08.10.08
Posted in Law, Microsoft, Antitrust, Vista, Wikipedia at 5:37 am by Roy Schestowitz
One reader has contacted us asking for attention to be brought to the following document, which is compressed and thus not easily accessible to search engines.
“Here’s another which is good to have handy. You’ll probably want to track down the original,” he writes, pointing to:
http://www.kegel.com/remedy/archive/fullstory/vaporwre.PDF.gz
http://www.kegel.com/remedy/archive/fullstory/vaporwre.html.gz
“I [was] commenting in 1995 [while] talking with a co-worker about vaporware screwing up the market and wanted to study it. It seems from the above that someone else got paid to do just that. It would also be good to have handy an itemized list with the items Microsoft has promised enough to hobble competition but failed to deliver, like WinFS for example.”
We have covered several examples of Microsoft vapourware before. It’s endemic. Here is a very partial list that will surely grow over time:
Some of the posts above contain antitrust exhibits which back the assertion that Microsoft does this deliberately. “Midori” and “7″ are good example of the vapourware du jour.
“We have covered several examples of Microsoft vapourware before.”We have asked the reader if the document can be disseminated better, and if so, how. He asked about our readership and, well… it depends on the statistics package. Webalizer says 60,000 hits per day, or about 15,000 Web pages on average. We flush the logs every night though, for privacy reasons.
As the above seems to be a court record, it can be appended below (uncompressed). but it would be best to be able to prove the provenance of the document. “Best of all would be to be able to point to a government web site with the same content,” our reader adds. Can anyone help identify the source?
“There also might be some finding of fact material which might have more weight. This appears to be the complaints against Microsoft,” the reader concludes. █
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03.15.08
Posted in Microsoft, Novell, Wikipedia, Fraud at 2:20 am by Roy Schestowitz
This last installment deals with various Novell-related news that can’t be fitted anywhere else.
Novell’s Jeff Merkey
Wikipedia deals with a controversial story of drama and misconduct. In thus latest episode, Wikipedia suffered a major blow after this incident involving an indirect exchange of money. Jeff Merkey (of “Novell fame”) and Jimmy Wales come under the radar.
The toughest two weeks of Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales’s career just became a whole lot worse, with a former chief scientist at one of the world’s biggest technology companies claiming Wales traded Wiki edits for donations.
Jeff Merkey, a former computer scientist at Novell, claims Wales told him in 2006 that in exchange for a substantial donation from Merkey, he would edit his uncomplimentary Wikipedia entry to make it more favourable.
Novell, Novacoast and Other Partners
A Novell Platinum Partner, Novacoast, acquires a company.
Bill Long, President of Integrated Network Systems, commented, “We look
forward to becoming part of the Novacoast family and are eager to continue
and grow our relationship with Novell. This partnership will provide us
access to greater resources and expertise in order to grow our business and
provide a broader range of solutions and expertise to our customers through
Novell product offerings.”
Tim Wolfe, North American President of software manufacturer Novell,
Inc., said, “The growth of Novacoast into these new markets is good news
for Novell and our customers. Novacoast is one of our top solution partners
in North America and Integrated Network Systems has been a strong Novell
partner in the Gulf Coast for over a decade. The merging of these two great
partners will result in a broader adoption of Novell technologies into new
and existing customers. It’s great to see our partners successfully growing
their business by partnering with Novell to develop world-class solutions
to their customers’ business problems.”
Another Novell (and Microsoft) partner, Warren Wyrostek, writes about certifications, including Novell’s.
If you have ever taken a Novell exam, a Microsoft exam, a Cisco exam, and/or a CompTIA exam, you probably have been told to answer the questions on the exam the way the given vendor wants you to answer the questions.
Don’t worry if the answer is ridiculous; if you want to get certified, give the Novell answer, or the Microsoft answer, or the Cisco answer, or the CompTIA answer. For the same question, each vendor could potentially have different correct responses. This is maddening at best.
Customers and Products
Novell’s software sneaks its way into Corpus Christi.
The City of Corpus Christi chose Touchpaper primarily for its ITIL expertise, and its tight integration with Novell desktop management tools and CiscoWorks Network Management.
GroupWise gets a hand with another new software integration.
Omni Technology Solutions Inc. (Omni) www.omni-ts.com and The Long Reach Corporation, www.infoathand.com, announced the immediate availability of Riva GroupWise Integration for info@hand.
Riva GroupWise Integration for info@hand provides transparent, server-side, bi-directional synchronization of appointments, tasks, notes and contacts between info@hand Customer Relations and Business Management (CRBM) and Novell GroupWise. Opportunities, quotes and cases are synchronized from info@hand to GroupWise. The Riva ConnectBar™ allows users to open info@hand opportunities, quotes and cases directly from their GroupWise clients. There are no modules to install on the info@hand CRBM server, on the GroupWise server or on the GroupWise clients.
That’s about all for this week. Next week will be busier and nosier because of BrainShare. █
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02.01.08
Posted in Microsoft, GNU/Linux, Novell, FOSS, Wikipedia, BSD at 5:44 am by Roy Schestowitz
Yahoo and Microsoft: friends or rivals?
Yahoo’s relationship with Microsoft is similar to that of Novell and Microsoft. Reminder yourself of our long criticism of Yahoo for political censorship and also censorship against BSD, open source and Linux. The context in which this was mentioned might seem odd. We pretty much praised a Yahoo Vice President for his description of the patent troll epidemic. The fact remains that Yahoo inappropriately handles information.
Yahoo has remained quiet about this issue for several months. Nonetheless, since deafening silence can be more damaging than acknowledgment of an issue, Yahoo finally issued a response to rising criticism of its censorship (I am partly responsible for this by the way). Here is it from The Inquirer:
FOLLOWING OUR STORY, entitled Yahoo caught censoring Open Sauce, some time ago, Yahoo!’s spin machine got in touch to clarify the situation.
[…]
“The Answers incident whereby the user’s response was removed is un-related to our thoughts on open source. The removal was due to human error, and we have since reinstated the answer.”
This happens to have made the headlines several months after I had put it at the front page of Digg.com, most probably because I lifted it again from the grave, Matt Asay then blogged it (he reads my comments) and the Inquirer quickly picked it up the following day. Here is Matt Asay’s entry:
Slated is suggesting that Yahoo! is censoring out open source on its Answers service. Apparently some suggestions that people try Ubuntu, among other things, have been marked as a “violation of…Community Guidelines or Terms of Service.”
Slated is a friend of mine and apparently, Wikipedia’s article on “Yahoo” now contains the relevant reference too (according to an E-mail I received just hours ago).
Some might say that Yahoo is a scapegoat here. Could mischievous moderators be the reason for those erased posts that speak about Free software? The rumours about a Yahoo-Microsoft takeover returned to light recently. Examples from the news:
Yahoo’s woes also may create pressure on its board to mull a possible sale to a deep-pocketed suitor like Microsoft Corp., which hopes to make more money from the online advertising boom.
Microsoft and Yahoo reportedly held informal discussions about a partnership last year before Yang — one of Yahoo’s biggest shareholders — became CEO.
Also this: Yahoo’s troubles spur new talk of a buyout
Will the company sell its soul and assets to Microsoft, with which it is already quite the partner? It is a worrisome thought, but I have been steering clear off Yahoo for almost a year when rumours first emerged about concrete negotiations between the two companies. At the time, Terry Semel was at the head of the company. And lookie here! Just yesterday Terry Semel completely disengaged from the company. Complete coincidence or complete collapse?
Terry Semel stepped down as Yahoo Inc.’s chairman Thursday, severing his ties with the slumping Internet icon 7 1/2 months after he resigned as chief executive under shareholder pressure.
What news was soon to follow? Watch this very new blog post:
Microsoft Calls Out To Yahoo Employee(s)
[…]
A member of Microsoft’s marketing staffing team has apparently sought out at least one Yahoo worker with a “we’d like to chat” message.
Wonderful! As we saw some days ago, those “chat” are a prelude to trouble [1, 2] (the same goes for Novell as we showed last week). Microsoft could truly use some staff in its Web-related division where it has been suffering a major financial blow and a major staff exodus.
But here comes the more worrying bit. A week ago we mentioned possible censorship at Google. If you are too lazy (or hurried) to read the whole overview of this issue, be aware that Google has been hiring many former Microsoft employees. These people can now game various algorithms (including search) and hand-pick information/results which are delivered via Google News. There is quite clearly some manual exclusion/selection of feeds. Filtering that is driven by humans is most likely involved to refine SEPRs that reach a large readership (e.g. “linux”, “novell”, “opendocument”, “2008 election”).
Last but not least, be aware that Yahoo seems to be breaking apart (1,000 jobs to be axed) and there is no clear strategic/recovery plan.
The hammer has fallen. Yahoo will finally make the job cuts Wall Street has craved for a long time, before a backdrop of lower profits caused by higher expenses.
Where will all these people end up? And if Microsoft inherited Yahoo’s position in search engines, what information would people receive (Microsoft is already said to be tweaking results to advance its business goal? Oh, Lordy. █
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12.18.07
Posted in Formats, Microsoft, Standard, OpenDocument, Open XML, Wikipedia at 9:56 pm by Roy Schestowitz
Further evidence of the ever-growing support for OpenDocument format just keeps coming and coming. It’s hardly necessary at this stage, but just in case the list of embracers needs updating, consider Wikipedia. From the WikiMedia Foundation:
The third stage, planned for mid-2008, will be the addition of the OpenDocument format for word processors to the list of export formats. “Imagine that you want to use a set of wiki articles in the classroom. By supporting the OpenDocument format, we will make it easy for educators to customize and remix content before printing and distributing it from any desktop computer,” Sue Gardner explained. This work is funded through a US$40,000 grant by the Open Society Institute.
Those who support OOXML are often paid by Microsoft to do this. That includes Novell. It makes this not support, but pseudo-support, of which we see plenty. It’s a question of money, not quality. Let’s repeat a motto:
OpenDocument opens up your documents.
Microsoft’s Open XML opens up your wallet. █
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06.08.07
Posted in Microsoft, Intellectual Property, Patents, Antitrust, Wikipedia at 10:12 am by Shane Coyle
From the saw-it-on-Slashdot Department…
This is utterly insane, forget about responsible disclosure arguments, this company is unabashedly and unapologetically twisting the software industry’s predilection for spurious software patents against itself.
Intellectual Weapons is soliciting vulnerability researchers to submit their discoveries to them, rather than the vendor or even the community, and work to "generate and enforce intellectual property such as patents relating to fixes for newly discovered, private or zero day security vulnerabilities, weaknesses, or technical flaws that you have found. We target the intellectual property against the vendors of the vulnerable products and other security providers such as suppliers of intrusion prevention technologies. You share in the income."
Now, from the perspective of Intellectual Weapons, if (as Microsoft and other software patent cartel members assert) software is indeed patentable, then I believe so are the improvements made to those patented inventions. You may patent an improvement and then license that improvement back to the vendor, or (at least) exclude them from using your patented improvement.
A patent is an exclusionary right. It gives the patent owner the right to exclude others from infringing the patent. That does not, however, necessarily give the owner of the patent the right to exploit the patent. For example, many inventions are improvements of prior inventions which may still be covered by someone else’s patent. If an inventor takes an existing patented mouse trap design, adds a new feature to make an improved mouse trap, and obtains a patent on the improvement, he or she can only legally build his or her improved mouse trap with permission from the patent holder of the original mouse trap, assuming the original patent is still in force. On the other hand, the owner of the improved mouse trap can exclude the original patent owner from using the improvement.
Can you imagine, after having purchased a license for a piece of software from a vendor, having to individually secure additional patent right-to-use licenses for security patches with other entities, if the vendor cannot or will not pay for a distribution license? Or, better yet, an improvement or patch is available but the parties cannot come to terms on licensing, preventing it ever from being distributed at all. Ludicrous.
Like Matthew Aslett had quipped the other day, it appears that Microsoft et al are about to be hoisted by their own (software) patent petard. Unless they can "fix" the system in their favor first, of course.
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01.23.07
Posted in Formats, Microsoft, Standard, OpenDocument, Open XML, OpenOffice, Wikipedia, Fraud at 9:30 pm by Roy Schestowitz
Articles are beginning to appear which describe Microsoft’s pay-to-edit Wikipedia strategy. For further information and for your own ‘leisure’, here they are:
You may find yourself asking, “what does this have to do with Novell?”
This intricate question would be answered by our extensive set of items on this topic. Novell also neatly fits the OpenODF category, although it has done more to damage its adoption, rather than help it. There is a clash of interests here.
When you cannot control the media, control the encyclopedia. It rhymes, too!
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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.