WE may have some updates regarding the Tuxera situation [1, 2, 3] which continues to be covered in the news.
"We came to Redmond to have an agreement, and in the end that is what we got. Three days of meetings and talking." Even Microsoft was impressed by the eagerness with which an open source firm wanted to close a deal with them: "After we had signed, someone from Microsoft asked: 'Have we ever done a deal so quickly?' 'I don't think so,' was the answer."
What is exFAT and why should you care? Because the SD Card Association made exFAT the standard file system for the new SDXC cards, and because exFAT is a Microsoft filesystem that claims to be like so totally interoperable, but it isn't.
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So it's business as usual in Redmond. Never mind all the fine talk about interoperability, Job One is still controlling the entire tech industry and erecting as many toll gates as posssible. Why not use something like ext2, which it seems to me is a good candidate for a low-overhead fast embedded filesystem? It minimizes writes, supports file sizes up to 64 TiB, and supports different block sizes so you tweak it for your particular application. But good heavens no, because that would require adding a driver to Windows, and even worse would not gouge money out of everyone. No, the MS way is to force a new closed proprietary standard and make everyone else dance to their tune. Ah well, it's economic stimulus in a way, by mandating makework industry-wide. Very innovative.
TiVo Inc. (TIVO) needs to move quickly to stop the unauthorized use of its intellectual property, according to Chief Executive Tom Rogers.
Facebook is the biggest social network in the world, so it may come as a surprise to some that up until early 2008, it didn’t offer any localized versions of the site at all. The company managed to jumpstart its international presence with an application fittingly called Translations, which took the time-consuming and costly task of translating the site and crowd-sourced it, asking the network’s millions of users to lend a hand.
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In layman’s terms, Facebook’s Translation app presents users with words that need to be translated, and they submit their entries. The system then invites other users to vote using Reddit-style up/down arrows to vote on which translations are best. This helps generate translations that are not just technically accurate, but also helps eliminate awkward or overly formal wording.
Last month, we wrote about how Amazon was defending itself against a patent on one-click ordering (click here once — oh no are we infringing too? —– to read the story). It was funny because ten years ago Amazon had threatened the world with its own patent on one-click ordering.
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2009-08-29 16:59:43
The details are secret because they are lying. We can not know the details nor why this deal happened. You should not trust what the company has to say now either because you should not trust people who hide important details from the investing public, customers and their own employees.
These terms are intentional, M$ wishes to deliver the maximum damage with every deal. Secrecy creates mistrust that's the antithesis of the free software community. In this case they got to threaten another piece of free software dealing with Winblows interops.
To minimize the damage, it is best to assume that M$ did what they did to Novell. They brought an irresistibly large pile of cash to a company that was not doing so well. The worker bees get to work on for another year or two and the executives responsible for the deal get to retire rich. As long as M$ has a few billion to squander, they will be able to do this to small companies. Better terms for this are bribery, conspiracy and fraud.