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"...Microsoft has received about 1,000 patents, or an average of 10 a week."

Tim

"...Microsoft has received about 1,000 patents, or an average of 10 a week."

Tim

Last summer, a major part of the Northeast U.S. was hit by a power outage that knocked out telecommunications and networks in several states. A recent report blames some of the problem on IT policies. Click here to read more.

Last summer, a major part of the Northeast U.S. was hit by a power outage that knocked out telecommunications and networks in several states. A recent report blames some of the problem on IT policies. Click here to read more.

From the eWeek article on January 13th, 2003: "The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is already creating supercomputer clusters using HP rx2600 servers powered by Itanium 2 and running Linux. Scott Studham, technical lead for the lab's Molecular Science Computing Facility, said they chose Linux over HP-UX in part because they had used it in other projects. "It is very stable, very robust, and [it is] very easy to get support," Studham said."

The rising tide of Linux at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory came at the expense of the HP-UX. And why not? The PNNL (and NASA) employ a significant number of engineers and computer scientists at high expense. They can justify having them work on computer projects such as customizing or modifying the operating system. I would expect them to "roll their own". Using open source probably has saved taxpayers a significant amount of time and money, and may benefit us all.

Most fortune 500 companies do not have the FTE allocations to bring in computer scientists, and instead look for packaged products and solutions.

Bottom line: Yay for Linux!, but this is not business news.

"We don't believe that one hammer is good for all nails. For jobs that work on a one-way Opteron server Linux would be better. There's a role for that class of system." from this interview with John Schwartz.

I may be no lover of Sun, but I have no intention of making there odd statements out to be anything more than what it is.

Now for the big Iron, the altrix is exactly what you are talking about. SGI has been selling linux systems with thousands of processors. That is more than big enough to be considered big iron and it doesn't have crappy sparcs in it to boot.

Which is exactly Jonathon Schwartz' point. Sun supports open standards not open source.

The terms sold were "AXA" and "Direct Assurance". ... it appears to be the assertion of AXA (the company) that their trademarks were sold to AXA's direct competitors.

The company claims that the use of their words infringes on its trademarks, patents and copyrights, and wants to stop Google from selling them.

[Begin rant]

Google is not selling people's trademarks. The company still owns them.

Google is not selling people's copyrights. They are making fair use of published material, as an indexing service.

Google is not infringing on people's patents by linking to their pages, unless that patant was on linking to someone's pages through a search engine.

Google is not supporting the competitors, other than through paid advertizing.

Google is not making any statements about which product to use.

Google is not making any statements about which company to support.

Google is not transferring any legal rights or ownership of the rights.

Google is not stating that you have a criminal record, or that you are doing something illegal, not making libel claims about you, and not violating your privacy, even though they might offer that information if it is searched for.

What ARE they doing?

Google is saying "You just asked us about one or more word. We have been paid to show you these ads when you typed that word, and these web sites use that word or have a high correlation to that word."

I'm sick of lawsuits against them for indexing public sites.

There are billions of web sites. These sites are publically available. Since Google is doing nothing more than indexing publically available content using fair-use excerpts, THESE LAWSUITS SHOULD ALL BE THROWN OUT.

If somebody is to be sued, it is the company paying for the ads, and the people publishing the source sites, making the information available to the public. Not Google.

[End Rant]

I think this was pretty standard practice at one point, to put your competitors names as triggers for your Adword advert. A competitor tried to do that to us, which we thought was a bit scummy but we didn't have the resources to do anything about it. Someone pointed us at Google's compaints procedure: we wrote to them, and after a long delay the offending advert was taken down. I found another article which implies that they will be reversing this policy and allowing you to bid on anybody's name and trademark, and take down adverts only where a particular jurisdiction makes it awkward for them (i.e. outside of US and Canada). This sucks of course but TBH I'm not sure said competitor would have got many hits from our name at the time. Now I suspect they might but this time we'd be able to do something about it :-)

From the Debian website:

The Debian Project is an association of individuals who have made common cause to create a free operating system.

It's a question of defining your goals. You're criticising Debian because their project isn't achieving what *you* see as the ideal goal of a Linux distro.

Debian is not accountable to you. Debian is accountable to its developers -- and as the vote shows, they overwhelmingly support freedom over world domination.

As you point out, there are other distributions which settle on a different compromise between freedom and ease of use. You are, of course, welcome to use these. But frankly I think it's a little cheeky to lambast Debian for not conforming to YOUR idea of what THEIR goals should be. Why do you unleash such bitterness against something you profess not to care about? If you're right, Debian will die quietly and it won't make any difference to you.

Debian is quickly becoming the dinosaur of Linux distributions and is pulling an RMS and hurting the cause of Free Software by marginalizing itself with extremism such that no serious users or organisations will want to be associated with it.

Oddly enough, eweek doesn't agree:

According to a Netcraft Ltd. report covering July 2003 to January 2004, Debian was the fastest-growing distribution among Linux Web servers, and Debian trailed only Red Hat Inc.'s Red Hat Linux in the number of Web sites it serves.

But hey, I'm happy with Debian, you're happy with Fedora. No need to make a flamefest of it.

They're just another troll for hire.

How this this go? Quote from 2002

The Meta Group last week issued a controversial report of its own. In the report, Meta forecasted a move by Microsoft to support Linux in its Web, groupware and database server products by late 2004.

Guess you guys got a few months more to fail that one completely. Hold your breath!

• Implement Avalon/XAML and ship it with Linux (with Mono).
• Come up with our own, competitive stack.

Google already has spell check, and so does Gmail have a look at the screenshots on my blog. I believe they're looking at releasing it to the public in six months time, have a look at this article.

and the FCC is still in on the act - then will the user licenses have *decency clauses* written into them?

Well the're definitely planning it (I agree IMAP is definitely better in this application).

From the article:
Steve Gillmor: It also compares favorably to my corporate e-mail.

Sergey Brin: Well, thank you. There are some things that it is currently missing as compared to corporate e-mail--for example, disconnected operation--though we do plan to provide things like POP3 and IMAP support, which should help that.

If they implement IM I hope they go the Jabber route.

One of the comments on Groklaw asks, "Why not Baystar, RBC and Microsoft?".

I think it's likely because these are corporations that would probably resist assisting IBM, and the IBM legal team could still be working out methods for compelling each of these corporations into full testimony. RBC would likely resist, and as a Canadian Bank they can tie up the whole process for as long as they want, unless compelled by a Canadian federal court. Plus, RBC is the most profitable bank in Canada, so they have billions in pocket change to throw at the fight, need be.

BayStar confirmed that Microsoft was connected to SCO, but maybe they have some kind of legal reason not to help? Or maybe the public facts are enough?

Trying to get documents from Microsoft in connection to SCO would likely be a huge legal undertaking, so that might be what's slowing things down. IANAL, but if Microsoft, BayStar and RBC joined the fray, wouldn't they have the power to somehow stop the whole process, or slow it dramatically as a joint force? You have to be extremely delicate when handling companies with track records like Microsoft. Maybe IBM's legal team is getting as much data as they can from corporations who won't put up much of a fight, before Microsoft comes in and shuts everything down.

Baystar generally get ideas, suggestions and recommendations from a variety of sources...

I've been in the financial services industry since before this company was founded, and I've never heard of a comparable case.

With saying this:

All the way back to 1998, a whole six years ago. Now there's history for you. Almost dynastic in its scope..

Tell me, big investment man, is this unusual or not. I'm not sure I'll trust your answer having seen this piece of sparkling judgement from you:

The moral to me is to distrust Baystar as a potential investment partner.

You should already have known that Baystar is a Microsoft shill with poor judgement. Why would you have ever have trusted that?

What you might conclude is that the SCO stock fraud is coming undone sooner than expected. Must have been the whistle blower. Or was it was the federal put up or shut up order, or the complete lack of evidence produced before or after? It should be clear to even the dumbest, greediest "investor" that SCO never had anything but a big mouth and a purchased famous name.

Microsoft initially recommended that BayStar take a look at SCO. But there is nothing unusual about that, Mr. Goldfarb [managing partner of BayStar] said. BayStar often talks to the investment and venture arms of major technology companies like Microsoft, Intel and Cisco. "It was evident that Microsoft had an agenda," Mr. Goldfarb said.

What about the statement from Blake Stowell of SCO that, "Contrary to the speculation of Eric Raymond, Microsoft did not orchestrate or participate in the BayStar transaction."?

Now, who needs a tin-foil hat?

And the URL.

Hate to burst your bubble, but that test highlights MySQL's greatest strength. Which is, what pretty much everyone openly admits. That is, readonly (select) environment.

I call bullshit. Again. According to the article, the test "stressed all facets of typical DBMS operation, including insertions, deletions, updates and searches."

Were they allowed to turn the benchmarks to target each database or did they all run the exact same code? If the answer is, they all ran the exact same code, then the test is immediatley invalidated as it ignores many, many significant features that are pretty much standard on all modern RDBMS, save only MySQL. Did they use the default tables or did they use Inno tables?

You can read it for yourself, and even download their code and run the tests yourself. The answer is that each database was custom-tuned. They used both default tables and Inno tables.

With Oracle, watch the queries perform the same under a far greater load than MySQL will handle.

I call bullshit. In e-Week's tests, Oracle and MySQL were dead even under load.

If you want to get a little more background, there's also the eWEEK.com story. Always good to have more than a single source. Especially when one of them is CNet.

"Thank god it is or you'd be living in scam land."

Look man I already gave you an example where two companies that have same name and the same product clashed in court and the smaller company won. You seem to think that if the names rhyme then it violates trademark. This is simply not the case.

"He can't throw the trademark out. What he can do is say "Let's let a jury decide." Frankly, I doubt it'd go even that far. Microsoft's position with their trademark is considerably stronger than it has been made out to believe on Slashdot. Putting it to a jury makes it even easier for them to sell. It's not going anywhere, sorry."

It's usually best not to open your mouth when you are so ignorant. Here are a couple of links you should read before you go around saying such things in the future.

From law.com"

Linuxworld
eweek

The windows trademark is clearly at risk.

"Doesn't matter. It looks like Windows, it acts like Windows, but it isn't Windows. Far too easy for somebody to end up with that without realizing what they really got."

Yes it does matter. No it does not look or act like windows. No it's not easy for somebody to end up with it because it's not available via retail and you have to go to a special area of the walmart web site to get it.

Maybe it's easy for you to get confused but a reasonable would not get confused and end up with the wrong product.

"Microsoft risks very little other than money and a slim chance that they lose the (R) next to their name. Thing is, they still own that mark even if the judge throws it out. Nobody's going to forget what Windows is. Frankly, it wouldn't be hard for Microsoft to cook up a new trademark to stand behind."

If microsoft loses the windows trademark it would be devestating to them. They will not risk it and if looks like they will (and it's looking like that) they will pay big bucks to get this case settled.

"Yeah maybe. What MS is doing to them is excessive. Then again, they opened themselves wide open to it. Are you really sure this was a brilliant move by Lindows? Sounds like you're telling me that MS's wrath is killing them. At least that's what I read in the various articles on this topic."

I don't think you know how to read. It's not going to kill them, it not going to devestate them. They have changed the name of their product (temporaririly) but their corporate name is still lindows. That's because in the US they can still use lindows as a name. In europe they have (temporarily) lost the right to use lindows as a product name. The whole lawsuit is probably going to cost them less then a million dollars and the potential rewards are in the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars because MS would pay anything to hold on to that trademark.

But this is getting us nowhere. You have this odd idea that companies own common words and all words that rhyme with them. You haven't read up on the case, you don't really know what you are talking about. You just keep repeating the same old mantra that an average person would would somehow be confused into buying a lindows PC thinking it's windows. That's just an idiotic statement to make and I guess there is no way to convince you otherwise.

Nope, he's always been like this.

First off, neither Lindows nor Linux has proven that there's any money whatsoever in "selling" Linux. None. Neither one has made a dime from it, contrary to what non-business people think that Redhat did with their accounting games.

Actually, there is alot of money in using linux to sell hardware and support contracts. Linux server sales were $743 million just in the 3rd quarter of 2003. That's almost 3 billion a year.

Red Hat reported profits of 5 million last quarter and 4.1 million the quarter before that, whereas they were breaking even the same time last year.

What more proof do you want?

Microsoft Readies for Software Bootleg Binge

Microsoft Corp. officials on Thursday said the company is investigating the leak of a piece of code that is capable of generating activation keys for Windows Server 2003 and other enterprise products. The tool, known as a key generator, can be used to produce the random alphanumeric keys that are needed to activate the software upon installation. The arrival of the key generator was noted in a posting by Microsoft enthusiast site Neowin.net earlier in the week. However, the group withdrew the listing for an undisclosed reason. More

This does a better job of outlining my concerns

To answer your other question, some make money and do other things at the same time. Even RedHat makes money, but not with the veracity of Microsoft.

Maybe the reality is about money, but not everyone chooses to be a whore, a pimp, or a pusher to do it.

Interesting pice on ms os release. Read it
here

Hilary Rosen, head of the Powerful Trade Organization for the $15 billion recording industry, is full of contrasts...*snip*

Fifteen billion?? May I please be next in line to be beleaguered???

Weaselmancer

I recently noticed that Microsoft is going to license ClearType and the FAT filesystem. Apparently, MS is tired of everybody using FAT. Maybe it's been discussed on /. already, but this can either mean third-party software to bring ClearType to other platforms including Win2K and Linux, or it can mean no FAT support in Linux -- maybe it'll mean both

Microsoft Opens Up Licensing
Microsoft Plays Intellectual Property Licensing Catch-Up
ClearType Technology and Patent License
Microsoft unveils new intellectual property policy

I don't have the links, but I read several posts by Mac users in other forums who have argued that Quartz under MacOS X is better than ClearType since Quartz more accurately renders text on screen as it would appear in print. Of course, some of the posts were just the typical Mac elitism, but some even said the anti-aliasing unde r Linux was better. Maybe they were talking about GNOME???

I wasn't sure whether GNOME was using sub-pixel rendering or straight anti-aliasing. I do remember liking the way text was rendered under GNOME though. Is there a way to add GNOME's anti-aliasing to old applications like rxvt and xv or WindowMaker and fvwm, or is this an impossibility since none of these apps are built using GNOME in the first place?

Would be cool if it happened, but does not seem like it. This article actually indicates that Green played a role in brokering the deal -

In fact, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company said Green played an essential role in Sun's negotiations with Microsoft to come to last week's 10-year, $1.6 billion deal. ... ...
Meanwhile, Sun would not disclose where Green was going, but said the company has held the position "for quite a while" for him. Said one source: "He didn't want to leave until the Microsoft deal was done."


And here is the blurb from the ZDNet article -

A Sun representative said Green was instrumental in brokering the company's legal settlement with Microsoft.


The first article also says that Green is planning on doing a startup. Therefore, whatever it was, Green would have definitely received significant amount of compensation for his role.

Which would mean that, him going renegade and helping start something Opensource based on Java would be quite unlikely. When big sums of money are involved, especially with companies like Microsoft, you can be assured that they would have taken due precautions precisely against this kind of thing - especially since he was supposed to testify against them.

On the other hand, he *might* just rally to make Java Opensource - which I believe, is more likely.

Why do people get surprised when corporations behave according to the profit motive?

If we want to see more Open Source behavior out of Microsoft, then we need to find ways to motivate them.

First both Sun and Microsoft invest in SCO, after it *trys* to get freaky with linux.

This is getting tedious. Tell me, when you buy gas, are you "investing" in Shell Oil? When you buy a PC from HP are you "investing" in HP? Not in any normal sense of the word. Sun didn't "invest" in SCO, they licensed driver technology. That isn't hard to understand. As is common in multimillion dollar deals Sun did get warrants to allow them to buy stock, but a warrant isn't stock, it is a right to invest if they choose to do so.

As to getting "freaky" with Linux, maybe you didn't notice but Sun is the leading Linux desktop vendor. Just one deal they have is giving them sales of 500,000-1,000,000 Linux desktops a year. Not bad for what many people claim to be "not a Linux company."

Sun charged for some types of updates before, just like HP, IBM, Red Hat, Suse and many other *nix companies. Nothing much to see here.

Just to let people know that it's not all one-sided.

"In other words," Torvalds said, "there is no code taint that I'd be afraid of, since no such tainted code exists in the kernel. There is only the issue of SCO's NDA. And, at least back then, Darl was aware of the issue, so this is not a question of misunderstanding. It's a question of Darl knowingly misrepresenting the truth."

like his code, his words are to the point and clear.

Fuck Darl, he's a kockbite.

The message from this country's Fair Trade Commission was clear: Japan is not about to sit idle as other global powers raise concerns over Microsoft's suspected abuses of its domination in the computer software business.

"Come for the wifi, stay for the game!"

Better get a hardened laptop to use for a shield just in case Barry Bonds has another bang-up season.

according to published information, Yahoo is not responding to the report of a flaw in e-mail filtering software for Yahoo Inc. Web-based e-mail services that could result in the theft of login and password information; the disclosure of message contents in the user's mailbox and contact file; and the exploitation of the user's machine by an outside agent.

What is SBC doing to resolve this serious vulnerability that your customers are exposed to as a result of this serious flaw on yahoo's part.

We, your customers, never had the opportunity to choose whether expose ourselves to yahoo, their advertising and this vulnerability.

I would appreciate some assurance that this severe vulnerability is being fixed.

see: E-Week article
and:Source report of vulnerability

Sorry for the repost, but that URL has a space in it and there were some other typos:
Well, I agree that it's stability is fantastic, but when I posted that comment I was thinking about my own company as an example. We happen to be doing just this. However, I agree that more documentation is appropriate so here's an article explaining that Novell itself is dropping Netware:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1552521,00.as p

(I got that from Slashdot 3 days ago.) Note that Novell will continue to support Netware. Frankly, I like Netware a lot too, but most opinions are that the writing is on the wall: Novell's new stuff is going to be Linux-centric.

not to mention the destroyed reputation...

The insiders are getting wealthy off of stock options and the lawyers are making a bundle off the legal wranglings. Left holding the bag are the stockholders and investors, notably Baystar, whose $50 million investment has lost more than half its original value already. The options are part of the problem, since they dilute the stock, and the loss of reputation and the court case will finish off the rest.

In the end, SCO will lose its court cases as expected and declare bankruptcy. The companies officers and lawyers will walk away with piles of cash and the remaining IP and products (yes, SCO has some IP and products) will be sold off to the highest bidder. But this all looks like it was part of the plan to extract money from a company which could no longer produce a viable business.

1. "The Internet is powered by open source."

Anybody who can exhibit a counterexample can say this is not true.

That's not how counterexamples work. If I claim my car runs on petroleum, and someone points out that it also has a electrical cell-battery providing a tiny bit of power, the existence of a 2nd power source doesn't eliminate the first. "is powered by" is not an exclusive phrase.

4. "It's simply going to be more secure than proprietary software."

This can be proven wrong, and you'll look stupid.

The fact that secrecy harms security is becoming increasingly well-documented (and that applies not just to software, but in general)

How can software which can be changed or withdrawn at a whim from Microsoft ever be considered secure? To be dependent on Microsoft is to be insecure (in the same way that the US subsidizes unneeded farming production for "national security"). Furthermore (and more related to tradional ideas of software-security), Microsoft claims that Windows has exploits that those with access to the source code can see and use. They're essentially saying "We could hack your box, if we wanted."

Only Groove puts all of those functional possibilities in one package. It's really THE P2P package.

And that's one of my problems with it. The Unix Philosophy had some really good rules, like #1, #2, and especially #6. Or "Make each program do one thing well".

Groove users I've seen only want to do one thing: automatically replicate a directory amoung distributed users. That's ALL they want. Oh, wait... they don't even want that. The majority just want to read a file that somebody else has told them is available through Groove.

As far as OS lock-in is concerned, this is the gov't you're talking about. They don't really get locked in.

None of what you just said re OS-lockin is relevant, unless Groove has Linux and Mac versions hidden away that they don't advertise. (If it uses ActiveX, then it probably doesn't!). Any agency which standarizes on Groove, then, is standardizing on Microsoft Windows, which is a national security risk.

Where have I seen this before... a groupware platform built on required client software that costs money, and proprietary protocols? Ah yes, it was Mr. Ozzie's last invention, Lotus Notes. But this time, we also get to share our identities with the rest of the Groove network.

Notes is a case study in how proprietary groupware is doomed to lose out to standards. The same will happen with Groove.

As a recent piece opined, "the only thing harder than using Notes is getting rid of it"

And it seems to be true. InfoWorld's own CEO gave up his attmpt to get rid of Notes. Won't that make it difficult to migrate to Groove?

Here's a glimmer of hope for anyone still roped to Notes. At my company we have 200 of 450 desktops converted from Notes mail to Thunderbird/Sendmail/OpenLDAP and most of the rest will be done this week. Mainly, all it took was perseverance.

It's too bad Ozzie couldn't find a way to make Groove open and still make money.

I bought the laptop PC anyway because there were no decent laptops available with Linux then (but there are now). I never ran XP. I booted the Xandros Linux install CD and have been a very happy camper, even if I am a bit miffed about being forced to pay the Microsoft tax.

I'm optimistic about a major PC manufacturer offering Xandros Linux as an option. It's a great distro for users migrating from Windows. It's easy to use, without giving up any of the Linux security or stability. The deluxe version includes CrossOver, so it runs lots of Windows apps. It's based on Debian stable.

I'm still a bit concerned about HP CEO Carly Fiorina's announcement that HP products will be aggressively enforcing DRM. That seems to me to be a bad move that will only make their products harder to use. Hippy perspective: Like, who wants a piece of consumer electronics to, like, get up in your face and start hassling you? REALLY bad karma, man.

However, he is mistaken that "GPL type licence agreements push the liablity to the users." The GPL specifically puts the patent onus on the code contributor.

As far as end-user liability goes, I fail to see the difference between the GPL and the EULAs of closed software. While GPL projects are certainly vulnerable, there have already been significant successful patent infringement claims against closed software that may affect the end-users of that software.

For example, Timeline recently won a patent infringement suit against Microsoft that potentially could require licencing royalties from developers and even end-users of SQL Server.

There is also Eolas' successful suit against Microsoft for Internet Explorer, which Anderer refers to.

BTW, when Anderer says that MSFT has 50 patent lawsuits waiting in the queue, I read that as saying Microsoft will be the defendant in those suits.

Blake Stowell, SCO's director of communications, acknowledged that the leaked memo is real.

But, Stowell claimed, pundits had mischaracterized the memo's context. "We believe the e-mail was simply a misunderstanding of the facts by an outside consultant who was working on a specific unrelated project to the BayStar transaction and he was told at the time of his misunderstanding. Contrary to the speculation of Eric Raymond, Microsoft did not orchestrate or participate in the BayStar transaction."

Responding to the allegations, a Microsoft spokesman said: "The allegations in the posting are not accurate. Microsoft has purchased a license to SCO's intellectual property, to ensure interoperability and legal indemnification for our customers. The details of this agreement have been widely reported and this is the only financial relationship Microsoft has with SCO. In addition, Microsoft has no direct or indirect financial relationship with BayStar."

Golly gee, I wonder what they're trying to hide? Anyone?

And you know what, there's a reason for it. Others where I work got copies as well, and they are already pushing for us to get an Exchange server. There are many features in the new "Office System" that require server support

Exactly. See this eWeek article. These Office 2003 discs are a trojan horse, but it's not about getting people to upgrade to maintain file format compatibility. It's about getting them to upgrade their OSes, especially their server OSes.

Well the Navy has sold its IT soul to the NMCI contract that stipulates that all desktops and servers and office productivity tools will be MS products. All others will be classified as "legacy" applications and will be schedules for rehosting. This includes all things that touch the network - databases, webservers, etc.

As the deployment is progress they are finding that people do more then send email and write word documents and they have to leave some of the existing infrastructure intact and many have two desktop machines - the nmci email kiosk and the other machine where work gets done. This neither lower costs or inceases security - both goals of the contract.

Also if they are successful the Navy will be a sitting duck with a monoculture IT infrastructure and a successful exploit will be able to cripple it in short order.

The NMCI contract is the largest IT contract ever and you hear scant little about it in the press. I sure hope some watchdog group or even the GAO start monitoring the progress of this contract.

Google sells a search appliance which also includes a (presumably) customized implementation of their searching algorithms. Basically any geeks dream - their own little Google. I read that base price is $28,000 (seems to be a hardware/software bundle).

You can keep the tin foil hat on, because this has been sold to government intelligence services.