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If you are a manager of a fund heavily invested in MS, or an individual investor, when does this news begin to worry you.

You aren't worried yet?

At least one analyst that has carefully taken apart the earnings statements and filings of ms sees the end of the earnings boost to licensing 6.0, and sees lower earnings and declining market share ahead. There are too many stories to link or quote them all, but here are a few you should look at (you'll need to google for them, I save the stories but I rarely go back and edit the source to include the original link, and the stories themselves don't usually do it):

Linux to Overtake Unix, Leapfrog Windows, Analyst Says, look at bzmedia's site, Claybrook wrote it, July 15, 03, bzmedia.com, or SD Times, the title is SD Times.

Small Businesses Like Linux Prices, Stacy Cowley, IDG News Service (PCWorld) Thursday, July 17, 2003

Nothing can stop Linux now, says IDC By Peter Williams [13-06-2003] VNUNet Not a direct link, need to find the article.

Microsoft Feels the Linux Heat:

June 9, 2003 By Peter Galli

Microsoft Corp. is starting to react more aggressively to the Linux and open-source threat, last week slashing the price of its SQL Server 2000 Developer Edition by $450, to $49.

The second major price cut in as many weeks followed the Redmond, Wash., company's decision to reduce the retail price of Office XP by 15 percent.

For the first time, Microsoft officials are admitting that Linux is affecting the way the company prices products. Paul Flessner, senior vice president of the Server Platform Division, told eWEEK at the Tech Ed conference here last week that Linux factored into Microsoft's decision to cut the price of its SQL Server 2000 Developer Edition, effective Aug. 1.

The Penguin heats up the enterprise applications space:

Apparently, Linux is the fastest growing of all operating systems, with a cumulative annual growth rate of 34%. In so doing, it is taking away market share from both Windows and Unix. According to IBM, Microsoft will never again achieve the annual growth rate of 40% for Windows that it previously enjoyed. But what about software and applications? Here, Linux is playing catch-up, with Linux software growing at an annual rate of 65%.

...
SAP has been supporting Linux for four years now and has more than 1,000 customers, both large and small, using Linux. PeopleSoft announced recently that it is porting all of its 170 enterprise applications over to Linux in its next upgrade. Oracle currently has a large marketing campaign underway in support of Linux products and is certifying and supporting its 9i database product on the China-based Red Flag Linux operating system. It has announced that it will soon make its 9i application server and both collaboration and e-business suites available on Linux. And a host of other vendors have also started to support Linux, including mid-tier vendors such as Sage.

Figures given by IBM show that Linux is resonating with customers as well. Handy states that Wall Street firms have taken to Linux in droves, with such companies as Morgan Stanley, Citibank, eTrade, Merrill Lynch and the New York Stock Exchange using it. In Europe, financial services firms such as HSBC and Deutsche Bank are deploying Linux, and it is also making inroads into government and retail verticals.

In terms of geographies, Europe is still ahead of the US in terms of take-up, although there has been a noticeable increase in implementations in the US in the past couple of years, from the Wall Street companies mentioned above on the East Coast to Hollywood on the West. In Europe, Linux has the largest penetration in Germany in terms of overall IT spending - but Handy points ou

MS wanted to buy Google, because to a large degree, the search engine (Google's natural language command line shell) is the way people interact with the OS, so it becomes the OS, in large part.

See this eweek article for more on this idea.

it was BayStar Capital:

see these:

here
and here

- just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're really not out there.

And here you go

See? was that so hard?

When contortion goes astray

This has sort of been picked up from other places on the internet,... it's not mine.

"IBM has unfairly competed with SCO by acts that include, but are not limited to, entering a conspiracy and combination in restraint of trade with others in the Linux development and distribution business, pursuant to the GPL, to artificially restrain prices below natural levels for the purposes of destroying competition in the operating systems market for UNIX software on Intel machines, and to improperly gain advantage and extract profits...blah, blah, blah" an SCO response from once apon a time.

SCO also conspired against itself through it's membership of UnitedLinux. Funny and maybe a bit sad.... Found here at eWeek-No More Mr. Nice IBM.

What does SCO think they are going to get out of Linus?

Perhaps they're running low on crack?

Microsoft Issues Security Patches every 2 weeks these days. (this set announced just an hour ago).
Great timing:
[shout]Hey, look over there! Linux has flaws![/shout]
[mumble]By the way, we have a handfull of new remote root exploits on XP and 2k to announce...[/mumble]

It's been said many times before, but it bears repeating:

First, they ignore you,

Then they laugh at you,

Then they fight you,

Then you win.

- Mahatma Ghandi

• a) cheap marketing gimmick to get free publicity out of Linux,
• b) cheap attempt to force VirtualPC users onto Windows,
• c) cheap marketing gimmick to distract from bad press on failed security and lawsuits,
• d) a company dropping products and services to hide financial difficulties,
• e) all of the above.

From the earlier article:

... the new version [of Virtual PC] will no longer offer official support for BSD Unix, Linux, NetWare or Solaris...

...Virtual PC for Mac 6.1 does not support the latest G5-based Macs. There is no release date for a G5-compatible Virtual PC for Mac...

• a) cheap marketing gimmick to get free publicity out of Linux,
• b) cheap attempt to force VirtualPC users onto Windows,
• c) cheap marketing gimmick to distract from bad press on failed security and lawsuits,
• d) a company dropping products and services to hide financial difficulties,
• e) all of the above.

From the earlier article:

... the new version [of Virtual PC] will no longer offer official support for BSD Unix, Linux, NetWare or Solaris...

...Virtual PC for Mac 6.1 does not support the latest G5-based Macs. There is no release date for a G5-compatible Virtual PC for Mac...

Its good to see another 'made on Linux' movie!

In particular, read: 'In 1999, Borland and Microsoft settled the lawsuit in a private agreement. Microsoft made a $25 million investment in Borland, and the companies entered into a $100 million alliance through which Borland would license core Microsoft technology. Borland continues to license core Microsoft components, becoming the first and only licensee of .Net Framework last year.'

This is similar to Corel dropping both its Linux distribution and WP Office for Linux after Microsoft "invested" money in it and also to the way Linux is no longer a supported guest OS on Connectix. Microsoft is preventing competition by buying the influence needed to destroy promising Linux technologies before they come to fruition.

Other articles, such as this one mention that this is about Avalon.

Avalon, for those of you who haven't been paying attention, is Microsoft's new UI programming paradigm for Longhorn. And it's all based, and written, on ".net". I use ".net" in quotes because what that really means is that it runs in the CLR and is written in C#, managed C++, VB, or anything else that compiles to IL such as XAML. Avalon has also been been described as being much like ASP.NET w/ it's declarative markup syntax. So it's got that going for it too.

So you can be sure that the ".net" technologies are living on, even if the brand may be deprecated (which doesn't necessarily appear to be happening [VS.NET is still alive and well] but who can tell what the MS marketing machine will come up with next).

I am guessing that SuSE thinks Novell can help them into the American market because of their contacts and longevity. I think SuSE could have done better - I don't get it - they are already working with IBM on s390 platform!!

That was my thought too. SuSE owns the zSeries s/390 space these days. I've never seen anything other than SuSE 7 or 8 installed on the dozen systems I've got to work with. Granted a small sampling, but you would figure someone Stateside would give RH a whirl on the big iron.

Another thing SuSE is pushing is Linux for the IBM pSeries boxes. I'm waiting for the under $3,500 quad 970 CPU servers to hit the market. They already bundle the SuSE distro with some of the current pSeries boxes. If hardware prices drop that low, they should have made a killing with a Linux bundle.

They have distros for the AMD and Intel variants of a 64-bit CPU as well.... seems to me SuSE has the workstation and server market nicely covered these days. Runs several databases, app servers, and the other bits of kit I need for my day to day work. (tragically, sans hardware on my part). The lack of an ISO had kept me from fiddling with it on the home front, but now that the playing field is level...

May we live in interesting days?

It's transmitted encrypted. It used to be almost always DES, which obviously caused a few problems over the years, but this story gives some details. Newer machines use AES, which avoids those problems.

Actually Oracle is going to start helping Redhat write the next version of Enterprise. The ties between Redhat and Oracle are strengthening, not weakening.

So.. I just have to ask: Where's Linux headed next?

Well, right now they're readying for the release of the 2.6.0 kernel, which they were saying in July would be ready in "less than" 7 months and will start showing up in boxed products shortly after that (probably whenever 2.6.2 comes). The new kernel brings, among other things, an O(1) scheduler, improved responsiveness for user actions, and vastly improved support for linux in embedded devices. One can also expect ReiserFS to begin to gain wider acceptance in this period. After that it looks like the schedule seems mostly to be to improve support for enterprise-class ("big iron") environments.

On the side of things more directly related to the user, GNOME is readying for their 2.4 release, which they expect by spring. 2.4 promises an unprecidented degree of polish, and may well prove to be the release that finally reaches the point "normal people" can deal with it-- if for no other reason than that it will FINALLY offer a clear, sane, graphical way for X users to *change their fricking screen resolution*. 2.4 will probably also be the version that Sun uses once they start shipping GNOME as the default desktop environment for Solaris.

On the other side of the user-interface fence, the competing KDE project will be releasing version 3.2 in december. Among other things will include inproved font support and a bundled groupware suite. After that it appears that among their plans is work on abstracting their theme display stuff by moving toward SVG-based graphics, which among other things will improve accessability by improving the support for those who need high-contrast or large-type displays.

Sounds pretty busy to me. That answer your question?

Check out this eWeek Oped

Like looking at a new show car, I want this thing; I also realize that until we see the beta, we won't see any of the negatives associated with it. I know the market is substantially antsier than I am, and three years is an incredibly long time to wait. Of course, there was plenty of warning for Windows 95 as well, and it still took out OS/2 and the then-Mac OS. Were Longhorn to come out this year or next, it would bury Linux and the Mac. But with three years' lead time, this is a horse race--and it's one from which the computer buyer will profit no matter who wins.

There's a poll on the right sidebar, it's already 85% switching to linux/mac, let's unbalance it more!

There is an article on him here.

Looks promising!:
"The defining difference between Billy Tauzin and [former chairman] Tom Bliley is a preference for change vs. a preference for the status quo," says Jeffrey Eisenach

But I thought Sun didn't have a Linux strategy...

Do we really need another bash-Microsoft article

No, you're right. We should leave poor MS alone. They're obviously confused. After all, this is the same company who during the antitrust trial, said they couldn't share their source code with anyone due to national security concerns if the code got into the wrong hands.

Then later (2002) they told a federal court that sharing information with competitors could damage national security. And even said the code was so flawed it could not be safely disclosed.

Then in early 2003, they agreed to share the source code with China.

So it seems clear to me that they are confused and just need our sympathy. After all I'm sure they wouldn't intentionally risk our national security nor lie about the risks of sharing their source on the stand in federal court.

>>we need to use a technological solution that allows easy, open, and transferable trusted participation in the network - maybe for once an application where a web-of-trust would actually function

If it's easy and open it will be abused by spammers. In fact, as others have pointed out, just because a server is on the whitelist doesn't mean that all other mail is on a blacklist. I dealt with this recently in a column. There might also be a blacklist, but all other mail should go into a queue from which it is given greater scrutiny and aggressive filtering. By whitelisting the servers of those with important relationships with the company they greatly decrease the possibility of false positives on any of that mail.

Security hole hits patched Internet Explorer
Microsoft Recalls Botched Browser Security Patch
MS security patch slows XP systems to a crawl
Microsoft withdraws faulty server patch
Microsoft replaces, broadens faulty Exchange patch
Microsoft fixes another faulty patch
Faulty Patch Leaves IE Open to Attack
More patching problems for Microsoft
Minor glitch in Win2K patch

Interestingly, none of these "migration articles" on web sites that are explicitly devoted to CMS matters (e.g., CMSwatch.com, cmsReview.com) seem to characterize this problem as relating to Extraction, Transformation, and Loading (ETL), raising the possibility that their authors are ignorant of the many ETL tools that are available. In the open source world, these tools include Octopus and Jetstream. Of course, Perl programmers do not call this process "ETL," but, rather, simply "data munging."

A prior Slashdot story on "Transferring data 'tween databases" (posted 14 April 2003) might interest you. I cannot post a link to it, however, because Slashdot's search engine is currently down.

Finally, EMC just bought Documentum, the CMS that you are considering. EMC is primarily a storage company, and I cannot help but wonder how CMS fits into their storage strategy.

Appears in this article again.

I think what he meant was that "we don't have a Linux strategy" means "we don't do Linux only products or development" and "Linux doesn't play a role on the server" means "Don't write/develop to the OS" - ie could say the same thing about Solaris if you contort it that much. Possibly being overly generous, but it's about the only logical thing I can think of. (unless you assume the guy's gone nuts.)

Last month Jonathan Schwartz did a fairly in depth response on his thoughts on Linux on general, though nobody seems to have reported it:
Schwartz Seeks to Clarify Sun's Linux Strategy

He doesn't really clarify his statements, but kinda starts from the beginning. Among other things he talks about ISV support, open standards, Debian (which he's a "big fan" of), and also indemnification - which Sun offers both on Solaris and Linux.

"This helps to ensure IP compliance across Microsoft solutions and supports our efforts around existing products like Services for UNIX that further UNIX interoperability," (EWeek)

Here is my confusion - that 20/21 million was just for a license for there "unix services", that I personally never really heard of (from Microsoft atleast). 1) Since when does microsoft invest 20 million into interoperability with there competition, let alone research and development? 2) If it costs 20 million just to license the IP rights to develop services like LPD and NFS (which it standard and open anyway) - just off the top of my head I would think that it would be 100's of millions to license the IP rights to develop an entire OS - and if that is the case and SCO has a handfull of companies giving them 100's of millions of dollars, why are they so broke?

He donates 2 million to India to fight Aids
He donates 50 million to SCO to fight GPL in spreading fud.

You make an excellent point, except that you're totally wrong on both counts:

The Bill Gates foundation provided $100 million for AIDS work in India

And the very article you didn't read in the slashdot posting states that MS didn't provide this $50 million to SCO (The article even provides information on who did -- you should have a look!)

You can not believe it all you want, but those are the facts.

In pursuit of this goal, IBM is poised to introduce two tiers of products: a low-end blade server and an "ultra -low-end" (ULE) rack/deskside model. The initial blade server will be based on the Power PC 970 processor (known internally as the GPUL), which made its debut this month in Apple Computer Inc.'s Power Mac G5 line.

The ULE models, which will run Linux and IBM's AIX OS, will ship in 2U two-way and 4U four-way configurations. A base configuration of the 4U is expected to cost less than $3,500, sources said.

How can an Open Standards UNIX company with its roots in BSD and contributions of millions of lines of code to the Open Source community (just look at OpenOffice.org) be a threat to Linux?

Sun's contributions to the open source community are useful and appreciated, but that doesn't change the fact that Java is not open and presents a threat.

By analogy, would you sign over ownership of your house to me if I gave you my old car for free? Probably not.

How can a company who is comitted to playing fair and abiding by Open Standards, with public documentation be a threat to Linux?

The Java documentation may be "public", but it comes with a several page long license attached to it that imposes strong constraints on anybody using the specification.

Why would Sun hate Linux when it keeps closed, proporietary, buggy, virus and trojan-infested, expensive Windows off PCs?

Your argument makes no sense. Sun is selling SPARC-based systems. Why would they want to keep buggy software off PCs? The worse PCs are technically, the easier it is for Sun to compete with them. Linux makes PCs into a very viable, low-cost alternative to Sun's products and that is destroying Sun's market. Of course, if Sun could wave a magic wand and make Linux go away, they would do so. However, since there is no way in hell they could succeed at that, they are living with an uneasy truce.

In any case, we don't have to guess what Sun management is thinking about Linux and Gnome, they are telling us. For example, Schwartz called it "open source crap" and the "Linux mistake". And McNealy is busy spreading FUD about Linux, comparing it to illegal MP3 file sharing and raising questions about copyright liabilities.

Some of you slashbots really need your heads examining!

Some of you Java zealots really need to get over this "we think Sun is a nice company and therefore we trust them" thing and look at actual licenses.

Don't Oracle and Microsoft do the same thing, looking for illegal copies of their software?

Microsoft certainly does, but not Oracle, according to this story. Their software costs a fortune, of course, but their attitude seems a lot less adversarial. That may be due in part to the difficulty of determining Oracle licensing compliance, though. Every time I purchase a license from them, something has changed.

I vote for collusion. Granted, two of the links I included discuss only flaws in IE 6.0 which aren't likely to be exploited on a server, but you never know what the customer may do. Finding critical flaws like this in just 5 months doesn't look too good. Try googling before you speak next time.

As far as I can tell, the big change that Microsoft made for the Windows Server 2003 release is that it ships with more services closed. If users want them, they have to open them up. This, inherently, makes the OS more secure, and all it does is follow the advice that security experts have been giving for the last several years. I highly doubt that Windows Server 2003 is some monster rewrite of everything, and I would fully expect that most of the same exploits waiting to be discovered in Windows 2000 are also present in Server 2003, along with some new ones.

As Schneier predicted, for Microsoft, the threat is bad publicity, and they are going to produce a security system that deals with the threat. Without some kind of disclosure, sysadmins cannot take stop gap measures to secure their systems. This is just another instance of rather than working on securing its products to a level needed for the Internet, the issue is being handled as a PR problem.

Time to upgrade if you haven't already.

Its more likely a bluff to see what MS will do for them.

Just like Munich's bluff?

Jim Alchin (Windows OS Chief) on Open-Source: CNET 2/14/2001
"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."

"We can build a better product than Linux. There is always something enamoring about thinking you can get something for free."

Bill Gates on Linux IP: CRN 7/25/2003
"There's no question that in cloning activities, IP from many, many companies, including Microsoft, is being used in open-source software."

Bill Gates on beating Linux at any price: USA Today 6/30/2003
"Well I'm not sure what you mean by undercutting. We will never have a price lower than Linux, in terms of just what you charge for the software. We compete on the basis of, if you look at the value you get out of the system and the overall cost that the system has that apply in our software.

Bill Gates on standards: CNN 9/18/2003
Gates said the Redmond, Washington-based company's work toward Web services standards would be "royalty free." ... "I can't believe I said that," Gates joked.

Balmer on Linux: E-week
"Can IBM give you a product roadmap for Linux? Can they deliver new features and fixes to Linux? Does it indemnify the intellectual property in Linux? No, no and no,"

What then of your personal data? Would you still say with your best NYC accent that the victim got what they deserved for giving personal data to a business that willfully and knowingly used insecure technology which cannot be improved for years to come? Especially when more secure options are known and well-documented?

According to E Week:

Sprint PCS Group, Cingular Wireless LLC, AT&T Wireless Services Inc. and T-Mobile USA Inc. all plan to start selling the Palm OS-based smart phone, starting in the fall.

AT&T Wireless will start selling the device by the end of the year, according to officials at the Redmond, Wash., company, who declined to give pricing. T-Mobile U.S.A. Inc. finished its field trials of the Treo 600 this week and has yet to announce a launch date.

And while we're googling, the names "Orange" and "Europe" have been mentioned together wrt this device.

I'll be haggling with my designated AT&T representative over this one. :)

Reference accounts seem to be franchised fast food & drug oriented.

We knew that from Linus' comment a while back already.

It seems that Eolas just wants money from MS and from money-making companies...
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1304252,00.as p.

Don't you see ?
M$ is taking the full advantage of the situation, this is just an excuse for them to slowly squeeze out thirdparty plugin technology from the browser. I would rather pay Eolas 10$ in a licence fee than paying M$ xxx$. Here's a interview with Eolas:

Quickly googled up a link from eWeek:

As Apple Computer Inc. draws up its game plan for the CPUs that will power its future generations of Mac hardware, the company is holding an ace in the hole: a feature-complete version of Mac OS X running atop the x86 architecture.

There have been rumors of the move to x86 for a while. I'm not sure if I buy them -- that's a ton of QA overhead for a potential move down the line, and hopefully the G5 negates any reason for them to move. Not to mention if Apple swapped processors, all the AltiVec-optimized code would be worth creee-ap without having multiple processor *types* in each new, partially x86 powered Mac. And any way you cut it, Apple would still, I'd assume, stick some hardware dongle in there to do what Open Firmware does now: stop cheap generic hardware (or expensive hardware when you talk Pegasos) from running OS X easily. Apple is a hardware company too, you know. Solutions, not just software, etc.

But the point of the article stands, even if the author was overhyping. Anil (the author) really has two outs:

Due for launch within five years, the chip will allow future machines to run, say, Windows XP together with Linux or the Apple operating system...
1.) ... providing Apple releases/creates its rumored-but-horribly-unlikely (imo) x86 build of OS X.
2.) ... Darwin, which is an OS, just not a very popular one and not much of story. Though AbiWord does run fairly well there with X11 installed. :^)

• 5) At some point, keystroke recorders got installed on several machines at Valve. Our speculation is that these were done via a buffer overflow in Outlook's preview pane. This recorder is apparently a customized version of RemoteAnywhere created to infect Valve (at least it hasn't been seen anywhere else, and isn't detected by normal virus scanning tools).

Did you even read the paper?

OP is quoting or paraphrasing an interview (at the bottom) from Chris Wypol and seen on EWeek.

I find it very odd that Chris Wysopal is trying to completely blow off the context of the study and making the comparison with a flaw in TCP/IP. His statement is a 100% a pure corporate puppet remark and pretty much sums up where @Stakes interests really are.

They already did it...

Guess what is coming next?

But I am wait ing for this one.

Some relevant quotes from Sun on Linux, wrt SCO's case

"Also, let me really clear about our Linux strategy. We don't have one. We don't at all. We do not believe that Linux plays a role on the server. Period."

"If you use Linux on the server, even if we sold the distribution to you, you are on your own."

"While they [IBM] have done a superb job of telling the world that Linux is the future, but sadly it may be true for them because they don't own an OS. We, on the other hand, have a safe, compelling and affordable product called Solaris that runs on Intel, Opteron and SPARC."

On Sun's relationship to SCO:

"Meanwhile, Sun hopes to capitalize on its strong contract relationship with SCO for the Solaris operating system to cherry pick IBM AIX customers worried by the revocation."

Also, it is interesting to note that Sun didn't pay SCO for rights to Unix, they paid for access to the source of some unnamed device drivers:

"They made a buy versus build decision (for Solaris x86 Platform Edition) to get access to a bunch of drivers for contemporary versions of Intel (Corp.) hardware,"

[sarcasm]Because, you know, SCO's Unix is just so well supported by hardware vendors![/sarcasm]

May 2002: A senior Microsoft Corp. executive told a federal court last week that sharing information with competitors could damage national security and even threaten the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. He later acknowledged that some Microsoft code was so flawed it could not be safely disclosed.

But giving it to China is all fine and dandy.

Actually, if you follow eWeek, they have an article about how the companies are giving in to the demand for interoperability. MS said they plan on implementing a third party layer to MSN Messenger to allow other apps to work with it. There's also a follow-up story on how Reuters and MS are joining their IM networks and offering connectivity to Yahoo and AOL.

Actually, if you follow eWeek, they have an article about how the companies are giving in to the demand for interoperability. MS said they plan on implementing a third party layer to MSN Messenger to allow other apps to work with it. There's also a follow-up story on how Reuters and MS are joining their IM networks and offering connectivity to Yahoo and AOL.

The SCO page says its sponsered by Microlite, which appears to be backup solutions for SCO products (and Linux).

Doesn't everyone remember that HP was the main sponser of the SCO 2003 forum in Las Vegas, but they backed out because of the SCO linux licensing. You can read about it here.

We should try not to forget that during the MS antitrust trial, MS VP for Windows Jim Allchin testified that it would be a threat to US national security for the code to Windows to be revealed:


A senior Microsoft Corp. executive told a federal court last week that sharing information with competitors could damage national security and even threaten the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. He later acknowledged that some Microsoft code was so flawed it could not be safely disclosed.

Now, they are showing this same code to the Chinese government? Has anyone asked them why this should be OK? Are they trying to endanger US interests with a fierce competitor? Or were they blatantly lying at the trial? And in either case, is anybody going to do anything about it?

What about when Microsoft said opening Windows source code could be damaging to US national security. Do the Chinese not count?