11.16.07
Posted in Asia, Microsoft, Office Suites, Open XML at 4:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
When you control information, you control the minds (and the wallets)
Yesterday we published some analysis which explained the relationship between OOXML and the “renting” model for Microsoft Office. The vision is soon becoming a reality as the carrier of the curse (Office 2007 carries OOXML) is brought to more people, who will later on be forced to pay to access data, as though access to personal data requires a subscription (or access be lost).
Hyderabad: Just like a pre-paid mobile telephony card, you can now have a pre-paid Office 2007 productivity software from Microsoft in India.
This offering that comes with the purchase of new personal computer allows a user to access this software for six months and thereafter with the option of renewal with additional payments.
We are approaching a digital dark age. Bob Sutor posted a pointer to a Q & A regarding OOXML. If OOXML isn’t stopped, then this lower entry barrier, as illustrated by the report above, will have people’s information imprisoned. If only more people realised the severity of this…
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Posted in Bill Gates, FUD, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, SCO, UNIX at 3:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The world is still not “as stupid as Microsoft needs it to be”
In Groklaw, an interesting short report was published which shows that Microsoft wants its money back from SCO.
Now it’s getting interesting. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates’ father’s law firm, known as the firm that represents Microsoft, has just filed a Notice of Entry of Appearance and Demand for Notices and Papers [PDF] in the SCO bankruptcy on behalf of MSLI.
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I guess filing as MSLI instead of Microsoft Licensing is like putting on sunglasses, hoping no one will notice you.
We’ve mentioned in the past some of the rather obvious connections between Microsoft and SCO, including other by-proxy lawsuits against Linux. It is worth rereading in order for the context of this to be fully understood.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Linspire, Novell at 3:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
After yesterday’s "goodbye SUSE" post a natural fit would be a story where a truly company-independent distro beats Linspire. The winner here is PCLinuxOS, a Mandrake derivative.
Pretty good install, all the things I need working and as a bonus this is the only distro I have tried that will allow Audacity to run concurrently with other apps as well as allowing it to record and play in the same session!
Remember that Novell’s deal with Microsoft is most harmful to distros which stand behind no monetised model. Thus, Novell-type deal undermine the very fundamental values of Linux, which is decentralised ny nature. Shane, my co-editor, is a a maintainer of an educational GNU/Linux distribution, so you can probably understand his frustration.
Novell and Microsoft continue to turn their back to standards and turn them into a business.
The two initiatives include – Microsoft’s first Interoperability Lab in India, designed to help customers envision and build solutions which are interoperable; Open Source Technology Program designed to further open source research and development of open source applications on the Windows platform in collaboration with leading engineering institutes in the country.
With standards, none of this is needed. Novell does not seem to care. The same goes to other sellouts, who seek to distinguish themselves by liaising with a sworn foe of all standards.
Image from Wikimedia
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, Patents, SUN at 3:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Have a quick look at this report from the Open Source Summit.
The resounding message of the Olswang’s and Greenberg Traurig’s Friday Open Source Summit was that software patents are bad for business. Bruce Perens’s message against software patents and that the European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA) should not become a reality was echoed throughout the day by numerous speakers to be restated once again during Simon Phipps closing keynote. The main argument was that these patents hinder software development because of their high transaction costs, and that Europe can maintain advantages by not allowing these patents (available in the US and elsewhere) on its shores.
The involvement of Simon Phipps is interesting in this context. As we pointed out yesterday, Sun has already embraced GPLv3 and the following newer article focuses on precisely that.
Sun Microsystems will release its xVM Ops Center virtualisation management application under the General Public Licence version 3 (GPLv3), the company revealed at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.
Can it be assumed from the two bits which are mentioned above that Sun is beginning to realise the harms of software patents? What about the recent battles with NetApp? Was it possibly a wakeup call?
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Posted in Apple, Courtroom, Law, Microsoft, Patents at 3:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Acacia, having just lost a lawsuit against Microsoft, also had its shares nosedive.
In the suit, Acacia was seeking $2.50 per Windows XP license sold in the U.S. for a total sum of between $600 million to $900 million.
Shares of Acacia fell 25 percent to $12.90 in extended trade from its Thursday Nasdaq close of $17.15.
According to Groklaw, Acacia has already filed another lawsuit against Microsoft, so the total of Acacia lawsuits against Microsoft now stands at 4. Acacia shows no signs of trolling abatement. It has just sued Apple as well.
Let’s see, Acacia just finished litigating with (losing to!) Microsoft in Beaumont, Texas, just settled one of its cases against AT&T pending in Madison, Wisconsin (details confidential, but sending its stock up 10% yesterday, followed by down 25% in after hours trading due to the MSFT verdict), and has now sued Apple.
Is this the future?
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11.15.07
Posted in GNU/Linux, NetWare, Novell, OpenSUSE, Security at 7:47 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Novell’s sweet spot
People change distros all the time. Granted, some of them leave OpenSUSE routinely, but there are stories that stand out, such as this one.
What also worries me, is openSUSEs close link to Novell. The integration of zmd is such an example.
That’s another loss for SUSE, which made friends with the wrong people (that’s Steve Ballmer riding the chameleon on the left). While we’re at Novell bashing, we might as well add these SUSE security advisory and point out that Novell’s client has a privilege escalation vulnerability.
A vulnerability has been reported in Novell Client, which can be exploited by malicious, local users to gain escalated privileges.
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Posted in Africa, Bill Gates, Formats, Intellectual Monopoly, Microsoft, Office Suites, OLPC, Open XML, OpenDocument, Windows at 7:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The children are our future, but what will be the impact of tying them to a company’s agenda? Many schools and colleges already do this by outsourcing their E-mail services to Hotmail (Microsoft) and forcing everybody to use and learn Microsoft Office. There should be a better way.
If you wish to help children in the developing world, you can still purchase an OLPC unit, which will in turn give another one to a child. The OLPC also boasts ODF support.
Although the applications currently can communicate only with the same applications running on other OPLC laptops, they are based on open source and open standards (such as ODF for documents) and therefore could work with other standard-compliant applications on other systems in the future.
No child deserves to have his/her own data locked in and become accessible from just a single pricey application.
The Renting Model
Recall this video which was mentioned a few days ago. It is a new commercial that illustrates the effects of one paying as one goes, essentially burning money on software that it not needed.
As a timely example of the dangers ahead consider yesterday’s update from Mary Jo Foley.
Via the pay-as-you-go program, users can choose three- or six-month subscriptions to Office Professional 2007 and pay a monthly fee to use the product.
An innocent observer might think that Microsoft has been generous when it offered cheap software (never mind the renting business model), but remind yourself of Microsoft’s long-term goals:
“Microsoft’s strategy of getting developing nations hooked on its software was clearly outlined by Bill Gates almost a decade ago,” said Con Zymaris, CEO of long-standing open source firm Cybersource.
Specifically, Bill Gates, citing China as an example, said:
“Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don’t pay for the software,” he said. “Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”[1]
”There is potential to extract a lot of more money, which no longer depends on the “forced upgrades” concept (related to planned obsolescence).“Remind yourself of the fact that by battling competition through “dumping” techniques [1, 2], Microsoft is able to monopolise. But there’s more than just ensuring the everyone uses the same software. There is potential to extract a lot of more money, which no longer depends on the “forced upgrades” concept (related to planned obsolescence).
It’s the wet dream of the proprietary software industry. It also applies to music, video, written publications. The industry wants you to pay for the same thing over and over again. The fashion industry is pretty much the same, but it can’t force these issues. It’s just a social force (peer pressure).
With a subscription only (no purchase), the seller gets the equivalent of installments and the seller is temping more people to become ‘hooked’. To quote a friend, “they are ensuring that everyone who uses their “IP” pays over and over and over again, for the “privilege” of accessing the same “IP”, in perpetuity.”
To quote another person, “So, just when I thought their software couldn’t get any more expensive, they come up with this. From their point of view, this might scream huge profits, but I bet users will just get fed up eventually and go open source, for the most part.”
The whole situation is rather intriguing in general. Microsoft software has always been rented (see the EULA), but it was never quite so time-limited in terms of use.
Forget about the renting model for a moment and consider the fact that Microsoft has also begun giving trial versions of Office. It is making that part of contracts with OEMs. It’s a case of prebundling with a twist and some innocent buyers will ‘type away’ and be imprisoned by the proprietary format that is OOXML. Yes, it’s the only format supported in the trial version, without fallback to old Microsoft Office formats. Jeremy Allison wrote about this a long time ago.
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Microsoft has already bothered to patent the idea of renting software.
A Microsoft patent application from June 2005, published only today, titled “System and method for delivery of a modular operating system” may signal a fundamental change for what an operating systems stands for and how it is sold.
Intel, unsurprisingly, is part of this. Intel is also part of the “dumping” schemes against AMD and against Linux in Russian schools.
The pay-as-you-go model enabled by FlexGo makes PCs more accessible by reducing the initial cost and enabling customers to pay for computers through subscriptions or as they use them, through the purchase of prepaid activation cards or tokens.
Read the following good piece.
Want to write a Word document? Pay a few pennies. Want to download some digital photos? Pay a few more.
Under the idea, which Microsoft is introducing this week, people would be able to get a PC for their home with a mechanism that charges them depending on how much computing they use. Consumers would pay for about half of the PC upfront and then, say, 50 cents or 75 cents per hour of use. After several hundred hours of paid use, they would then own the PC outright.
Here is an older article from South Africa: Microsoft selling hobbled software to poor countries
Surprisingly, no-one seems to have told Microsoft that it is not good marketing strategy to treat your customers as if they are stupid. Which is exactly what the company is doing with the release in Africa of the stripped-down operating system it calls Windows XP Starter Edition.
Microsoft South Africa launched Windows XP Starter Edition (XPSE) into the African market last week with very little fanfare and market hype.
Which is not surprising considering how the product was received by other media on its intial launch in 2004. Known for its straight talking, The Register labelled XPSE “crippleware”. Analysts Gartner said the product had “good intent, poor execution”.
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Posted in Asia, Formats, IBM, Microsoft, Office Suites, Open XML, OpenDocument, Standard at 6:39 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
When dirty tricks are not just the norm, but also a standard
It never ceases to amaze how much Microsoft achieves with proxies that hide behind apparently independent names. There are several such arms and one of the major ones is shilling for Microsoft at the moment.
Microsoft and industry body Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) have teamed up to drive the adoption of Office Open XML in the Philippines.
We spoke about the tight CompTIA/Microsoft connection a few months ago. Last week, another example of CompTIA praising its own paymaster could be found.
Bill Gates, Steve Jobs Top CompTIA Poll on Most Influential IT Industry Personalities of the Past 25 Years
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The co-founders of two of the world’s most successful, recognizable and innovative information technology (IT) companies are the industry’s most influential personalities of the past 25 years, according to a poll by the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA).
Yes, this comes from the same lobbyist that praised Internet Explorer and now praises OOXML at ODF’s expense. This must be how it all works when proxies are abound. Enough ranting though. It’s just something that ought to become common knowledge.
Here is what happens on IBM’s side (no need for proxies):
OOXML Ballot Resolution Meeting: Why You Should Worry About All Comments
If you cannot process all the comments deeply and diligently, then reject OOXML. If you are still not satisfied for any reason that it makes sense for OOXML to be an ISO standard, regardless of Microsoft’s market share, then reject OOXML. If you fundamentally believe that OOXML is a bad idea built for the wrong reasons, reject OOXML.
More on the latest beta of Symphony: IBM’s Lotus Symphony Continues ODF Push
Symphony has been downloaded by more than 250,000 registered users since its release, according to IBM.
The next post will discuss the importance of ODF and a worrisome (yet quiet) trend where people are (virtually) required to pay per OOXML file that they create. It is a true danger which is yet to be realised in years to come.
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