11.10.10

Quick Mention: Microsoft is Suing Over RAND

Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, RAND at 5:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: ‘Thief’ turns to whiner and bully as Xbox suffers the losses of defects and sales below production costs

JUST WEEKS ago Microsoft decided to sue Motorola over the use of Linux in Android (FAT). Now they sue Motorola over RAND, which mobbyists have been trying to tell us we should simply accept. This is breaking news that we’ll cover later. Here are the articles we’ve found about it so far:

What a bunch of bullying hypocrites. This is part of the legal fight which Microsoft started last month because it cannot compete fairly based on technical merit. Mobbyists already spin it in Microsoft’s favour. There’s nothing they won’t say to defend Microsoft’s racketeering [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. They try to normalise it. █

Share this post: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

Permalink Mail Send this to a friend

If you liked this post, consider subscribing to the RSS feed or join us now at the IRC channels.

Pages that cross-reference this one

4 Comments

twitter said,

November 10, 2010 at 9:58 am

It’s hard to tell what is going on because most of those articles have few details and put a Microsoft spin on the events. The articles make it look like there has been a change in licensing terms between Microsoft and Motorola, which “RAND” allows if it’s applied to everyone at the same time, but that Motorola somehow arranged things to harm poor little Microsoft while making it look fair. The Inquirer has a link to Microsoft’s filing, but they put it at Scribd, which does not work with the free software in Debian stable and requires an obnoxious registration for download. Hopefully, some real reporters will do some real research and we will get the facts of the story instead of Microsoft press releases soon. If Microsoft is still Microsoft, what they have done is simply quit paying long standing obligations to Motorola to “cut off their oxygen” and bully the company into submission or bankruptcy.

Dr. Roy Schestowitz Reply:
November 10th, 2010 at 10:13 am
Scribd has moved off Adobe Trash [sic] and now requires JavaScript, I think. It would be nice to see what Microsoft’s claim is all about once the spin is removed (peeled off).

twitter Reply:
November 10th, 2010 at 11:19 pm
I don’t think so. Iceweasel in Debian stable gives me the outline but no document. It’s nice that I can search the text that I can’t see, but I’d rather read it. Konquer 4.4.5 is handed the message:

Hello, you have an old version of Adobe Flash Player. To use iPaper (and lots of other stuff on the web) you need to get the latest Flash player.

They use Trash to restrict readers. On top of that, they require their own or a Facebook registration for download. I’ll pass on both. People should use their own servers, Google or just about anyone but Scribd to share important documents.

NotZed Reply:
November 11th, 2010 at 1:47 am
Weird i used it the other week to try to read something I couldn’t find anywhere else – i have flash installed but disabled on this browser config.

It’s horrible – really really slow, and the text isn’t really formatted properly. #@$#@ web 2 nonsense. I have a perfectly capable application that reads formatted documents, why force me to use some shitty web app?

It seems i created an account to try to download the document i was reading, but you can’t do that till you upload another one. But the document i was reading was a standard – i.e. not for public distribution, so their whole system appears to be based on copyright infringement anyway.

Just deleted my account … now when i go to the front page I get the raw XHTML.