01.18.09

Links 18/01/2009: Big Gains for Apache, Launchpad to Adopt AGPLv3

Posted in News Roundup at 9:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• Enough is Enough. Higher Education…? Wake Up

  Who appointed your entity as the gatekeepers of our technology? You may not perceive yourself as such, but actions are leading some to think you are just that…gatekeepers keeping us out. Linux users are growing in huge numbers and those numbers get bigger every day. I am hearing from Linux users about you at a disturbing rate.

  Look, no one is asking you to embrace this thing fully, just tweak a couple of things to allow Linux users equal access to your portals and sites. Heck, pay my travel and one night’s lodging, buy me a meal and I will come do it myself. I’m serious, I will be happy to do it and I am fully qualified to do so.

  Why are you denying computer users simply because they choose to use a more secure operating system?

• Linux, windows and netbooks

  The netbooks were designed with Linux in mind from the start. Only when microsoft realised how successful they were did it try to horn in on the act. Yet they had a hard time doing it with xp. They managed but how successful and useful is it?

  The latest released os from microsoft, vista, doesn’t have a snowballs chance in the Nevada desert on a hot summers day of fitting onto a netbook. Now people are saying that windows 7 is targeted for netbooks.

  I have installed w7 beta and, just like vista, at the moment it has as much chance as that poor snowball. Yet so called respected presidents of research companies seem to think that it can. What is even worse is they are clearly not neutral in their thinking and are twisting in the microsoft marketing wind.

• Death of the CD, a new world for Linux?

  I ask this, because, while we do in fact have distributions that run off pen drives, we don’t have any way to write distros to flash cards yet. And if the flash card is going to be the next medium of choice for music and movies, and likely all digital media, including software, how long will it be before people start demanding Linux distros that are capable of being installed from flash media?

• Ten Great “Tux” the Linux Penguin Crafts

  What geek doesn’t at least respect Linux? And even if you aren’t a fan of the OS, who doesn’t love Tux the Linux Penguin? I know I do! So here are ten of the coolest Tux projects I could find on the world wide web.

• Move over PC and Mac; it’s time for “I’m Linux”

  Apple’s “I’m a Mac” ads have gone viral, and are well known around the world, even in countries where they have never aired on television.

  It’s a slick marketing strategy that certainly troubled the Redmond juggernaut, who spent a whopping $10m to hire the star – Jerry Seinfeld – alone. If you’re a Windows user, consider where your licensing fees are going!

  Of course, one notable operating system has been absent from these comparisons and productions – until now!

  The Linux Foundation think, and rightly so, that a Linux advertisement is overdue. They’ve taken on the challenge to bring it to life.

• Desktop Linux – If it ain’t broke don’t fix it!

  I have been using Linux for a decade and using PCLinuxOS since it’s 0.92 release. I had installed PCLinuxOS 0.92 sometime in 2005 worked on it for quite a long period, and installed the much anticipated pclos 2007. But I had to distro-hop, when I sold off that desktop and brought home a low-cost notebook. Hopped a full circle across the much hyped distros but again came back to pclos – the venerable PCLinuxOS 2008 MiniME.

• Why everyone should be using an Open Source operating system

  Most people are just not aware there’s a choice, most people don’t even know what a Operating System is.
  It’s up to us to make them now.

• Talking to a Wiimote in Ubuntu 8.10

  To add Wiimote support on Ubuntu 8.10, start by running the command “sudo apt-get install wminput wmgui lswm” to install the CWiid library and associated software.

  If you’re using a desktop machine, you probably don’t have Bluetooth capability. If you run the program “lswm” and see the message “No Bluetooth interface found” then you need to get a Bluetooth adapter, which is a dongle that uses a USB port to add Bluetooth abilities. I bought the IOGear GBU421 because it seems to be well-supported in Linux and only costs about $20. It’s also so tiny that it’s cute.

• From Ubuntu Netbook Remix to Ubuntu UMPC

  I am now using Ubuntu UMPC. This is awesome because I really like the defaults of the version of GNOME shipped with Ubuntu 8.10 and I have the benefits.

• New Mexico in the midst of a geek renaissance.

  Plenty going on in the world of non-profits too, an organization I’m involved with The New Mexico Linux Corporation was started to promote and manage The New Mexico LinuxFest it’s just getting off the ground but it promises to offer quite a bit in the near future. Check out the work from this group called Upgrade New Mexico, truly an amazing example of what an all volunteer organization can accomplish. Added to the mix of volunteer collaboration The New Mexico Ubuntu LoCo has as one of it’s projects The Endorphin Power Company a project that’s been over a year in the making and even has them installing a mesh network for their entire campus.

• Tungsten’s New VIA DRM, Mesa Driver Published

  Earlier this month we shared that Tungsten Graphics was creating a new VIA 3D stack for one of their clients. This new work has many improvements over the current Mesa and DRM code both on the technical level as well when it comes to what’s supported for use by end-users. This morning the code for Tungsten’s new support has been pushed out to OpenChrome.

• OLPC

  • Sugar on Acer Aspire One & Thin Client via LTSP

    We recently held a olpc / LTSP presentation in Vienna, which gave us the opportunity to be experimental and check the wonderful world of using Sugar on various platforms via LTSP. We hooked up 2 Acer Aspire One netbooks, a Thin Client (Artec), a laptop acting as LTSP and ejabberd server, along with 2 traditional XOs.

  • What Keeps Me Going with One Laptop Per Child

    So, a lot of people have been asking me this lately in the One Laptop Per Child context: “What keeps you going?” They ask me, because I am Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D., organizer of SF-OLPC.

    Of course, this question has been asked by different people with different intentions. Some are genuinely surprised that I have so much free time, while others suspect a hidden treasure.

• Desktop Environments

  • Building the KDE UserBase

    Most software developers, whether open source or proprietary, would agree that the success or failure of any endeavour depends on building a community.

    This may be a community of fellow developers, advocates or just users, but unless a significant number of people take a project to their hearts, it’s unlikely to make an impact.

  • What do I do as Executive Director of GNOME?

    I get asked a lot what I do, exactly, as executive director of the GNOME Foundation.

    First off, I want to say I’m really glad I work for an organization where people feel comfortable asking “what do you do?” It shows they care about the organization and are not afraid to ask tough questions. Have you ever asked your boss what they did, exactly?

  • Interview with Paul Cooper – GNOME Mobile

    In this interview we talk with Paul. In specific, we talk about:

    * Getting started with the GNOME project
    * Devices targeted by GNOME Mobile
    * Differences between GNOME and GNOME Mobile
    * Establishing a design approach for meeting the needs of users and devices
    * The potential for virtualization on mobile devices
    * The relationship between GNOME and providing kernel and hardware support

  • Enlightenment 17 Still Moving Right Along

    It has been awhile since anyone has posted any updates about e17 (myself included). The enlightenment project is still moving along at good speed. The window manager for enlightenment – simply called e – is stable. I have been using it constantly since 2004 as my X desktop on both Linux and FreeBSD without any issues. What many users may not know is how much over the last year or so has risen up around enlightenment.

• New Releases

  • (2009-01-10) Topologilinux 7.0.1 released

    Currently only available at below ftp site.
    ftp://ftp.se.linux.org/distributions/topologilinux/Topologilinux-7.0.1/
    Would be great if you could help me getting ftp mirrors.
    Tell them to link against ftp://ftp.se.linux.org/distributions/topologilinux
    updates are available in the updates directory.
    Topologilinux is still 100% free and so the updates but please donate some money if you like this project.
    just press the donate button and donate.
    This is a bugfix release that should fix reported bugs reported in the 7.0.0 release
    If you wonder why it has not been uploaded to Sourceforge yet.. read this info
    So help of this problem would also be appreciated.

  • What is AUSTRUMI-1.8.5 ?

    • Fastest Linux distribution with 3D support for Nvidia and Intel video cards
    • Contains all necessary basic programs for work and entertainment
    • The modern user interface into Latvian, Russian, English, Italian and Greek languages
    • Simple boot from CD, flash drive or HDD
    • It is fitted out for the servers and workstations

  • Clonezilla 1.2.1-33

  • FreeNAS 0.69 (Kwisatz Haderach)

  • Linux 2.6.29-rc2

    It’s out there now, or at least in the process of mirroring out.

    About half of the bulk is a late MIPS merge (tssk, tssk, but I really couldn’t make myself care too much), and there are a few odd new drivers there too. In fact, of the non-MIPS code, drivers is about half of the remaining one, and then firmware (which is really drivers too but shows up separately) is half of _that_ remaining half.

  • The G:Mini 3.0.beta01 is Released

    The GoblinX Project is proud to announce the second beta of the next stable release. The G:Mini 3.0 beta 01 is released. The g:Mini formely known as ‘GoblinX Mini Edition‘ is the son of GoblinX and contains only XFCE as the windows manager and GTK/GTK2 based applications. The edition is ideal for those users whose want to remaster the distro or with difficulties in downloading more than three hundred of megabytes (the original size of g:Standard).

F/OSS

• January 2009 Web Server Survey [Apache Wins Big]

  Apache’s market share grew by more than 1 percentage point this month, extending its lead over Microsoft IIS, which has fallen to less than a third of the market. In total, Apache gained 1.27 million sites this month.

• Why I Think Open Source Will “Win” In The End

  I will not go into my half remembered “horror stories” of my sessions with Closed Source technical support. I did not document those nor do I really want to recall them. I just remember a great deal of frustration dealing with Closed Source technical support when I knew the problem was their software. Sure, sometimes PEBKAC is true. But many times PEBKAC is used in “the industry” to explain away real problems with Closed Source software by support personnel. Getting an acknowledgment that a Closed Source software program has a real problem can be problematic to impossible for an end user. Certainly this could happen with Open Source projects as well. But to date I have never experienced a “brush off” from Open Source folk and I will be surprised when or if it does happen.

• Mozilla releases Ubiquity update

  Mozilla Labs announced on Wednesday a major update to Ubiquity, a browser extension that provides users with a clever context-sensitive command interface to various web services and browser functionality.

• GPL/FSF

  • Launchpad’s License Will Be AGPLv3

    Last week, I asked Karl Fogel, Canonical’s newly hired Launchpad Ombudsman, if Launchpad will use the AGPLv3. His eyes said “yes” but his words were something like: Canonical hasn’t announced the license choice yet. I was excited to learn this morning from him that Launchpad’s license will be AGPLv3.

  • Free Software Song Rocks!

    I still find the Free Software Song inspiring in some way although I know it will never ever win a Grammy Award or whatever. So, I thought I would share this to all of you especially those who are starting to lose faith in free software. Also, to all FOSS developers and advocates who are looking for some motivation, perhaps this will help.

  • Shared data feed

    Richard Stallman views proprietary software, and specifically software patents, as deliberate efforts to prevent people from helping each other. In this way people make money providing what someone else would gladly supply free. I think both file sharing and free software are evidence that people are naturally inclined to share and help, within certain constraints. The sharing communities have arisen within those constraints. If all this is accurate, then file sharing and open source come from a basic part of our social nature and are going to be very hard to eradicate – hysterical anti-piracy campaigns and patent-supported software behemoths notwithstanding.

Leftovers

• Why Google Employees Quit

• China censors websites in vulgarity crackdown

  Websites, featuring what the Chinese government has called vulgar content, have been closed down.

Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the Day

Lawyer John Koenig on how people make money with Free Software 01 (2004)

Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.

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Unrest in Vista 7 Land

Posted in Antitrust, Europe, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Videos, Vista 7 at 7:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

LAPTOP briberies and censorship [1, 2] are hardly enough to prevent truth from being told about bad products. We are continuing to see people who are disgusted by Vista 7 and no… they are not GNU/Linux or Mac aficionados. Some of those who feel disappointed are Microsoft’s biggest fans who make money from Microsoft, including Paul Thurrott.

Some Fanboys Don’t Like Windows 7 Either

[...]

Amazingly, the Windows Supersite of Paul Thurrott is showing some falling out of lockstep with Redmond.

This is bad.

Over at Linux Journal, similar thoughts are expressed, but it’s easier for outsiders to rule these out for being “biased”.

I realize Windows 7 is still in Beta. I really do. I read that it’s supposed to have backwards compatibility with Vista though. I have a corporate version of Symantec Antivirus, designed for Vista, and I can not get it to install. You tell me I must be administrator. If I try to run as administrator (BTW, why can’t you just prompt me for an admin password?), I get crazy messages about insecure installation mode, unsupported somethingorother, and you ask if I’d like to install with the correct permissions. Sadly, clicking on “YES” brings me back to the start.

It scares me to run Windows without anti-virus software, so the inability to install Symantec worries me. And that brings me to the interesting observation I made while testing Windows 7. Linux has better support for software. Give the average user a Beta install of a popular Linux distribution, and a Beta install of Windows 7 — and guess which one will be easier to use out of the box? Linux! Which is easier to install software on? Linux! Which requires you to enter an absurdly long alphanumeric key in order to install? Not Linux!

Microsoft: I was expecting great things with Windows 7, and the most I can muster is, “Meh.” I think I’ll go format that hard drive now, because a Windows machine without virus protection makes me nervous.

So where does Windows go from here? Gizmodo, which joked about Vista 7 showing no "innovation" in BSODs, has just launched a contest for redesigning Vista 7′s BSOD mode. It’s not exactly a compliment because Windows makes bad engineering and system crashes “acceptable” in many users’ eyes.

Vista 7 is far from a release (some suggest that it will be released in 2010), so it might be the least serious among Microsoft’s headaches. According to this report, Internet Explorer continues to be messy.

Microsoft’s forthcoming Internet Explorer 8, which is now in its second beta version and closely tied to Windows 7, is showing so many bugs that it causes even some of the company’s own browser-based software to crash.

As long as that’s the case, Internet Explorer will continue losing market share. It is possible that Vista 7 will not even come with Internet Explorer saddled onto it. █

Microsoft MVP Chris Pirillo

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Microsoft Botnets: The Chaos Continues

Posted in Microsoft, Security, Windows at 6:50 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Fear not the Windows zombies

There are many ways to “Suck at Information Security”, but one easy way is to choose a platform that leads to entire military bases getting cracked.

The British military is one of the very few which choose this tactless route even for nuclear submarines and it costs it dearly.

Virus ‘sends RAF e-mails to Russia’

THE Ministry of Defence is investigating a major breach in security amid claims that all e-mail traffic from a number of RAF stations has been sent to a Russian internet server.

The e-mails were allegedly diverted to the Russian sender by a worm virus that entered the MoD systems 12 days ago bringing down computers and blocking e-mail communications across the military.

The world is already filled with about 320 million Windows PCs that are zombies, so what’s another massive botnet anyway?

New Botnets Replace Vanquished Pests

Although the shutdown of a California Web hosting company eradicated several prominent botnets last year, others have stepped up to fill the gaps, a security researcher says.

Gone from the landscape, said Joe Stewart, director of research at Atlanta-based SecureWorks Inc., are “Srizbi” and “Storm,” the botnets Stewart ranked as No. 1 and No. 5, respectively, in an April 2008 botnet census.

How can anyone combat Windows worms that appear all the time in new forms?

A variant of a malicious worm that targeted Microsoft Windows now is spreading via USB sticks, researchers say.

Security company BitDefender Labs, based in Bucharest, Romania, detected the Windows worm variant in late December. The original worm known as Win32.Worm.Downadup, first made its appearance in late November, exploiting a Microsoft vulnerability in the Windows RPC Server Service. Since then, it has rapidly spread across numerous corporate networks with the aim of distributing malicious software on susceptible computers.

Even an Instant Messaging (IM) program is no longer safe because Microsoft turned simple communication protocols into something that can invoke unknown executables.

Internet MSN users are warned. Some programme writers are now using IM to spread malicious programs such as viruses and worms. These viruses can spread when a person opens an infected file, such as pictures of pornographic nature, that is sent through IM by someone who appears to be a contact.

Why is a program for exchange of text leading to the running of untrusted code? This is an architectural deficiency that would prove costly. Outlook and ActiveX are almost perfect examples and they requires no social engineering to lead to a raft of menaces. █

“Our products just aren’t engineered for security.”

–Brian Valentine, Microsoft executive

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Microsoft Sued Over Unified Communications and Loses Key Partner Due to Bankruptcy

Posted in Courtroom, Finance, Law, Microsoft at 6:25 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Microsoft disconnected (reset by peer)

IF ANYONE NEEDED a reminder of why Microsoft is a bad partner, this is it from Friday.

Microsoft Sued Over Unified Communications Deal

Microsoft has been sued by a small Wisconsin business for allegedly misrepresenting the capabilities of its Live Communications Server product, selling the company more licenses than it needed and not providing a refund or other products to solve its original problem.

Imagineering International filed its lawsuit in December in the Fond de Lac County circuit court in Wisconsin, accusing Microsoft of breach of contract and breach of warranties, among other offenses.

Imagineering claims Microsoft failed to resolve problems the company had with deploying an enterprise version of Live Communications Server, then did not replace the product with a revamped version, Office Communications Server (OCS), as Microsoft had promised.

As if that’s not bad enough, one must wonder what Nortel’s big shocker will mean to Microsoft.

Nortel’s bankruptcy filing could force it into restructuring that could influence many of its noted partnerships such as a unified communications deal with Microsoft.

Microsoft too is going through difficult times (including layoffs), so this jeopardises a new business area which Microsoft calls “unified communications” — whatever that practically means.

Nortel’s bankruptcy filing on January 14 may put the breaks on its high-profile unified communications relationship with Microsoft.

The ‘Microsoft press’ too acknowledges the problem. █

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Another AstroTurf Scam Exposed?

Posted in Deception, Fraud, Hardware, Microsoft at 6:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Violation of EU law

Microsoft AstroTurfing is a reality and undeniable fact, not just a reasonable assumption. Using concrete proof and admission from Microsoft, we last showed this a month ago. We also asserted that one of the key people who organise AstroTurf campaigns for Microsoft — a gentleman who goes by the name of Marshall Goldberg — was seemingly leaving fake reviews in Amazon.

Well, thanks to this new report, it seems like there is a whole business behind fake reviews in Amazon.

I just contacted Belkin to confirm but this doesn’t look good. A site called The Daily Background found evidence that Belkin Bizdev guy, Michael Bayard, is paying folks 65 cents to write good things about Belkin routers. Why? I’m not sure. I sure didn’t mind Belkin routers in the first place and 65 cents isn’t a lot of money for a paragraph. Maybe a flat buck or a USB hub instead? Is false praise really that cheap?

We are not through with such exploration of AstroTurfing by Microsoft because it is a crime in the European Union. The company can probably be sued already because there is sufficient evidence and victims. █

Who can you trust?

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Noted: Microsoft Has Money in Comcast

Posted in Finance, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft at 5:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Might as well call it “Comcastsoft”?

For quite a few months we were exploring the Microsoft-Comcast relationship and attempted to explain Comcast’s hostility towards the Web, towards GNU/Linux, towards Google, and also its sheer neglect of the law.

We already knew that Microsoft had invested a considerable amount of money in Comcast around 1997 ($1 billion). Microsoft buys love from other cable companies worldwide, but the following report suggests that while an investment in Comcast has remained since, it is currently much smaller.

Microsoft Corp. has liquidated its 7.3 percent stake in Comcast Corp.’s Class A shares, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Friday.

[...]

Microsoft acquired 115 million Comcast shares in 2002 as part of a deal related to Comcast’s acquisition of AT&T Broadband.

In order to explains any company’s corporate behaviour, such as its attitude towards players in other areas, partnerships like this one must be realised and remembered. █

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Why Microsoft Wants to Put .NET/Mono in Devices

Posted in Antitrust, DRM, Microsoft, Mono, Novell at 4:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Novell & Miguel de Icaza help Microsoft

SOME people may be wondering why Microsoft’s partners want Mono in LiMo and why Miguel de Icaza is so keen on putting Mono inside Android [1, 2]. Microsoft Windows CE/Mobile is not doing well in this area, so the company wants its Intellectual Monopolies to ‘infect’ competitors’ devices. Today we’ll show evidence from Microsoft, in the form of E-mails that came through antitrust litigation.

“I saw that internally inside Microsoft many times when I was told to stay away from supporting Mono in public. They reserve the right to sue”

–Robert Scoble, former Microsoft evangelist

In today’s evidence, Microsoft discusses the failure of Windows CE and the last resort — a need to “license” from competing operating systems, as we shall show at the bottom.

In a world or a nation where software patents are seen as legitimate, ownership need not be physical alone, so there is wiggling room. How to do all that? Formats, programs (like codecs) and .NET, even DRM.

As a timely plug from the news, Ryan Paul is boosting Mono again. It’s ‘infecting’ iPhone and Wii, two devices that Microsoft is very much afraid of.

According to Novell’s lead Mono developer, Miguel de Icaza, several applications in Apple’s App Store are powered by Mono. This might come as a bit of a surprise to those familiar with Apple’s highly restrictive application inclusion policies, because the company strictly prohibits developers from using interpreted languages and third-party runtime environments—a constraint that largely rules out technologies like .NET and Java.

Many comments appear in the accompanying OS News pointer. Mono is very controversial for various reasons.

Arstechnica reports that Mono, an open source implementation of .NET runtime, is bringing Microsoft’s development technologies to some unexpected places, including the iPhone, Android, and the Wii.

Mono continues to evolve and sneak into areas that are legal minefields, by admission from the most stubborn defenders of Mono, such as Dan O’Brian. From Heise:

Version 2.2 of Mono, the open source alternative to Microsoft’s .NET framework, is now available.

Evidence of Microsoft’s plans for Mono/.NET we have covered using antitrust material before (E-mails from inside Microsoft). But today we move on and look at Comes vs. Microsoft Exhibit px07010 [PDF], which we translated entirely by hand (it’s too poorly scanned). We address this reverse chronologically, just like in the exhibit.

In this “Highly Confidential” set of E-mails from 2001, Microsoft’s Alex Limberis writes:

• Customer visit evidence that 50% plus is Linux
• CE’s POR market data pointing to only less than 10% market share
• Support from MSTV agreeing we need to support all OSes

He is talking about set-top boxes. For context, Alex Limberis was “Director of Wireless, Broadband and Consumer Electronics” at Microsoft between 2000 and 2004.

Microsoft’s Amir Majidimehr, who left Microsoft a year ago, writes:

In Korea, clearly the format is dragging the OS in. But elsewhere in the world, where we having nothing close to 90% (or even 90%) marketshare, the OS is selected first.

Microsoft wants to control the format (or API) and it uses Korea as an example. Just watch the Korea/ActiveX situation [1, 2, 3].

I think the situation is rather simple (although the decision is not). When we asked for permission to take our format everywhere 2.5 years ago, no one blinked. JimAll himself said it was just fine to go on embedded Linux. Of course, this was at a time when people though we brought no compelling value.

Control the format, control the minds.

Now, contrast this with the situation in Korea where WMT has a 90% share. Last time I was there, I think they said they have something like a dozen WinCE stb wins, all because of WMT. You better not say anything about supporting Linux or the ESG guys escort you out to the airport!

Eureka moment:

So, the story at both extremes is very clear. When we had no value, we could be everywhere. And where we have ultimate value, then we must be on our own platform. The question is, when do you make the switch?

Integration and dependency:

[Alex Limberis] To be a format means render everywhere. The key to OS success is to create the value proposition from a compelling combination of ease of use, time to market and features of which WM, IE, real time kernel, IP stack, etc. etc. is part of the package.

Kind of like .NET versus Mono… and Moonlight with Microsoft’s proprietary codecs. To quote further:

With nearly zero design wins for video, and strong threat of MPEG-4, I would say this is no time to be picky. We must establish our base as we have done with audio. The stronger we become, the more value we can provide to the other assets of the company. We need to be the “icing on the cake and not the cake itself” when it comes to WinCE! This is not what happened PocketPC.

Linux-powered devices like TiVo are then mentioned:

[Alex Limberis] In the case of audio, we were not facing a “thick” os. The CE team never felt threatened by the OS as it were running on RIO. They are threatened by the OS running on a Moto, Replay TV, Ti Vo etc. that could support our format. This is our internal challenge.

Then it’s back to media formats and their power as a “standard” (which is controlled by Microsoft through bundling or added value… even software patents).

I always come back to; we are FM radio, or NTSC TV we must render on everything regardless of what shape, form or OS choice the gizmo is made from. CE must win on the total value of proposition of ease of use and integration of technologies including WM. In total power cost to deploy.

Linux and the GPL are mentioned as an “issue” (because Microsoft hates them both, of course).

His expressed sentiment seems to be the blocker for us moving forward and not the Linux GPL issue.

Here is why Mono may merely be a path towards Windows and Visual Studio in the long term:

I don’t know what other argument to make other than we must have 100% of the nodes available to us to be a successful format, and no matter how you slice, dice, justify and segment CE doesn’t have anywhere near 100%. Then we get into the belief that having WM in account helps move them to a Win OS in the future.

It then moves on to .NET:

The .net argument doesn’t cut it. Doesn’t .net need to run on everything also?

Here is a key part which is very telling:

2. As I mentioned on the call, WMT is one of the main distinguishing features of WinCE. To offer it on Linux (starting with STBs and then extending to other devices as well) robs us of our competitive edge.
3. While you mentioned that you will start by offering only the codecs and Udl on Linux today, I am very worried that a year from now, you will need to bow to customer demand and offer WMP and DRM as well at that stage. And by that time, the horse may have bolted too far for us to lock the gates.
4. There was mention of OEMs such as Pace, Moto, Nokia moving to Linux today. It is true that many OEMs are playing around with Linux today (since it is the easiest for developers to kick tires on)….however, most of the same OEMs mentioned above are moving to a WinCE platform as we discuss this. And the move in most cases has been driven by their need for WMT – if you take that away, we lose the battle before it begins.

We understand the need for DMD to proliferate the format … however, if it is at the expense of our embedded OSs, I fear that it can hurt us in the long run. Especially when you consider that part of enabling the .NET vision is to embed our OSs in devices of all forms going forward – hence our apprehension.

Here is the bit about “we must license onto the competing OSes” in order to compensate for Windows’ failure in this space.

I guess the net of it from DMD’s perspective is only 6% of the world is going to be CE based we must license onto the competing OSes.

So there. They want to pollute the competition with their own technology. They see this as a gaining strategy. █

“As many of you may know, we’ve actually kind of broadened the product portfolio of Visual Studio, targeting all the way from the low end with students and hobbyists, kind of competitive in that Linux space, making sure that every developer has a copy of .NET and is trained in writing .NET solutions. [...] I think it will really help us in our competition with open source.”

–Eric Rudder, Senior Vice President, Microsoft

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Appendix: Comes vs. Microsoft – exhibit px07010, as text

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Microsoft Studies How to Use Intellectual Property Against GNU/Linux

Posted in IBM, Intellectual Monopoly, Microsoft, Patents, Red Hat at 11:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

“…Microsoft wished to promote SCO and its pending lawsuit against IBM and the Linux operating system. But Microsoft did not want to be seen as attacking IBM or Linux.”

–Larry Goldfarb, Baystar, key investor in SCO

EXTRACTED FROM this antitrust exhibit [PDF] (context here), everyone should a look at what a Microsoft vice president wrote about GNU/Linux:

5. We need someone to tear down the indemnification offered from RedHat and IBM to customers. We need to understand exactly the risk a customer is under if a patent lawsuit happens and Linux is challenged. I’d like Dan to own this. There MUST be risks to customers that are being passed on. I want this understood precisely. We need to get the license from IBM given to customers and investigate.

That was said less than 6 months before SCO attacked Linux. The same goes for this reference to SCO and Novell from Microsoft’s General Manager in India. █

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