I am flattered to see you commenting here, having followed your excellent writings for a long, long time. In almost a thousand posts which the site has accumulated, I hope it has been shown that Microsoft has much greater (and broader) plans, which extend beyond pressuring Red Hat. The EU’s wrath, document formats, IP scare, and even search engines (yes, it turns out that Linspire will also assist MSN, all at Google’s expense) are just some among the many benefits to Microsoft.

On a side note (as before), I have completed my setup of Ubuntu Linux. I use 7.04 now, having used 5.10 and 4.10 in the past. I installed them on two other PCs of mine, which later had SuSE (the pre-Novell era) and Mandriva. Ubuntu Feisty Fawn has been a pleasure that I cannot begin to describe. Writing a review at this stage would be pointless because it has been done thousands of times before. With a 4000-pixel-wide dual-head display, I am prepared to work more efficiently than ever before. In retrospect, the hard drive crash was a blessing. The new one hardware is better.

I talked with Illuminata’s Gordon Haff about this yesterday for our site, and he said pretty much the same thing. I realize that there’s a few posts out there today saying that MS is snatching up all these little guys as some kind of maneuver meant to outflank Red Hat, but from my own reporting and research that’s sounding like a huge stretch right now. Like an astronomical unit kind of stretch. Times ten.

I can however, give you something to think about.

If esr suddenly announces his resignation from a particular board or organization…

You will then know the next zebra to fall.

Let’s start a pool of which wounded member of the herd will be taken down next…

But yeah, not exactly a shocker