The next major version of the GNOME desktop environment, version 3.0, may contain more than the one Mono-dependent application than it currently does, according to GNOME Foundation member Dave Neary.
[...]
Red Hat’s community Linux distribution, Fedora, recently decided to throw out Mono altogether from its default install, and replaced Tomboy with Gnote, a recently created port of Tomboy.
Summary: News that matters, about intellectual monopolies
THIS is another quick rundown through the news. Included below are only reports that have some relevance to Free software in a land of monopolies on thought and applied ideas.
Patent Trolls are an ever-growing threat to global innovation. These IP aggregators purchase low-quality patents and use them as leverage to hijack potential revenue and profits from hardware and software companies, our largest economic driver. This causes entrepreneurs to reconsider launching companies, while CEOs devote more of their time and resources to managing intellectual property. New online and offline tools and services are becoming available to combat Patent Trolls and enable technology companies to focus on their core business.
Also worth a glance are the following new pages, which highlight the impact of patent trolling:
In June 2008, DSC was given the source code to 8 of the accused software products, along with executable copies and operating manuals for the accused products. Despite having this information, DSC did not elaborate further on the PICs.
Ravicher acknowledged that it seems strange for a lawyer affiliated with PubPat—even as a volunteer—to have gone so far as to set up his own patent-holding company and then sued a group of major Internet players.
“Dave, if you were to talk to him, he’d say software patents are good, and they incentivize innovation,” says Ravicher. “Some people can’t be friends with people who disagree with them. But I’m friends with lots of people I have strenuous disagreements with.”
Asked whether he surprised by his friend’s involvement in the business colloquially known as “patent trolling,” Ravicher pauses, and then laughs. “Nothing surprises me these days.”
Software Patents
Microsoft is to pay damages for software patent infringement and Blackboard has just made another pledge, this time to “follow open standards more closely.” Blackboard also made pledges regarding software patents, which it is using to injure its competition.
This week Blackboard’s new head of course-management software, Ray Henderson, sent a letter to customers pledging that the company will do more to follow industry software standards, and to participate more actively in their development.
Backed by Microsoft, Blackboard still threatens Free software using software patents [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8], so its behaviour is worth keeping an eye on.
Over in the UK, IPKat is “Wondering if the questions the EU Council of Ministers want to ask the ECJ about the unified patent litigation system have been made public” and in New Zealand it is a matter of urgency.
URGENT: Unlimited Software Patents In New Zealand. Act Now!
[...]
NZ government is about to pass a new Patents Act. In the 8-year review, they seemingly forgot to consider the impacts of patents on computer software! Submissions on the bill are being accepted till 2 July, so we need to move fast.
In the pro-intellectual monopolies Web site known as Law.com there is this rare criticism of software patents, which “hinder innovation,” according to Daniel Ravicher.
But meanwhile, as Mullin notes, the former Ropes & Gray partner is also working closely to spearhead a litigation project with an old friend, Daniel Ravicher of the Public Patent Foundation–who has publicly proclaimed that software patents hinder innovation. Garrod is helping Public Patent file suits to block products from carrying false patent markings.
Speaking of the Public Patent Foundation, here is a video about it.
Patents other than ones pertaining to software are causing unrest. Some lead to unnecessary deaths [1, 2], whereas others obstruct works of art. It turns out that Michael Jackson has a US patent. It’s a patent on motion and dance moves. Shame on the USPTO for going this far with intellectual monopolies. Here is a patent site that has just called In Re Bilski (business method patents) “a Mess”.
Claim: (Ex Parte Borenstein) A method for providing catalog information for presentation to a user of a store in an electronic commerce system, comprising the steps of . . .
BPAI: while the storage of information in independent claim 1 could arguably be done as a mental process, the recitation of a structured relationship between multiple stores that requires “path information” inherently implies that this information must be stored on a computer or database. This “particular” computer or database is sufficient structure to meet the machine prong of the machine-or-transformation test of In re Bilski. As independent claim 15 recites a computer program product, it is not a method claim that must be analyzed under In re Bilski.
Need anything else be said about ACTA, which takes patents to the extreme [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13]?
EU, US Consumer Groups Issue Resolution On Enforcement; Demand Role In ACTA
An international coalition of consumer groups has issued a resolution calling into question global enforcement policy and offering core principles for policymakers to consider in setting new enforcement standards.
The Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue on 18 June issued the resolution on the enforcement of copyright, trademarks, patents and other intellectual property rights. The TACD is a trade advisory body to the European Union and United States government, and brings together 80 member organisations from those regions, claiming a direct paid-up membership of some 20 million consumers.
Malfunction
As more signs of a system in state of distress (the EPO is already in a limbo [1, 2]), consider the renaissance of patent reexaminations, which are indicative of the granting of patents that should never have been granted in the first place.
Given this, it is certainly no surprise the patent infringement defendants have been using the reexam strategy more and more. The semiconductor field is no different. Two well known patent enforcers in the industry, Tessera and Rambus have seen their patents thrown into reexam by various parties that are the targets of their licensing programs. Furthermore, I have also seen evidence that courts are willing to stay litigation if a quick reexam request is filed in the Patent Office, though obviously this is very judge and district specific.
It speaks about hardware patents, where an ambush harmed the consumer. Nobody wins in this case and the same goes for patent-caused embargoes, such as this latest example:
The U.S. International Trade Commission issued a decision Wednesday that blocks the U.S. import of LCD panels and LCD televisions made by Sharp, ruling that the company violated a patent held by rival Samsung Electronics.
The IEEE is ready to jump into the patent pool game, and it is starting with a call for patents on power over Ethernet.
Via Licensing Corp. will act as administer of the pool. Via announced Monday it will work with the Open Patent Alliance to set up a separate patent pool for WiMax.
Patent pools are a farce and the notion of “call for patents” is ludicrous. What about small companies that have no patents? Can they not participate in the market? █
Summary: An assemblage of new writings that show who is promoting Mono
Yesterday we gave a sample of responses to Richard Stallman’s advice against Mono and C#. The SFLC and FSF are absolutely behind him. It is around the same time that we also find Linux developers scrambling to avoid Microsoft’s VFAT patent. It is a timely reminder of reasons to avoid software from Microsoft. As Bradley Kuhn from the SFLC put it this year, “Microsoft is unique among proprietary software companies: they are the only ones who have actively tried to kill Open Source and Free Software. It’s not often someone wants to be your friend after trying to kill you for ten years, but such change is cause for suspicion.”
Andrew Tridgell has posted a new patch intended to enable the kernel to work around the VFAT patents. Unlike the previous version (covered on LWN in May), this patch preserves the long filename functionality which is at the core of the patent. There’s an associated FAQ which describes the patch and the approach which has been taken in its development and posting.
The Ubuntu technical board appears to have decided that there is no significant cause for IP concern over Mono, the contentious clone of Microsoft’s .NET development environment.
The founder of the Free Software Foundation, Richard Matthew Stallman, has termed Debian’s decision to include Mono as part of its default desktop task a move that “leads the community in a risky direction.”
[...]
Red Hat’s community Linux distribution, Fedora, recently decided to throw out Mono altogether from its default install, and replaced Tomboy with Gnote.
While pro-Mono zealots often claim that it is possible to obtain a royalty-free, reasonable and non-discriminatory licence for the use of Microsoft patents which may be part of Mono, in reality, it is extremely difficult to even find out how one can do so.
Another person, who describes himself as an “intern at Microsoft [who is] writing an extension to the MonoDevelop project,” has just written about this. “Fuck you, Richard Stallman,” screams the headline of his blog post where he complains about Stallman’s stance on Mono. It’s interesting to know that Microsoft is helping MonoDevelop, which helps Windows of course [1, 2, 3]. The foul-mouthed rant also links to libel about me (personal attacks) and about this subject in general. Not bad for proponents of Mono who are also working for Microsoft, eh? At least there is a pattern.
In other news, Tomboy may be getting yet another decent replacement called KeepNote.
Best Linux Notetaking Application
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I know a lot of people out there like to take notes with Linux, and probably didn’t come across this program yet, as it look me a bit googling to find it again. The program is called KeepNote, and is a fantastic program for taking notes. I use it with Dropbox, and store all of my notes there and that way it is synchronized to all of my systems. The program itself is open source and free, and you can support it by making a donation on the homepage.
We wish to end this with an ongoing discussion about licences. It is based on conversations where it has emerged that when it comes to Mono/Moonlight (to quote Novell), “In addition to the GNU LGPL, [Mono] code is available for relicensing for non-LGPL use, contact Novell for details (mono@novell.com).”
According to one of our readers, “this basically means that at your option you can acquire a proprietary license instead of using the LGPL. This is similar to e.g. MySQL or Qt.”
The opinion of another reader is very different. “I’m aware of that,” he says, “but it’s wholly irrelevant to my argument. I am not claiming, nor have I ever claimed, this software is not available under different licenses.
“The point I take issue with is Novell’s interpretation of non-LGPL use, which as I indicated, would preclude LGPL distribution on something as innocuous as a LiveCD. There is absolutely nothing in the LGPL which precludes distribution on inherently immutable systems, so this clause is a “further restriction”, as explicitly prohibited under the LGPL. Therefore Moonlight is explicitly non-Free software, regardless of any potential patent threats.
“Distributing LGPL software on inherently immutable systems is not “non-LGPL use”. Period. Novell’s assertion is a lie.” –Anonymous reader“Non-LGPL use means just that: use under terms other than the LGPL. If you don’t like or don’t want those terms, you can convey those in the LGPL instead.
“Notice they also want to support distribution on tivoized systems, not just inherently immutable ones. But this is not LGPLv3, so such wording is unnecessary. Maybe Novell’s legal department is paranoid, or incompetent (or both).
“Novell need to force, through licensing, distribution of Moonlight in a manner in which they can guarantee it will be updated with a certain specific component that they push to users – something not possible on immutable systems. And on immutable systems, Novell can ensure this mysterious component is either preinstalled, or paid for in lieu anyway (at ISV level), due to their “non-LGPL use” redefinition clause.”
Adds another reader: “Distributing LGPL software on inherently immutable systems is not “non-LGPL use”. Period. Novell’s assertion is a lie.
“The fact than Novell wish to fool people into seeking non-LGPL licensing, where it is totally unnecessary, is quite palpable, but that does not make their assertion true. I don’t care that other licensing is available as an option. I don’t care that I (or others) may distribute and use this software on immutable systems if we/they are fooled into accepting a proprietary license. The fact that “other licenses are available” is completely and utterly irrelevant. Novell is perverting the meaning of the LGPL, and abusing that bastardisation to “sell” the false premise that Moonlight is Free Software, when it clearly is not.
As a last remark, adds one reader: “Guess what that component is, where it comes from, and why Novell “need” Moonlight users to deploy it.
“Yes, that’s right, it’s Miguel de Icaza pushing yet more of their proprietary and encumbered standards down Free Software users’ throats again. Not content with poisoning us with their .NET Silverlight (Moonlight) garbage, they also want to coerce us into accepting their proprietary licensed, patent encumbered media codecs, via a “push” to all Moonlight users to install “MICROSOFT MEDIA PACK 1.0″.
“That is the real reason for all this “we consider non-LGPL use…” nonsense. That is why these systems need to be mutable, so they can install this “media pack” at Microsoft’s behest. De Icaza and friends are simply trying to force people to install proprietary Microsoft codecs. No doubt this is in fact part of the “arrangement” de Icaza has come to with Microsoft, in order that they tolerate this Silverlight “Cloneware” from Novell. Although I deeply suspect that there is little coercion on either side. Novell and Microsoft now have the same agenda.”
Speaking of Silverlight, Microsoft appears to have bought itselfanother contract for excluding GNU/Linux users from yet another Olympic event [1, 2] (or forcing them to install Mono for inferior and risky experience).
He also points out that the Olympics, which are being held in Vancouver, will be using Microsoft’s (MSFT) Silverlight standard, and its Smooth Streaming technology, which he notes the company worked on with Akamai.
“There is a substantive effort in open source to bring such an implementation of .Net to market, known as Mono and being driven by Novell, and one of the attributes of the agreement we made with Novell is that the intellectual property associated with that is available to Novell customers.”
–Bob Muglia, Microsoft President
Addendum: the gentleman who insulted Stallman has expressed regret about it and the statements should not be attributed to Microsoft.
LAST WEEK was the last time we wrote about the T3 lawsuit, having pointed out that it is part of an innovative pattern. Over at Groklaw, in relation to the T3 lawsuit, Pamela Jones wrote: “Microsoft rivals end up defendants in litigation with Microsoft showing up somewhere in the background? How could that ever happen? Kidding. We saw SCO, which also targeted IBM and Linux. Google has been targeted. Apple is getting hammered. Is it coincidence? Or antitrust? Hopefully, we’ll find out someday. But remember when SCO first started and Larry Ellison said about the litigation that Microsoft was innovating? Think of the damage to the economy. No. Really. Think of the loss of productivity, the money that could have gone into jobs not lost, into research and development instead of being wasted on bogo litigation. Look at the SCO saga. Was it legitimate litigation? You tell me. Here’s what Ellison said in 2003 when the news first hit that Microsoft had licensed something from SCO, paying them millions: “Bill [Gates] is innovating. Microsoft has always had incredible innovation. You’ve had advanced bundling, and what you see now is extreme litigation. They have a lot of experience with extreme litigation, actually.” Maybe someday a regulator will take a look at what happens to competitors of Microsoft, and the extreme litigation innovation, as Ellison courageously put it.”
Here is yet another article about the T3 lawsuit — a lawsuit which one of our more apprehensive readers interprets as follows:
Few more details [see] the CCIA press release. They say ground are product tying and interop.
I checked the E.C. DG Competition news site. Nothing there yet about the complaint. Suspect it got filed just before close of business Brussels time on Friday. DG Competition is normally very prompt in cranking out press releases acknowledging receipt of a complaint.
A bit of context. Microsoft is building whopper server farms to rival those being built by Google, Yahoo, Amazon, etc. See e.g., this. What’s driving all that is big-time bets on cloud computing becoming the next big thing, with big money in wheeling data center capacity to big customers on demand. Google, Microsoft, et ilk are building around massively parallel x86 processors. IBM presently has a lock on the mainframe part of the cloud market to be.
Interop in the cloud is emerging as a big deal for customers. They don’t want to be locked into a single cloud service provider. There’s been a lot of talk about it in the trade press but not much progress on developing *software* standards for interop in this area that would enable customers to switch. I don’t know what interop barriers, if any, might exist at the hardware level. But I suspect the gripe is at the software level, perhaps at the server operating system level because IBM has its own operating systems for its mainframes.
But the really big point here is that there’s a whole new major branch of the computing industry emerging with gigantic investments and everyone involved trying to grab early market advantage. This probably won’t be the only legal action that flies out of that struggle.
I might have stated my major point more finely. I doubt that this initiative is just Microsoft retaliating for IBM having instigated the ECIS DG Competitition complaint re the Office software stack. Not that there aren’t people at Microsoft would wouldn’t like a bit of revenge, but I do think this is aimed at the struggle for advantage in the cloud services market.
In relation to another article, Pamela Jones later added: “Ed Black, CCIA’s chief executive, mentioned in the article is the man who received $9.75 million in a settlement with Microsoft in 2004, when CCIA pulled out of the EU antitrust action against Microsoft, leaving FSFE and the SAMBA guys all alone to pursue the matter to a successful conclusion. CCIA got the rest of the $19.75 million settlement money.” █
Summary: Microsoft uses aggressive, dishonest marketing to promote proprietary software that interferes with standards
Microsoft has gone very aggressive in its fight against all Web browsers other than its own [1, 2, 3]. It is a repetition of “Get the Facts” as applied to Web browsers, not operating systems. As Savio Rodrigues puts it:
But this comparison table treats me like a moron, especially when you consider that I’m using Firefox and have pre-existing views on many items on the comparison table. Only IE8 gets a check for security, privacy, and ease of use? Really? At a minimum, Microsoft should have used Harvey Balls to show that the competitors have capabilities, which may not be as strong as IE8. Microsoft could have posted videos that show how easy it is to carry out a common task in IE8 and compare it to Firefox with the relevant add-on installed.
For example: One day last month Cringester D. L. discovered when he logged onto the Net, he couldn’t get to his e-mail or view Web pages. He then enjoyed several quality hours on the phone with Dell tech support, which determined the cause: His daughter had clicked a button and updated the browser to IE8 without telling him. The support tech logged onto his computer remotely and downgraded it to IE7. Problems solved.
After I downloaded IE8 two weeks ago, my Sony audio programs got hung up and wouldn’t load. When I went to the Microsoft and Sony sites and found no help, I decided I didn’t need nuanced improvements to my web surfing, and did a system restore. Oops. Then IEx wouldn’t run at all. Somehow, the update had destabilized somethingoranother. I was out of luck.
Internet Explorer 8 is a very good browser, especially when compared to IE7 and (ugh) IE6. However, it still lags behind most of the other browsers in both performance and standards compliance. That doesn’t seem to bother Microsoft, which has been pushing IE8 using hype that they rarely use even for Windows or Office.
[...]
There is no way that Microsoft can claim anything close to parity with standards compliance of the other major browsers. For example, IE8 retains a non-standard event model that does not get anywhere close to the W3C standard published in 2000. Just a few examples: Form elements don’t bubble events. There is a global event object instead of an event argument passed to the handler. Rather than document.addEventListener, IE uses the non-standard document.attachEvent method.
As the following new article shows, Microsoft lied to the court about IE being impossible to remove from Windows. Microsoft was too busy ‘extending’ the Web in order to turn it into another vector of operating system lock-in. Nothing has changed since. Last week we showed that this serious violation came from Bill Gates himself. He wanted to make E-mail and Web pages dependent on Microsoft Office. People are still furious over this, but Microsoft is ignoring their pleas. From the news:
While it is pretty much the standard email client, Microsoft Outlook has long had problems rendering HTML correctly in emails. And the latest version, Outlook 2010, due sometime in the next several months, doesn’t look like it’s going to be any better — and it actually may be worse. And a lot of users aren’t happy about it at all.
Continuing a decision made in 2007 to render HTML with Word in Outlook, Microsoft confirmed that Outlook 2010 will also use Word. In response to this decision, the fixoutlook.org campaign was created in an attempt to change Microsoft’s mind.
Showing again the power of Twitter for quick social organizing, Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday was forced to defend itself against complaints that its market-leading Outlook e-mail program wreaks havoc on rich-HTML e-mails.
Outlook 2007 and the upcoming Outlook 2010′s use of Microsoft Word to display rich HTML content is to blame, according to blog posts by Dave Greiner, the Sydney, Australia-based organizer of the protest.
There’s been a lot buzz on Twitter about a movement to try and get Microsoft to backtrack on its decision to use the Word rendering engine for HTML based email in Outlook. So far some 22,000 plus Twitterers have heeded the call and visited fixoutlook.org to register their vote on this.
Antitrust regulators should grill Microsoft over it. The motives are crystal clear and they are anti-competitive. Even E-mails that were standards-based (and intended to be a commodity) are being subverted by Microsoft, which deliberately reduces interoperability between mail clients and across operating systems. █
“In one piece of mail people were suggesting that Office had to work equally well with all browsers and that we shouldn’t force Office users to use our browser. This Is wrong and I wanted to correct this.
“Another suggestion In this mail was that we can’t make our own unilateral extensions to HTML I was going to say this was wrong and correct this also.”
Summary: The latest look at marketing hype that surrounds Vista 7
LAST NIGHT we wrote about press coverage that Microsoft was essentially buying. It is no exaggeration to say that the news is driven by money rather than the importance of news. Both Apple and Microsoft have colossal marketing budgets, so in many ways they can be considered marketing companies for mediocre products that they adopt and sometimes build. It’s about branding.
“Among the headlines, “Vista” is seen mentioned only 3 times this week, in conjunction/overlap with Vista 7, which has 44 matches in the headlines.”Windows Vista is hardly covered in the news anymore. We have just looked at 800 Microsoft headlines from the past week (in the same way that we do this every week). Among the headlines, “Vista” is seen mentioned only 3 times this week, in conjunction/overlap with Vista 7, which has 44 matches in the headlines. That is a 15:1 ratio in favour of vapourware, a product which is not even available. So it becomes very clear what Microsoft is marketing out there in the news and which products it prefers not to mention. Free upgrades from Vista to Vista 7 (Windows 6.1) indicate that Microsoft wants to bury Vista and restart afresh.
Speaking of advertising, here is an advertising-oriented Microsoft product which our reader ZiggyFish claims to be a dead product now.
A Microsoft Office spokesperson whom I contacted this week said Microsoft is not building an Office for Advertising SKU.
One of our readers, who goes by the name of Goblin, has carried on experimenting in order to understand how Microsoft manages public perception in Twitter. He draws in people whose role — whether voluntary or not — is to defend Microsoft products and the latest findings are rather amusing. Here is his tease for Vista 7 AstroTurfers.
Too lazy to upgrade to 7?
[...]
Its another one of those general articles that implies there’s great features of 7 but never goes into any real detail. Maybe its posts like his that are encouraging some users to try alternatives? Or maybe those users are, as Mr Hussain says, just ignorant and lazy for daring to be happy with an OS that “just works”?
Mr Hussain would be welcome to come here and justify himself, but I wont ask if he wants a right of reply, I really don’t believe there is anything that can salvage the rubbish he’s posted. (IMO) An excellent reason in my opinion why if you are considering upgrading you should at least try Linux first. It wont cost you anything and it will certainly take you away from a platform that seems to always want to sell you things.
Ive posted on Imran Hussain’s blog, but as is usual in these cases, moderation is in place so the comment doesn’t appear. What are these posters so worried about?
MicroPirates, Censorship & Openbytes to be “ripped apart”?
[...]
Sunday has been rather interesting. I hope you enjoy this light relief, tongue in cheek look at the silliness some will engage in whilst promoting a Microsoft cause. Remember the girlfriend of a faithful MS poster coming here? I can’t promise you anything as funny or tragic as that (it will be difficult to beat) but heres a little entertainment. Today we met some new “characters” in the World of baseless Windows promotion.
As another sign that Vista 7 will disappoint many (and Microsoft knows this), XP availability is extended yet again, making it an operating system that survives for at least a decade due to strong competition from GNU/Linux.
Microsoft Extends XP Downgrade Option Until 2011
We’ve been here one or two times before (read: six times – see links below) but just like a champion who doesn’t know when they are beaten, Windows XP has again had its lifespan extended…
Glyn Moody writes about more reasons why Vista 7 starts on the wrong foot.
Call me cynical, but I don’t think that’s going to wash with the punters. They will rightly see this as Microsoft throwing a pan-galactic strop, and doing all it can to be as nasty as possible to the European Union – forgetting in its rage that the ones it will most upset are those people formerly known as locked-in users.
Except that nowadays, they aren’t so locked in. Improved cross-platform compatibility for apps means that alongside GNU/Linux (admittedly still something of an acquired taste), there’s also Apple’s hardware, which is becoming increasingly popular on the desktop. Or why not simply stick with XP and forget about Windows 7 *just* like everybody forgot about Windows Vista?
People may not recall this, but ahead of Vista’s arrival, the atmosphere in the press was similar. Vista was hailed as the next great operating system and bribed bloggers led to it being praised on the Web. Microsoft spends hundreds of millions of dollars acquiring a warped consensus (it is called “perception management” [1, 2]). It manufactures people’s feelings and thoughts about Vista 7. Many people won’t try it, so they rely on hearsay, a lot of which is either bribed for or simply comes from Windows enthusiasts who install beta software for posing. █
“I receive an e-mail from Julie McCormick at Waggener Edstrom in which she extends a “special save-the-date” invitation to attend a “unique, invitation-only” event being hosted by the Windows Client team. She labels the subject matter as “confidential”…”
MICROSOFT, the world’s leading software manufacturer, has contracted Kampala Associated Advocates to fight software piracy in Uganda.
The reason Uganda was made dependent on Windows in the first place is something that we last wrote about when the BBC published an article covering Microsoft’s colonisation of Africa.
Africans understand to need for autonomy and freedom. As the following new article shows, the Kofi Annan ICT Centre advocates GNU/Linux, but Microsoft is still trying to get Africa (Ghana in this one particular case) to use Windows exclusively. There is a clear reference to MOU, aka "Project Marshall".
Microsoft has been criticised for committing African governments into purchasing its software, denying them the chance to explore other alternatives.
But speaking to Joy News, Mr Iddrisu said government is exploring its options before concluding any such agreement.
“Government has a collaborative relationship with Microsoft to which there is an earlier MOU on the training of public servants in IT skills and IT related matters,” he told Joy FM’s Cobby Graham.
He hinted that his ministry is considering the possibility of using open source as against enterprise software from Microsoft, stressing “We will take a decision which is in the best of our national interest.”
Meanwhile an IT expert at the Kofi Annan ICT Centre, Fred Yeboah, has advocated for the use of open-source alternatives like OpenOffice – a rival to Microsoft Office – and Linux, a competitor to the Windows operating system.
Let it be added that Bill Gates lobbies the UN, probably to have it drop its Free(dom) software favouritism.
An educational software platform consisting of different products from many vendors is the best strategy; it allows for both free and expensive proprietary enterprise products to be used when they are appropriate. It also avoids exactly the kind of lock-in that Microsoft is surely hoping IU falls into by signing this new agreement. If all you know is Microsoft software and your file formats can only be opened by Microsoft software, then what choice do you have but to continue using Microsoft’s products?
My advice to the University administration would be to strongly consider limiting expensive Microsoft deals to Kelley in the future – they’re really the only ones who benefit anyway. Between lock-in, security problems and sheer costs (both upfront and ongoing maintenance and support), everyone loses with a Microsoft-dominated campus.
This is another university that signs a deal with Microsoft — a deal whose purpose to turn students into Microsoft customers. Microsoft is now bragging about this in a press release, neglecting to mention that Live@edu involves bribes to those whose academic institutions they hand over to Microsoft. It is a vicious, vicious strategy. Regulatory authorities ought to look at it. █
