using something that is open source.
It seems likely, based on MTG’s previous and recent admission, that this Equitable Open Source push was inspired by an index that we have in this Web site.
It will be a pleasure to have a reference (and service) such as that which MTG tries to establish. It comes at a good time because only an hour ago one reader reminded us of Sun’s likely motives in entering “open source”.
Another reader has been repeatedly suggesting that we set up the IRC channel, #boycottnovell, now that the site attracts enough people to drive well over a gigabyte in traffic per day. █
Related readings:
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05.30.08
Posted in Microsoft, Windows, GNU/Linux, Deception, GPL, Google, FOSS at 5:15 am by Roy Schestowitz
Google disregards the AGPL and, as everyone knows, Google Does-No-Evil™, so…
Google loves Free software on its servers. Giving back improvements? Not so much. This continues to be a problem that we mentioned here before [1, 2]. At the moment, Google’s Stein, who is a high-level senior, seems to be doing some damage control. Watch the discussion.
Well, actually, there’s another rather important trend that is conspicuous by its absence: adoption of the Affero GPL. To which Google seems strangely allergic….
But that’s not all. The other day, Google did what it’s exceptionally skilled at protesting against. It made some nifty Web-based features available, but only for Windows (mind highlights in red).
Hypocrisy?
Google’s 3D data has escaped the client and is now a welcome addition to the browser! Today at Google I/O a Google Earth Browser plugin is going to be released. With the plugin installed anybody with a Windows machine will be able to view Google Earth mashups in the comfort of their own browser instead of having to pull up a separate client.
Google could use a gentle reminder here. It was also using ActiveX controls in Google Maps a few years back. You can find my comment and one from DiBona too in the post above. Sympathy is not enough. That’s the same argument which individual Microsoft employees use to defend themselves, passing liability to their superiors. As in, “it came from above.”
Disclaimer: There’s no bias against Google here. The company’s recruiters approached me a couple of times for interviews. I also needed to correct them when they claimed Google Earth to be their ‘innovation’ (it’s an acquisition really). █
“The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity”
–Andre Gide quotes
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05.24.08
Posted in Finance, GNU/Linux, Novell, Opensuse, KDE, Google at 1:55 am by Roy Schestowitz
Another week went by and the OpenSUSE project has made further progress towards 11.0. Here are some highlights.
Development
Development news, as always, you can find in the OpenSUSE Web site, but our accumulation is totally separate and independent from it. Every Saturday we try to be gentler because of the nature of OpenSUSE.
In this week:
* Announcing openSUSE 11.0 Beta 3
* People of openSUSE: Wolfgang Koller
* Status Updates
* Duncan Mac-Vicar P.: The greatest unknown openSUSE 11.0 package management feature
* Lukáš Ocilka: Function Keys in YaST ncurses Frontend
* andi.opensuse-id.org: KDE 4.0.4 on openSUSE 10.3
The image on the left is GPL-licensed and it’s from YaST, which is still being worked on heavily. Here is a small progress report — with visuals — of the redesigned YaST expert partitioner.
An item that was also picked by OpenSUSE Weekly News is this one from Duncan, which speaks of an “unknown openSUSE 11.0 package management feature,” to use his own words.
During the development of openSUSE 11.0, we have been reporting in real time cool improvements like the fast installation, how YaST became sexy, how YaST/ZYpp/zypper became fast, how YaST/ZYpp/zypper performs better than others and even that our solver is also really smart.
Bugs
Zonker called for help with bug management.
Attention openSUSE users and contributors! It’s time to exercise your vote and help the openSUSE team identify the bugs that need to be squashed prior to the openSUSE 11.0 release. On May 22nd, we’re having a bug voting day to help ensure we identify the most troublesome issues in Bugzilla under openSUSE 11.0.
The resolvability of bugs was covered in Softpedia also, but not in the very same context.
openSUSE 11.0 Beta 3 Resolves Over 700 Bugs
The third and last beta version of openSUSE 11.0 was announced last night. Beta 3 fixes over 700 bugs, adds some new artwork and a few updated packages.
People
Last week’s person of openSUSE was Wolfgang Koller, whom you can learn a little more about.
While some are preparing their fly to Austria to attend EURO 2008, ‘People of openSUSE’ already flew but rather to meet Wolfgang Koller - founder of SuSELinuxSupport community and author of some nice KDE applications such as KTrafficAnalyzer.
Funding
The press release about Google’s Summer of Code was mentioned last week, but here are a couple of articles that covered it a little later. The first one shows that some of the output will be of general use to more GNU/Linux distributions (not just SUSE).
The projects funded by Google are as follows:
* LTSP GUI Management for openSuse by Jan Weber (mentored by Jigish Gohil)
* Interactive Crash Analysis by Nikolay Derkach (mentored by Jan Blunck)
* Face-Based Authentication by Rohan Anil (mentored by Alex Lau Chun Yin)
* Grub4ext4: Enable ext4 File System as Boot Partition by PengTao (mentored by Coly Li)
[…]
Timothy Prickett Morgan has a summary of recent developments, including the above.
Novell Buys $100 Million in Shares, Joins Google Summer of Code
Commercial Linux distributor Novell said last week that its board of directors has authorized the company to head on down to Wall Street with a couple of bales of cash to buy up shares of the company’s stock in a effort to bolster the shares and boost per share earnings growth calculations in the coming quarters. Novell also announced that search engine giant Google is funding some openSUSE projects as part of its Summer of Code donations back to the open source community.
We wrote about the buybacks in [1, 2].
Reviews
Every week there are a few people who write about their experiences with stable versions or development versions of OpenSUSE. Here is one such experience, which is largely positive
OpenSUSE is another awsome linux, other than the few i blogged about earlier ( Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, .. ).
The best part of OpenSUSE is its installation procedure. It really rocks.
Here is a more negative one.
I downloaded the Ubuntu CD image, burned it to a disk, swapped the hard drives and booted the CD. Less than an hour later the installation was finished, and it was up and running. I have tried this several times before, most recently with SuSE Linux, and this one the first time that it seemed to have gotten all of the major laptop devices and configurations figured out properly. I’m impressed.
Here is a comparison.
Arch has taught me so much and I will go back to it one day. For now, I plan to decide between three popular KDE distros - openSUSE, Kubuntu and Fedora. The desktop environment of choice? KDE 4.0.
[…]
openSUSE 10.3 :
* Use of the Aya plasma theme with new artwork rocks.
* YaST uses an Oxygen icon theme which suits it.
* Firefox doesn’t look that ugly even without the gtk-qt-engine for some reason.
* Only KDE 4 applications present.
* YaST installer messed up my GRUB for some reason; took a while to fix.
* Printer setup was fine.
* Slow YaST (since this is 10.3) makes me wait eagerly for 11.0.
Lastly, here is a test drive of the development build.
In Satuday evening I tried KDE Live on VMWare environment before playing with the DVD iso. Surprised, it was worked flawlessly, running well without problem including Live installation. I don’t know why the LiveCD worked without problem on VMWare workstation but having problem on physical machine. I assumes that it would like the problem with the iso burned on CD, not with iso itself, so I take another blank disc and burned the kde live iso once again.
OpenSUSE’s KDE side in 11.0 will be an interesting one to watch. A lot of the latest Qt is incorporated and last week’s news from Nokia (about mobile Linux) elevates hopes that the company will take Maemo further, maybe at the expense of Symbian. Might Nokia change its mind and let Qt maintain more focus on the desktop? It seems safe to at least remain hopeful.
KDE is moving fast! █
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05.19.08
Posted in Microsoft, Finance, Novell, America, Courtroom, Antitrust, Google at 11:49 pm by Roy Schestowitz
“We need to slaughter Novell before they get stronger….If you’re going to kill someone, there isn’t much reason to get all worked up about it and angry. You just pull the trigger. Any discussions beforehand are a waste of time. We need to smile at Novell while we pull the trigger.”
–Jim Allchin, Vice President, Microsoft
They say that regulation is needed to ensure that the Trust is every now again weakened or dissolved. While a new target for severe anti-trust action seems to be Intel (we will not focus on this here), Microsoft seems to be gradually undoing its own business not due to regulation, but due to its own failures and “hubris-infected” leadership. Let’s recap some timely interesting figures.
When you assess the financial state of Microsoft (MSFT), then you are rather likely to think about the value of the stock, but it rarely tells the full story. It merely represents the combination of public and potentially private holdings in the stock. Chairman Gates has been loosening his grip on MSFT for the past 2 years, based on reports that were published after obligatory disclosures. It’s a gradual process, which is also mandatory for one with a personal stake in the company (prevention of inside-trading and the likes of that).
“Chairman Gates has been loosening his grip on MSFT for the past 2 years, based on reports that were published after obligatory disclosures.”Watching the graphs of MSFT, you will most likely miss a very important factor and a hidden ingredient. It was only mentioned in isolated places in the press way back in 2006. One would need to at least point out that Microsoft has been pumping approximately $36,000,000,000 of its own savings into its own stock since then. It’s important because it means that real investors have been departing. If they didn’t, the stock would go up through the roof. The stock, therefore, does not tell the truth and it’s not a function of might.
Assume that we’ve agreed that the stock says too little. It’s not an encouraging sign. But that’s not the whole story. The degradation, as recently described even by Cringely, affects other forms of financial balance. Microsoft has been left with just about $26 billion the bank (Apple is a close second this latest technology survey) and it has also lost $30,000,000,0000 in terms of market cap since February, which is when the bid for Yahoo was made. If Microsoft buys significant portions of Yahoo (and returns money that investors expect), it could find itself in debt.
The company’s grip on its core business is evidently slipping too. That’s where long-term hopes continue to reside because newer businesses (or separate divisions) generally lose heaps of money. Had they been an isolated entity, they would have gone bankrupt by now. One of the latest noticeable articles about the key issue was published some hours ago and it states:
I call it the “tyranny of the installed base.” I saw plenty of it when I worked at minicomputer Data General in the 1990s. Customers want bug fixes and enhancements to their existing products–even if it’s some legacy database that fewer and fewer people used with each passing year. The result is that lots of resources get sucked into supporting the “old stuff,” leaving that much less energy, money, etc. for the “new stuff.”
But the real issue here is more insidious. A company, especially a public company, can’t really “Just Say No” to that installed base and tell them to take their business elsewhere. Imagine if you would this scenario: Ballmer wakes up next Monday morning after having an epiphany over the weekend. He walks into Redmond, tosses a few chairs for emphasis, and announces that Microsoft is going to immediately discontinue selling and developing its Windows operating system and Office products because they’re mired in the past and have become too much a distraction from what’s really important–its online services business.
The point to be made here is that one needn’t necessarily rely on regulators alone. The market is able to see the abuses and — in accordance — raise its nose in the face of Microsoft’s offers. Just watch the retorts of Yahoo!
Moreover, Microsoft’s stubbornness in this dilemma, where it struggles keep its cash cow’s expansion (similar to Novell’s dilemma), turns out to be rather suicidal because it leaves the door open for competitors in tomorrow’s generation of software.
By all means, none of this will ever change the fact that Microsoft has abused and corrupted. It carries on to this day. It has all been learned and filed, no matter how much denial and history-rewrite attempts are being made. Bill Gates wants to control the museum of computing, but he can be trusted as much as leaders that spread self-glorifying sculptures of themselves around town. And then there’s the 10-year anniversary of a significant court ruling that brought a gold mine or a treasure trove filled with smoking guns.
When the government and 20 states filed their antitrust lawsuit, they charged Microsoft with exerting a ‘’choke hold'’ on rivals while denying consumer choice.
The lawsuit we filed today seeks to put an end to Microsoft’s unlawful campaign to eliminate competition, deter innovation, and restrict consumer choice. In essence, what Microsoft has been doing, through a wide variety of illegal business practices, is leveraging its Windows operating system monopoly to force its other software products on consumers.”
That reads like a blast from the past. I spent the better part of two years watching lawyers for Microsoft and the trustbusters argue before the bench. Beyond the day-to-day, though, this was fundamentally a debate about the future of the desktop at a time when the Windows operating system was under challenge from the Internet.
Bill Gates and his closest managers truly feared what would happen to Windows if Netscape’s browser became the preferred conduit to the Internet. The court ultimately found Microsoft guilty of predatory behavior, but the company avoided potentially crippling, worst-case sanctions.
For more information about Microsoft’s slightly older market abuses, there’s always Groklaw’s brilliant coverage and accumulation of exhibits. █
Recent news:
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« Previous entries ·
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.