Summary: Reporters wonder if Vivek Kundra (national CIO) can resist the temptation to just hand over government operations to private companies, some of which are abusive and dangerous to sovereignty
THE United States government should ideally deploy Free software, just as it used Drupal and LAMP to redo the official White House Web site. This gives the government full control of the software that it uses, which is crucial. Favouritism to some overpaid people who are hiding behind some company names is not an acceptable practice, especially given that the money comes from taxpayers and the government is often funded by those same companies that it returns favours to (Microsoft funded the Obama campaign for example).
According to this report, “Obama’s $79 Billion Tech Plan May Favor Web Programs”
Watch which companies are being listed:
Microsoft, Google and Amazon.com Inc. are all offering more databases and programs online, allowing customers to curb storage costs. Sharing software and data that way would shrink U.S. storage needs, helping to cut expenses after previous governments spent more than $500 billion on data centers and other technology initiatives in the past decade, Kundra said.
The government is able to employ its own IT staff that will build and maintain systems that are based on Free software. There is no need for a Microsoft or a Google or an Amazon.com. If businesses choose to do trade with them, that’s fine. It’s their choice. But governments are different, they are inherently obliged not to become just an extension of commerce for reasons we won’t go into.
“Steve Ballmer visits the White House a little too much given that he is not a politician (or isn’t supposed to act as one because he was never elected).”As we have already shown, Steve Ballmer visits the White House a little too much [1, 2] given that he is not a politician (or isn’t supposed to act as one because he was never elected). Ballmer and Obama’s CIO may have met at a university recently and Investor Spot now asks: “Will Steve Ballmer’s Microsoft & Obama’s Administration Share A Cloud?”
Now we’ve got Apple’s Developer License Agreement with terms so controlling that developers must seek prior approval from Apple before even commenting on the license itself. We only know this because the Electronic Frontier Foundation snared a copy from NASA via a Freedom of Information Act request (view PDF on the EFF site. Apparently, federal law still trumps Apple’s corporate attempts at secrecy. At least for now.
NASA also appears to have been intruded by Microsoft boosters [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], who in turn use NASA to block/turn away GNU/Linux and BSD users. █
“Open source is an intellectual-property destroyer [...] I can’t imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business. I’m an American; I believe in the American way, I worry if the government encourages open source, and I don’t think we’ve done enough education of policymakers to understand the threat.”
–Jim Allchin, President of Platforms & Services Division at Microsoft
Summary: This post brings together a variety of thoughts and insights into the impact of Novell’s actions, which promote Microsoft and demote GNU
Microsoft-esque and Microsoft-funded/inspired software (see Wiki pages on Mono and Moonlight) continues to fragment and separate the community of Free software users. Recently we saw hostility towards GNU in GNOME [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. It came from the same guy who had started a banner meme to protest against Stallman’s stance on Mono.
Now that the Director of GNOME is a Novell Employee, there are those who believe that if Microsoft decided to buy Novell, it would have even more control over GNOME. From ECT (Linux Insider):
“I [imagine] Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is very pleased with this new direction with Gnome,” wrote Stumbles on Slashdot, for example. “I predict in 5 years, perhaps less, Microsoft will have maneuvered these short sighted individuals to accepting Microsoft to buy Gnome.”
Novell is increasing focus on Mono and its vice president has called developers to program for Microsoft's Silverlight (XAML). He once said that they could “refresh the look and feel of the entire desktop with Moonlight.” He seems to be ignoring the conditions under which access to Moonlight is granted.
Simon Phipps argues that “Microsoft desperately needs a clueful open source leader to fix this stuff.” Put in context:
There is still a strong thread of thought at Microsoft that imagines open source is purely the domain of solitary programmers of private means. This is yet another “covenant” from them that gives no assurance whatsoever to the average FOSS developer. Microsoft desperately needs a clueful open source leader to fix this stuff.
These are unacceptable conditions for Free software users. As one person put it:
Moonlight 2 sounds good but they still need the licensed codecs.
“Covenant” appears to be a marketing term that means:
“If you only do what we say we’ll let you do with our stuff, we think we’ll let you use it. For now, anyways. But we can still take it all back if we happen to change our mind.”
This isn’t a “covenant”; it’s an advert for a “free trial offer”.
derp sarcastically puts it liks this: “thank you for not suing me. MS decided not to persecute #moonlight users.” Later he wrote to me: “best part is that they can break the agreement any time they want. so nothing matters. except for de icaza”
But de Icaza explained to eWEEK that this model was not so “open-source-y.” Yet, he assured readers that “Microsoft’s intention was to expand the reach of Silverlight, but the original covenant was not a good cultural fit.” And, “The new patent covenant ensures that other third-party distributions can distribute Moonlight without their users fearing … getting sued over patent infringement by Microsoft,” he said.
It is possible treat it like freeware, not Free software, but it’s even worse (and there is an expiry date to worry about). Watch this new article bearing the headline “Download New Moonlight For Free!”
rysiek writes “A few days ago, Miguel de Icaza wrote on his blog that the whole of MonoDevelop is now ‘free’ of GPL-licensed code. ‘MonoDevelop code is now LGPLv2 and MIT X11 licensed. We have removed all of the GPL code, allowing addins to use Apache, MS-PL code as well as allowing proprietary add-ins to be used with MonoDevelop (like RemObject’s Oxygene).’”
To say that Microsoft and Novell have a muddy history when it comes to open-source projects and the GPL would be an understatement. Things were looking up, with the release of the open-source implementation of Silverlight, Moonlight 2, last week, but today things took a turn for the worse: Novell has just cut all the open source code from MonoDevelop.
Novell doesn’t just want mainframe shops to put SLES 11 on their boxes and run Linux workloads, it wants them to take the commercially supported Mono clone of the .NET runtime environment and use that to move Windows workloads over to mainframe boxes. So Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Consolidation Suite (SLECS) bundles roll Linux and Mono software together and provide a single support package for the stack.
Along with Mono, I see Ubuntu including this on the live CD as well. Microsoft writes such good software and has such excellent standards that we should all embrace whatever Microsoft wants. Besides they have never done anything that would harm any potential competitor.
So, people in charge of what gets included in Ubuntu, bring it on.
Microsoft just doesn’t change. No matter what they say.
As always the best course is to avoid them. There is no longer any real need to use any of their technology. You may try to convince yourself otherwise, but you are just wasting your time. Rather, look forward and embrace the new world that is before you.
Subject: And let’s not forget the Microsoft trolls..
Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold own companies that buy many patents. They are not bound by any Microsoft covenants. Both of these individuals serve their interests today by working to Microsoft’s benefit.
And note the covenant doesn’t apply to old versions. This pressures existing users to stay on the treadmill investing in Microsoft standards over and over to avoid patent problems from Microsoft.
I’ve read the analyses of the most recent promise, and it’s not good enough. I don’t care how “nifty” people think this new software is, because with that license/promise I’m never going to even look at it.
P.S.: Miguel was, apparently, recently so proud of removing “all GPL components” from MonoDevelop. Makes me quite glad I removed the installation as soon as I noticed it…and all other mono components with it.
Maybe I should say “good riddance” to him… but that’s not ok.
What is better is that Miguel does what he wants and Linux folks do whatever they want. If that means parting ways, I see it as a good thing for both parties.
I really should say to Miguel “goodbye”. And “thanks for all the fish”.
What if Novell starts selling some kind of *BSD? Maybe they can start selling something without the Linux kernel?
In order to dodge the lawsuits, Microsoft would have people convinced that data was rescued, but as The Register points out, such promises turn into a “farce”.
Microsoft played spot the difference over the weekend with statements on Saturday and Sunday that hinted at “steady progress” for the recovery of data its Danger subsidiary lost for many Sidekick customers.
[...]
The fallout was huge and Microsoft scurried to paint a more optimistic picture for Danger’s unhappy customers, at the same time some punters threatened legal action against Redmond and T-Mobile.
According to the above, promises are everything that Microsoft has at this stage and people are meanwhile locked out of their mail, photos, and contacts. Kelly Fiveash writes that “the software vendor hasn’t actually delivered the goods yet. Instead it seems to be pinning its hopes on that old adage that if you say the same thing for long enough, it might eventually ring true.”
Known Microsoft shill Andrew Thomas is meanwhile attacking GNU/Linux and blaming it for this Microsoft failure. He uses TG Daily for his preposterous attack (he also attacks the FSF and Firefox from there). In response to the article of this shill, Groklaw points to this page and adds: “Since folks have been putting out the idea that it was actually Linux’s fault, heh heh, I thought you’d like to know the truth. Danger wrote its own operating system. Proprietary.” It is sad that The Register took the bait from Thomas yesterday.
Another British publication, the BBC, writes about scareware, but ‘forgets’ that it’s a Windows problem.
Online criminals are making millions of pounds by convincing computer users to download fake anti-virus software, internet security experts claim.
Summary: Despite its proven inability to write a secure network stack, Microsoft is approached by Lockheed Martin for the job
AS MANY people are probably aware, Microsoft used (‘stole’) BSD code to implement a TCP/IP stack in Windows. Only recently did Microsoft write its own stack, only to leave Windows Vista readily available to remote hijackers (as far back as 2007) and lately to a remote BSoD (Vista 7 is also affected and hijacking is possible as a result).
Despite this abysmal record with TCP/IP, Lockheed Martin has turned to Microsoft for “improved security” in network protocols. “Irony alert” was sent to use by a reader who says that “Microsoft [is] to reinvent TCP/IP.” He cites The Register:
Arms globocorp Lockheed Martin announced today that it has won a $31m contract from the famous Pentagon crazy-ideas bureau, DARPA, to reinvent the internet and make it more suitable for military use. Microsoft will also be involved in the effort.
The main thrust of the effort will be to develop a new Military Network Protocol, which will differ from old hat such as TCP/IP in that it will offer “improved security, dynamic bandwidth allocation, and policy-based prioritization levels at the individual and unit level.”
“I thought IPV6 was supposed to solve these kind of problems,” comments our reader.
“Through this project, as well as our cyber Mission Maker initiatives, we are working to enhance cyber security and ensure that warfighters* can fight on despite cyber attacks.”
Summary: Major new bug discovered in Apple’s Snow Leopard, showing the dangers of ‘commercial-grade’ software
Forget about Microsoft's Danger. Watch what Apple’s shiny products are up to again. It was initially reported in a Microsoft/Windows fan site, Neowin (and currently spreading its way to news sites).
Reports have been cropping up on the Apple Support forums that users have been losing all their data due to a nasty bug in Snow Leopard, Apple’s latest Operating System. Many users are reporting that all settings are being reset and most data is gone, according to iTWire.
Think your Snow Leopard woes are finally over? Don’t go logging into that Guest account, then. A flurry of reports have surfaced around the web explaining that even an accidental login to one’s Guest account within Snow Leopard could lead to mass deletion of all user files on the primary account, and when we say “mass deletion,” we mean “mass deletion.”
Snow Leopard users have reported that they’ve lost all their personal data when they’ve logged into a “Guest” account after upgrading from Leopard, according to messages on Apple’s support forum.
The bug, users said in a well-read thread on Apple’s support forum, resets all settings on the Mac, resets all applications’ settings and erases the contents of critical folders containing documents, photos and music.
Leopard’s Finder has a glaring bug in its directory-moving code, leading to horrendous data loss if a destination volume disappears while a move operation is in action. I first came across it when Samba crashed while I was moving a directory from my desktop over to a Samba mount on my FreeBSD server.
Normally, assuming no changes have been made to what is being synced, this should take a matter of seconds. Except this time, something unexpected happens. iTunes begins copying several hundred files to your Apple TV. No error message or warning appears. The files just copy as if you had newly added them to Apple TV’s playlists. This is especially odd because you recognize these files as ones that have been previously synced and should already be on your Apple TV.
Depending on how much data needs to be copied, and the speed of your network connection, this recopying can take from minutes to hours.
Making matters worse, the exact same thing may happen again and again, as often as several times a week. It probably doesn’t happen every time you launch iTunes. But often enough to be really annoying.
This was worth posting as means of reminding people that no software is infallible and non-Free software tends to mess up royally, in a way that destroys people’s bread and butter — their personal data. Apple must be having a “Danger moment” this week. █
Summary: Analysis of the impact of the big deal, which may still get blocked
SEVERAL DAYS ago we explained that Yahoo! had been seized from the inside in the sense that people who are loyal to Microsoft escalated up the ranks of the company while those who acted as barriers got pressured outside the company. Technically, it was a proxy fight (see the links at the bottom for necessary background). Linux should protect itself from similar dangers, which for the most part it does, but Novell’s participation in development was never particularly helpful [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8].
“We just lost a search engine by this deal. It’s sad.” –Pamela Jones, GroklawThe following links are mostly ‘borrowed’ from Groklaw, as they very nicely illustrate the stupidity of signing that search deal with Microsoft — a deal which puts terrible propaganda in place of Yahoo! We wrote about many other issues with Bing.
According to APF, Ballmer said : “It is a win-win strategic partnership and it is a win-win deal from my perspective… Together we can create economic value that’s going to benefit Yahoo! shareholders and Microsoft shareholders.”
So why did Yahoo’s stock fall so sharply?
Pamela Jones inquires: “What if you are not a shareholder? We just lost a search engine by this deal. It’s sad.”
This is not final however. That deal may still be blocked based on the following analysis from the Wall Street Journal.
The new Internet-search venture between Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) is likely to face considerable scrutiny from federal antitrust regulators, according to government officials and analysts.
The Justice Department will look at the deal carefully to be sure it doesn’t harm competition by allowing two top Internet companies to team up.
“It’s a tremendous vote of no confidence in Carol Bartz,” said Larry Haverty, a portfolio manager with Gamco Investors Inc. in Rye, New York. The firm manages about $20 billion, including 1.6 million Yahoo shares. “This is anything but a boatload of cash.”
It’s terrible, and it is suggestive that accusations of Bartz “selling out” have a substantial basis to them. It remains obvious who the winner and who the loser is in this deal. Here is how one person put it on the Charlie Rose show.
CHARLIE ROSE: Is this going to work?
STEVEN LEVY: It has a lot of hurdles. I think the upfront money really isn’t the key to Yahoo! The key is, Yahoo! is disbanding their search team, their engineering, and disbanding the team which built their advertising engine to sell ads on search. Now, these happen to be some of the most important aspects of engineering at a company there. And really, if Yahoo! wants to be a top Internet company, it has to have the engineering chops to keep doing that.
So, it’s going to miss out on that. And it will save money by not hiring — having those people to pay, but those are the people you want in your company.
[...]
And the big problem here is that Yahoo! really — they kind of walked away from the most interesting fight on the Internet right now, which is search. And they handed it over to Microsoft for less than any of the previous deals that were on the table. The four real deals that were on the table going back to the $45 or $48 billion offer in February of 2008, the revised search deal that Microsoft offered, which included $8 billion to buy 16 percent of Yahoo! and $1 billion payment for the search part of the business. The Google deal that got squashed, that guaranteed $800 million in revenues. This deal was the worst of all the deals.
To add to those claims about disbanding of engineers, one of our readers warns that “it looks like Microsoft gutted Yahoo and is keeping the outer shell. If PHP and FreeBSD developers were really the target, then this does close to maximum damage because Microsoft was able to eliminate the employment protections in case of buyout.”
Looking back at the past year and a half, this was an ugly saga filled with bullying and cronyism. Yahoo! has only softened because a former Microsoft partner was put in charge of Yahoo! and the board of directors too became saturated with those who were in cahoots with Microsoft. That’s how proxy fights are done (background below). █
Summary: An interesting real-world example of Microsoft’s influence on the press
Microsoft’s use of Free software is a subject that we covered many times before, e.g. in [1, 2, 3, 4]. Hotmail, for example, was running BSD long after Microsoft had acquired it, but how far did a dishonest Microsoft go to deny it? Well, Slated has picked up some old links which nicely fit and explain a newer incident.
The first link he picked is this one where Microsoft admits being a BSD user.
Despite the company’s bitter campaign against open source software, Microsoft continues to use FreeBSD to power important functions of its Hotmail free e-mail service. Much to the chagrin of the folks at Redmond, FreeBSD and Apache continued to run Hotmail for several years after it was purchased in 1997. Microsoft publicly claimed to have removed all traces of FreeBSD last summer, and even published a case study documenting its experiences. Microsoft told BetaNews that solutions such as FreeBSD are in use throughout its IT infrastructure. A spokesperson also clarified the the software giant’s position on OSS technologies, and views on GPL licensing.
Microsoft maintains however, that it is migrating to its own proprietary software and any delays are meant to ensure a positive experience for its customers.
Contrary to recent claims, the popular Hotmail service does not run entirely on the Windows 2000 platform. First reported by the Wall Street Journal, FreeBSD developer Trevor Johnson determined that Microsoft was still using the open source operating system for DNS hosting and also for tracking advertisements. It has also been reported that FreeBSD software components are utilized in Microsoft products, such as Windows 2000. BSD’s TCP/IP stack, a vital communication protocol, is rumored to have been used in several Windows operating systems, enabling users to connect to the Internet.
Slated does not stop there. “The original WSJ article,” he points out, “has mysteriously disappeared, but fragments remain elsewhere.”
Wall St. Journal: Microsoft Uses Open-Source Code Despite Denying Use of Such Software
Lee Gomes, the reporter who wrote the friendly (and curiously MSNBC-edited) piece last week about “Microsoft’s Uphill Battle Against Linux” is back this week with an amplification on Microsoft’s use of open source software:
“Microsoft Corp., even while mounting a new campaign against open-source software, has quietly been using such free computer code in several major products, as well as on key portions of a popular Web site — despite denying last week that it did so.
Software connected with the FreeBSD open-source operating system is used in several places deep inside several versions of Microsoft’s Windows software, such as in the “TCP/IP” section that arranges all connections to the Internet. The company also uses FreeBSD on numerous “server” computers that manage major functions at its Hotmail free e-mail service, whose registered users exceed 100 million and make it one of the Web’s busiest sites.
Microsoft acknowledged its repeated use of open-source code Friday, in response to questions about the matter. Just two days earlier, it had specifically denied the existence of any such software at Hotmail.”
Why is the NY Times so Dumb About Linux and Windows?
The New York Times seems hard-wired to rarely identify any Windows malware as Windows malware, but rather as “computer malware.” They seem to share this illness with other people too, such as researchers and professors. Can it be that all these educated people who make their livings knowing things and uncovering new knowledge really don’t know that there are other computer operating systems besides Microsoft Windows?
Their latest failure at making this distinction is China Orders Patches to Planned Web Filter, and they also missed the real story: since this censoring software is required to be installed on all computers sold in China, does that mean that Mac, Linux, and Unix computers are banned? Because it’s a Windows program.
MSNBC has been caught doctoring copy originating from the Wall Street Journal to make it more favourable to the news channel’s co-owner Microsoft. The changes introduced by MSNBC also had the effect of removing references to Microsoft competitors.
Amongst many fairly harmless edits, designed to improve readability, were some more ominous changes.
The original WSJ report gave a harsh analysis of Microsoft’ offensive against open source software and the GNU General Public License, initiated six weeks ago by Craig Mundie. The WSJ cited Microsoft’s own dependence on open source software, and cited lawyers who were critical of its interpretation of the General Public License.
“Microsoft said that since last summer, Hotmail has been running on both Windows 2000 and the Solaris operating system from Sun Microsystems Inc.,” noted the original copy from the WSJ.
MSNBC amended this to:-
“Microsoft said Hotmail has been running on Windows since last summer.”
By Friday, the original version of the story that appeared in the WSJ had been restored to MSNBC.
“Here’s the best rebuttal I could find,” writes Slated, “although the author still does not actually deny that Microsoft benefited from “freeloading” the BSD code.”
I worked at Microsoft for ten years, most of it on the core Windows NT/2000 (hereafter referred to as NT) networking code. As such I briefly dealt with the Hotmail team, mostly to hear them complain about the lameness of the telnet daemon in NT (a valid point). I do know that when Microsoft bought Hotmail, the email system was entirely running on FreeBSD, and Microsoft immediately set about trying to migrate it to NT, and it took many years to do so. Now it seems that the transition is not complete. Well, what are you gonna do.
[...]
Now, some of Spider’s code (possibly all of it) was based on the TCP/IP stack in the BSD flavors of Unix. These are open source, but distributed under the BSD license, not the GPL that Linux is released under. Whereas the GPL states that any software derived from GPL’ed software must also be released under the GPL, the BSD license basically says, “here’s the source, you can do whatever you want, just give credit to the original author.”
Eventually the new, from scratch TCP/IP stack was done and shipped with NT 3.5 (the second version, despite the number) in late 1994. The same stack was also included with Windows 95.
However, it looks like some of those Unix utilities were never rewritten. If you look at the executables, you can still see the copyright notice from the regents of the University of California (BSD is short for Berkeley Software Distrubution, Berkeley being a branch of the University of California, for some reason referred to as “Berkeley” on the East Coast and “California” on the West Coast…and “Berkeley” is one of those words that starts to look real funny if you stare at it too long – but I digress).
Keep in mind there is no reason to rewrite that code. If your ftp client works fine (no comments from the peanut gallery!) then why change it? Microsoft has other fish to fry. And the software was licensed perfectly legally, since the inclusion of the copyright notice satisfied the BSD license.
To conclude, Slated writes:
Did Microsoft satisfy the BSD license?
Yes.
Are they “freetards”, according to [some] definition?
Yes.
Microsoft and their anti-Freedom supporters are a bunch of hypocrites. Or, to use the words of the above author, it’s “like the event horizon calling the kettle black”.
So when can we expect Microsoft (or even Spider Systems Ltd.) to compensate The Regents of the University of California for “all their hard work”?
IN MY correspondence with Linus last week I attempted to diffuse some friction between GNU/FSF/SFLC and the side which is Linus/OSDL/LF. It is always better to work together where possible, BSD included.
It is rather amusing to find that for the second time in about a month, Linus announced Linux (-rc3) in the mailing lists and calls the kernel “Linus” (in the headline). Here is the latest incident. Surely it’s just a typo or a Freudian slip, not a matter of ego. But to repeat an old joke, Linus said he named two projects after himself (the second one being git, which actually means something in British English). Below we add a video where he makes this statement.
“Surely it’s just a typo or a Freudian slip, not a matter of ego.”Did Miguel de Icaza name his projects after himself too? Right now he conveniently ignores Gnote [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] even when referring to a post which covers it. He also ignored completely (and quite conveniently) the implications of TomTom/FAT for Mono and Moonlight [1, 2]. █
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