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You have alot of anger in you. Let's take this calmly one-by-one:

Ok, in who's eyes? From the Open Office people's point of view it is non-discriminatory, but from Microsoft and companies that offer more features it is very discriminatory.

How is it discriminatory in microsoft's eyes exactly? Because it is not their format? Why do they support the wide variety of formats they support in word? (wordperfect, RTF,...) Do they all have the features OpenXML has? Why do they not drop support for these formats. I'm sure wordperfect format was not built with microsoft support in mind.

How about from the user's persepective? I imagine they would say, "Oh, I would love to write this on my TablePC, or I would love to drop in Voice Notes with this letter or include an animation or a video or slideshow, but I have to 'publish' in ODF and it doesn't support any of these features." (Talk about dis-empowering people with software 'constraints')

I thought this was an Open advocacy site, how in the 'fek' do people think that just because they slap 'Open' on the front of something, then 'force' people to use it that this is about openness or empowering people?

I don't get your point. For microsoft to support ODF officialy, microsoft is obligated to make its apps support the 'subset' of features that ODF currently includes in its spec. Nothing more, nothing less. If something is not supported by the ODF spec, no one is saying the user can not use OpenXML. No one is asking microsoft to drop its default file format, just include ODF support. This is what I think most microsoft advocates are missing when they are yelling 'ODF doesn't support this x feature'.

If it was truly non-discriminatory then ODF would look at Microsoft's proposals and work with them instead of trying to TELL Microsoft and OTHER companies how the ODF people think it should be done. They are NOT the sole experts here, PERIOD.

Microsoft is a member of the OASIS consortium. They never chose to become actively involved in it, they just rolled their own. So if it is someone claiming expertise and not cooperating, I think you're pointing at the wrong side.

Open should be truly open, not a just a standard FORCED on the industry with the word OPEN slapped on the front of it.

I could make a new 'open' Image format, call it OpenTNAImage, and then tell the industry that this is the only true 'open' image standard, sell it to some politicians that don't know a pixel from a light bulb. Then tell the rest of the world that they cannot have any say in my 'open standard' format.

Sound good? How about when I tell you that my new OpenTNAImage format is only 256pixels by 500pixels maximum and is only black and white, but HECK, it is OPEN so the entire world should just use it and convert all their images to my 'open' format even if it means the loss of image quaility. As long as I can sell it to non-tech politicians, then it must be the 'best'. Geesh.

How can people truly not get that ODF needs to be truly 'open' and 'extendible'? Not just a standard by people with 'agendas' with the word Open on the front of it?

Well, you might want to read a legal analysis of the OpenXML licensing scheme. Technical merit is dandy and all, but in the business world, legal risk in competing applications with OpenXML support is not going to fly. I would love for you or anyone else to explain how microsoft has addressed the specific legal concerns in Marbux's analysis. This has nothing to do with technical merit, but legal bullshit that businesses pay attention to. This is why competitors cannot just adopt OpenXML. What about Brian Jones saying it is GPL incompatible. And it's not only the GPL applications that are being excluded a

Microsoft isn't announcing that they are implementing ODF, they are saying they won't take you to court if you write a plugin to save Office documents to ODF. The announcement is pure obfuscation. You don't need the features of the Microsoft Word application when you create a PDF document from a document created in Word; you need the features of a PDF document.

Cows are already out of the barn anyway. Apparently a plugin already exists which works with MS Office versions since 1997

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200605040 15438308

As groklaw has already reported there is a plugin for importing and exporting ODF files for MS Office all the way back to Office 97. It was recently finished and is in testing.

You meant to say SPF and DKIM.

"senderID" was an unsuccessful non-standard created by Microsoft hijacking SPFv2 with submarine patents and other deceits. Read up on MARID and see what I mean. senderID is dead, do not try to implement it, do SPFv1 or domainkeys if you want the current gold standard.

DKIM is the successor to domainkeys, and it's looking pretty good.

There is no "easy" involved in crypto, however. If you want "easy" do SPFv1... spoofing prevention with 5 minutes of work by any competent DNS administrator.

Do you smell the faintest hint of an MS FUD campaign in the air?

I'd like to see, just for starters, if anyone associated with MS is a campaign contributor to Tolback. I'd like to know if anyone associated with MS has any previous involvement with this law firm or any of its lawyers. It's not like MS has never before engaged in litigation by proxy.

Adsense has been in the news an awful lot lately, being portrayed in a negative light. Is Ballmer finally making good on his threats?

This isn't about money, this is about politics and getting votes for Toback. It's an election year.

Although, on a deeper level, there might be money involved. I wonder if there are any rivals to Google that might have been funneling money into the campaign coffers of Toback. Are there any rivals that have a previous history of litigation by proxy?

Aside from your wholesale copying and posting of the entire article here---a move which undoubtedly oversteps the bounds of fair use---I will merely point you to this article on Groklaw in which I think PJ deftly points out the the errors in the Economist article, thereby leaving me with little else to say but: troll much?

Aside from your wholesale copying and posting of the entire article here---a move which undoubtedly oversteps the bounds of fair use---I will merely point you to this article on Groklaw in which I think PJ deftly points out the the errors in the Economist article, thereby leaving me with little else to say but: troll much?

I believe that some information that will help explain this is to be found here. It's best to read that article for yourself, but I'll provide a little abstraction of some of the details myself, although this isn't really my area of expertise:

The main point revolves around the fact that MS' OpenXML uses a non-mixed content model, while OpenDocument uses a mixed content model. This means that OpenDocument can have tags interspersed with regular text, or tags within text delimited by other tags, etc. However, OpenXML cannot do this: all text must reside within a tag, and only text or tags can reside within other tags. The article gives a textual example of this. To the computer, the MS one is probably closer to the internal representation of the data: object-oriented programmers will probably recognise the structure as an object encoding its member variables. However, it pretty much removes the benefit of using XML in the first place: source readability. If you look at HTML, it's fairly easy to change a couple words around, and make a few italic, or bold. But in the OpenXML format, that becomes a more laborious task.

The article goes on to make arguments which back up the basic premise given here. You can also see from the examples how the tags differ in type. They give examples in OpenXML, ODF, and XHTML. Just looking at the tags in the OpenXML source doesn't give you any real idea what they're doing-- I mean, what does <w:rPr> mean? However, the tags used in ODF are longer and easier to read and understand for a human.

Of course, you could say that human-readability isn't an issue, and that's a fairly valid argument. However, if human-readability isn't an issue, why use XML? Why not do what Office was doing before, and writing memory out to disk, or basically serializing the document object tree in binary? It'll be smaller and easier for the computer. The whole point of using XML is to make the data easily understandable to humans, to the point where we can make numerous (albeit potentially quite small) changes without needing a program to interpret the data for us. Or where it's possible for us to write an app that understands the data, which pretty much requires that we personally understand it. As it stands, just about any XML data format is quite self-explanatory in itself, which is why we have XML.

Maybe that doesn't answer everyone's questions, but I hope it proves at least a decent starting point.

-Q

I think there is some confusion here .. Where is it today?

Microsofts sucess owes more to them squeezing out competitors/partners than anything to do with providing a low cost client. Take a look at the litigation page on Groklaw to see what they are really good at. Remember this is a company who altered Outlook to block a web greeting card company when they wouldn't sell out to them.

The main reason you don't see thin client is because MS supressed the development of Java and reinvented most of its functionality in dotNET.

Despite so many online and network applications, many business users need to function offline.

A medium sized PC running groupware supplying 10/15 diskless clients would be a lot more cost effective to the small company that Windows on each desktop. Remember Novell netware.

Java is also quite a moot point nowadays. The write once run anywhere model maybe a factor on the server side; however, on the client side for enterprise customers simply not an issue. What enterprise customers run multiple client platforms successfully? Few and at what cost?

It isn't a matter of having multiple clients. How is it not an issue. You update a single application on the server and the clients don't need to be each visited in turn. Remember the fiasco here recently when the department of works and pensions tried to upgrade all their desktops remotely and it failed.

Why can't I go into a shop and buy a $200.00 dollar netPC plug it in and it works. When I buy a DVD player I know it will play any DVD from any supplier regardless of who made it. Why don't the same economy apply in the PC market. Why a monoculture. Well we all know the answer to that don't we.

If anyone should be rewarded for providing millions of jobs for the world, it should be Bill Gates

You're kidding aren't you. What millions of jobs. A few hundred developers in Redmond yes. Some CD factory in China turning out CDs for 0.5p a go. IT is a drain on a companies budget. A business should be working to spend less on IT not more. You could also count the cost in lost productivity to endlessly managing Windows. Someone who works in providing medical equipment told me they spend a fifth of their budget per year on Windows licenses.

-If software and hardware all worked perfectly, I'd be without a job.

If other business were as reliable as 'software' planes would be falling out of the sky, engines would fall off cars and fridges would explode. And people would take this as normal.

ref: outage kills 80,000 PCs http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/26/dwp_networ k_outage/

http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page= 2005010107100653

From a comment on Groklaw:

Note that the "children" comments that followed this comment covered much detail regarding some specifics to part of what was in the quotes taken from the comment below - to see those comments and children of those comments go to:

http://www.groklaw.net/comment.php?mode=display&si d=2006042600285164&title=Net+Neutrality+is+equal+t o+Freedom+of+Speech...!&type=article&order=&hidean onymous=0&pid=434496#c434501

"Verizon and the TelCo PAC say they need to be paid for the upgrades to fiber that they are making? Well, one union lineman that works for Verizon told me that as the TELCOs install more fiber to the house, they will end up saving HUGE amounts of money, as the TELCOs will more longer need to pay for the expensive labor that is required today to maintain the copper lines (corrosion, lightning damage due to copper getting hit then equipment blowing up), as copper costs them. The Union for Telco workers is looking at fiber optics to the business or house as the biggest pink slip creator ever in the history of the Telephone Industry. Copper costs the Telephone Companies in both labor (maintance) and equipment (Fiber equipment lasts longer and does not suffer from electrical surges that are caused by every lighting storm that happens in the US ever day. Fiber does not corrode, does not conduct lighting, and is even cheaper to produce with a lower cost per foot to buy than copper... FIber is just glass! Cheap to produce and cheap to maintain... all splices to fiber lines are perfect every time. A splice to a copper line is a future failure point due to the corrosion that can then occur at that point or break in the line.

The Telephone and cable industry does NOT need to charge more! They don't need the right to OWN the internet and charge fees to those who USE is (other than the customer side where a customer can choose the speed they want and pay the fee for it's use)! The Telephone Companies and Cable Companies are looking for their own monopoly again (only this time in restricting free speech, freedom of commerce, and to restrict and own the freedoms of competition with their own a third party tax OR TOLL BOOTH ON THE PUBLIC INTERNET where the fees then become a barrier to it's use!

IF the Republicans pass this bill through it will cause masses of internet users to vote them out of office in the next election. The US internet user wants their internet access on every side to remain free! This is an attack by an industry on the Freedoms of Internet Access and by doing this it is a direct attack on the Freedoms of Speech! What are YOU going to do about this TODAY?"

See Parent and children to this link:

http://www.groklaw.net/comment.php?mode=display&si d=20060427044611872&title=Senate+Judiciary+Cmte.+H earing+on+the+Music+Industry+-+Digital%2C+Internet +Radio%2C+Copyright...&type=article&order=&hideano nymous=0&pid=434950#c434983

Senate Judiciary Cmte. Hearing on the Music Industry - Digital, Internet Radio, Copyright... - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 27 2006 @ 09:43 AM EDT

        * Senate Judiciary Cmte. Hearing on the Music Industry - Digital, Internet Radio, Copyright... - Authored by: PolR on Thursday, April 27 2006 @ 10:26 AM EDT
                    o Not DRM- simply creative commons with a law that enforces an artist's allowed uses! Open & Free! - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 27 2006 @ 12:18 PM EDT
                                + Prior Art is Basic Networking Security, as it is *group allow execute* tech - Tons of Prior art! - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 27 2006 @ 01:42 PM EDT

That is of course assuming Netscape would have been able to ship a stable, working usable product. Maybe that would have been easier without the anti-competitive practices of Microsoft. Netscape needed information on the Windows 95 API to ensure that Navigator would work well when it came out. Microsoft tried to strong-arm them into forgoing Navigator as a platform for developers. As a result, Netscape didn't get the API until two months after Windows 95's release, two months where Internet Explorer was bundled with the OS.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200604241 64142296
Freespire: A Linux Distro For When You Couldn't Care Less About Freedom
Monday, April 24 2006 @ 06:36 PM EDT

PJ is 100% exactly correct.

PS - Anonymous Coward's take...

"Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.

Nothing don't mean nothing honey if it ain't free, now now."

                            * JANIS JOPLIN -- ( Me Bobby Mcgee Lyrics )

Freedom today in technology, is Freedom of Speech, period!

What percentage of communication today is done by some kind of computer? The
lines are not blurred anymore they are as black and white as the lyric.

I remember when I first heard Janice Joplin sing those lyrics, the context was
plain as the day that they emerged, the days of a different struggle, those
words were powerful then, and they are just as powerful today.

"But I'd trade all of my tomorrows for one single yesterday"

Freespire: A Linux Distro For When You Couldn't Care Less About Freedom (http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060424 164142296)

---
Stefano Spinucci

Some lawyers claim that copyright covers "Methods and Concepts", which could include an Artist's style I expect.

In particular the United Linux members agreed that each member would have an irrevocable, perpetual, and worldwide license to use and unlimitedly exploit any intellectual property rights of the other members in the UnitedLinux Software, which would be transferred to the LLC for this very purpose... Paragraphs 81 and 82 are interesting. They point out that Caldera didn't contribute the Linux kernel to UL, but its infringement claims, although vague, appear to involve the kernel. The [UnitedLinux contracts], therefore, preclude SCO from asserting copyright infringement claims against the Linux kernel, no matter how you examine the issue, and the document does so every possible way, including the requirements of the GPL

The original link does describe SCO requesting arbitration (among other things) The article that you link to was posted early this morning and gives the details of the arbitration filed in europe. I'm guessing that the second article was posted after this was submitted to slashdot.

It's good to have the second article, but there's no need to insult the slashdot editors (this time).

I mean, the idiotors. The article linked is the wrong one. This is the correct article for the story.

More and more frequently, I'm thinking that slashdot is becoming a mad magazine parody of itself.

Boies fucked up big-time.

Not surprising. If Boies was half the lawyer he thinks he is we'd have President Gore in the White House.

Groklaw's discussion posits how Novell's lawyers goaded Boies et al to add the Linux copyright claims to SCO v. Novell just to trigger this arbitration clause.

SCO does not provide a complete set of reference points (version, file and line) for any of the 198 Items. Astonishingly, SCO fails specifically to identify a single line of System V, AIX or Dynix, and Linux code for any of the 198 Items. SCO does not identify specific System V, AIX, or Dynix version(s) or file(s) with respect to more than a few of the Items. Even specific versions and files of Linux are omitted with respect to many of the Items.
...
IV. THE ONLY APPROPRIATE REMEDY IS TO LIMIT SCO'S CLAIMS.
...
As discussed above, SCO has failed to provide IBM and its experts the most basic information needed for IBM to evaluate SCO's claims and prepare its defense. With respect to the 198 Items at issue, SCO has declined, as a practical matter, to tell IBM what is in dispute.
...
  We believe, respectfully, that SCO's failure to specify the 198 Items amounts to bad faith.

1. If/when Novell gets their motion four of SCO's five claims will get booted out of court and off to arbitration-- but all of Novell's counterclaims against SCO get to stay in court
   
2. One of SCO's claims was for "unfair competition". Novell had to file a motion just to ask exactly what law they broke!!! SCO has gone beyond specifying laws broken but not being able to specify exactly what had been stolen, and now into the realm of insisting "well, they did something illegal" without being able to explain exactly what.

Look to http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200604110 33758760 for what microsoft said in recent filings.

Reading those filings, Microsoft is saying "... but the users will have educated themselves on what our routines are doing, we shouldn't have to explain in OUR documentation."

Re: telling people that they can't use your software if they use DRM -- isn't that a sort of DRM right there, just done in legalize rather than software and hardware

Nobody is saying this. You'll be perfectly OK using GPLv3'd packages with DRM. What you won't be able to do is publish anything that uses both, because that would restrict the rights of others.

How can you have a comment complaining about a comments lack of a link to Groklaw and not link to Groklaw??

Better end this now. http://www.groklaw.net/

It is just me or is slashdot in the habit of pretending sites like Groklaw doesn't exist? Groklaw had the scoop a full day before the Computer Business Review article (which probably used Groklaw as its primary source anyway). I don't think this is some corporate conspiracy against Groklaw; I just wonder if Slashdot is having a hard time coping with the fact that specialized blogs, rss feeds, and aggregators like Thunderbird are doing a much better job of providing what Slashdot provided in the past... So the editors don't post articles that directly link to the 'competition'.

It is just me or is slashdot in the habit of pretending sites like Groklaw doesn't exist? Groklaw had the scoop a full day before the Computer Business Review article (which probably used Groklaw as its primary source anyway). I don't think this is some corporate conspiracy against Groklaw; I just wonder if Slashdot is having a hard time coping with the fact that specialized blogs, rss feeds, and aggregators like Thunderbird are doing a much better job of providing what Slashdot provided in the past... So the editors don't post articles that directly link to the 'competition'.

As stated in IBM's opening brief, SCO declined to provide all of its disclosures in an easily searchable, electronic format, complicating IBM's analysis of them. Addendum B corrects and refines the statement of SCO's shortcomings included in IBM's opening papers.

Have fun running your compare program on a piece of paper...

Grocklaw's take here, and it makes good reading:

"What an extraordinary response to the court's orders. As IBM points out, because SCO fails to "identify with specificity the versions, files and lines of System V, AIX, Dynix and Linux material that IBM is alleged to have misused," as a practical matter, it just isn't possible to evaluate SCO's claims. We're talking about a lot of code. IBM references a Declaration of Todd Shaughnessy, which we don't yet have, which says "there are at least 11 versions, 112,622 files and 23,802,817 lines of System V code potentially implicated by SCO's claims. There are at least 9 versions, 1,079,986 files and 1,216,698,259 lines of AIX code potentially implicated by SCO's claims. There are at least 37 versions of the base operating system, and 472,176 files and 156,757,842 lines of Dynix code potentially implicated by SCO's claims. And there are at least 597 versions, 3,485,859 files and 1,394,381,543 lines of Linux code potentially implicated to SCO's claims." Precisely where in this massive pile of code should IBM start digging?

...

"I feel sure we'll hear more on this topic at the hearing coming up. I have this vague memory that SCO told Magistrate Judge Wells, when she asked them at a recent hearing if they'd found anything of use in those materials, that they had."

Software Freedom Conservancy offers nonprofit umbrella to free and open source projects

see this groklaw page for entire article http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200604011 21120517

Here's yet another creative idea to protect FOSS developers. The Software Freedom Law Center has launched the Software Freedom Conservancy, which is designed to permit certain projects accepted as members, such as Wine, uClibc and BusyBox currently, to apply for and then benefit from nonprofit tax-exempt status. The Conservancy does all the onerous paperwork needed to set it up and run that way.

It does the paperwork and it provides the umbrella. It will file one tax return covering all members' projects, and it will handle the other corporate and tax issues that are associated with becoming a nonprofit and then operating as one, as well as holding project assets and managing them as the project directs. That leaves projects members free to code. It's a free service, if your project is accepted as a member.

Probably because of the paperwork involved. Maybe they haven't heard of this new effort?

Having dedicated (para)legal and accounting types to handle the administrivia of maintaining Non Profit (Charitable) status, could be a godsend for the projects that manage to get in on this opportunity.

lmao. ESR the father of the open source movement?

I knew I should have bolded the 'a' in that sentence. Easy to miss.

I posed the question, what has she actually done for us. I haven't recieved one response other than she battles anti-fud.

And my response was "what the hell do you want from her". Battling the FUD is a full-time job (she quit her day job in the early stages of the SCO trial if I remember correctly). Groklaw is the go-to site for legal analysis regarding OSS, and you're going to throw that away because the editor of the site wrote an opinion piece you don't like? That doesn't make sense. That site is invaluable for these articles regarding the GPL alone, and that's a fraction of the information available. How do you justify dismissing all of this?

If you've looked at ODF and MSXML, you'll see why it matters which one's the standard. If you look at a comparison of ODF and MSXML, you'll see the differences. You'll notice that the XHTML and ODF examples read like document mark-up: you have the recognizable text of the document and things like paragraph and italic marks occur at the obvious places. This makes it really easy to manipulate ODF via XSLT to turn it into other formats. MSXML, by contrast, reads like an XML encoding of the internal object representation within Word. Instead of text being a paragraph you have a paragraph object with several attributes, one of which is the text of the paragraph. Notice how complex the nesting gets when you've got words in italics and boldface within a paragraph. This structure is going to be a real bitch to manipulate using XSLT. In fact Microsoft themselves admit this, saying that MSXML isn't meant to be manipulated by standard tools like XSLT but by programs using Microsoft's own APIs. What's the use of XML if you can't manipulate the document using standard tools for manipulating XML?

(BTW, isn't there a Donovan song about Pamela Jones?)

I think you're thinking of Pamela Jo, not that I'm a big Donovan fan or anything.

But Microsoft isn't joing the ODA, they're joining the ISO group that's responsible for ODF's ISO certification.

Interestingly enough, despite Microsoft's protests to the contrary, as the person who is quoted in the article (Groklaw's PJ) has stated on her site, the specific committee on which Microsoft sits just happens to be the one that's responsible for tallying up all the votes and giving the final yay or nay.

Sorry, but Microsoft's statements of 'we're not gonna do anything, we're just here to watch,' sound just a bit increduluous if you ask me.

Sir, please hop over to http://www.groklaw.net/ and take a look at exactly what SCO has beein trying to subpoena for the "discovery" stage of their lawsuit with IBM. It is literally millions of lines of code, entire changelog histories, hundreds of hours of testimony, and other vast amounts of evidence.

Their limited success getting access to this material means that it is at least thinkable to grant such wide access to the material. Fortunately, IBM's lawyers have actually been doing their jobs in defending against such wide-ranging, expensive, and business plan revealing fishing expeditions.

" Yeah, you're right, Microsoft should sit around and allow its IP to be stolen..."

And how many times has Microsoft be dragged into court for IP theft itself only to settle out of court? The pot calling the kettle black, I'd say. When a company can make more money off stole IP than what it costs to settle in court, what do think they will do?

But do you think Microsoft is innocent in all these cases? Here is a list of MS litigation http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page= 2005010107100653. Sort through it. You'll find some like the AT&T case, for example.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200603211 63230297

The www.consortiuminfo.org blog links to her, but I know some /.'ers won't RTFA, but maybe Grok Law will get their attention.

Courtesy of a post on Groklaw, court costs don't include attorney fees (although they can be imposed, too). Another post in the Groklaw thread suggested a figure of about $2k (for the FSF's costs...), but PJ said probably lower. I understand Wallace has similar cases pending against RedHat, Novell, and IBM. He probably has similar chances of success. It's going to add up if he pushes...

I

Courtesy of a post on Groklaw, court costs don't include attorney fees (although they can be imposed, too). Another post in the Groklaw thread suggested a figure of about $2k (for the FSF's costs...), but PJ said probably lower. I understand Wallace has similar cases pending against RedHat, Novell, and IBM. He probably has similar chances of success. It's going to add up if he pushes...

I

Courtesy of a post on Groklaw, court costs don't include attorney fees (although they can be imposed, too). Another post in the Groklaw thread suggested a figure of about $2k (for the FSF's costs...), but PJ said probably lower. I understand Wallace has similar cases pending against RedHat, Novell, and IBM. He probably has similar chances of success. It's going to add up if he pushes...

I

Slashdot displays its ignorance of basic legal concepts yet again...

Wrong, daddy-o. That comment came from PJ at Groklaw, not slashdot. Lookee here ...

It's the Order that tells Wallace to pay the Free Software Foundation's costs. Judges do that when they'd like you to learn a good lesson. It's a signal you shouldn't have brought the case in the first place.

This would be a good analogy if Linux were a Minix clone. Minix was the platform he developed on. He wasn't cloning it. This has already been documented several times on the Net. http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200405200 21144762/

The person who wrote the Newsforge article, and whoever submitted this story to Slashdot is out of the loop, according to PJ of Groklaw. Here's the latest at GrokLaw on how FOSS and Disabled Communities are NOT of touch. Instead, FOSS is working with the disabled communities to provide a solution.

So The Economist is just trying to teach those poor Open Source programmers The Right Way (tm) of developing software. This article is wrong in so many ways. But others like Groklaw have pointed plenty of them.
I just want to make a point that I always miss in this kind of discussion. There is a wildly sucessful, innovative, world changing collaboration effort that works in the same principles of open source that is never mentioned: science.
Scientists build on top of each other's work. They publish data, theories and results for other scientists to use freely. They form a meritocracy that measures success by how much their work is used by others.
By contrast, propietary software is alchemy, magic. They will only do their trick if you pay them, and never ever tell you how it is done.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. And then, they forget that they ever anything but your best friends.

PJ over at Groklaw http://www.groklaw.net/ has this story.

The reporter interviewed her. She has his questions and her answers. He obviouly ignored what she told him and printed a story full of factual innacuracies.

This is bad, bad reporting. Do I still trust the Economist? Not much.

Or maybe you meant GrokLaw?

Once IBM gets done eviscerating SCO in court, they'll probably end up owning all SCO's IP and assets

Forgetting the $34,000,000 plus interest that the SCO Group owes Novell from the M$ and Sun license fees? Or the fact that Novell still own the UNIX copyrights, that tSCOg has no trade secrets or patents? Or the Red Hat suit?

A happy thought is these 3 passing round the hot, smoking corpse of Cald^H^H^H^H^H tSCOg: "Here, take it", "No, it's yours", "We insist" while trying to ignore the stench of napalm-burnt turd ...

Oh, the good old days. Concepts have been fair game for years and things just got worse last September. The courts have said you can't patent abstract ideas, but business method patents have been patentable for years.

Recently, the patent office issued a ruling that removed the so-called "technological arts" requirement. For many years, business method patents have been limited by this requirement -- essentially, if a business method doesn't involve a technology component, then it doesn't qualify. In September, the appeals board voted in favor of a compensation method that can worked out with pencil and paper. This opens the door for even more business method patents.

If the current system existed back in the 40s, the only drive-thru in the country might be Red's Giant Hamburgs.

I'm not forced to put the Xgl Desktop on my file server, and I'm not forced to use the console screen to do my text editing. I can put the Umbutu desktop on my friend's desktop and a smoothwall install on his firewall.
And best of all, I don't have to write to Washington for permission to start the computers.