LindowsOS.com Email Lists Collected For MS Suit

Over at the LindowsOS website is a message from company chief Michael Robertson, who advises readers that, in the course of discovery for the ongoing lawsuit instigated by Microsoft against Lindows.com, the company was "compelled to disclose your email address to Microsoft." The email addresses aren't just those who have submitted product names with a connection to "Windows", but rather "everyone who had submitted their address asking to be signed up for the Lindows.com mailing list since we turned on the website," according to email from Robertson. He adds: "The information which Microsoft received in the list was name, email address and physical address. It was not just people that posted to our forum, but basically every address for every person that we had collected." (Note: If you'd like to contribute to the list of "Windows" products, it would be helpful to include more than just a product name photocopy -- e.g. a company name, URL, or photocopied manual.).Update by HeUnique: And here is Michael Robertson comment.

Comments

Remember everyone...

[neema]

In some states, it is LEGAL to shoot anyone who steps on your property uninvited.

you wish

[Erris]

Now we'll be subjected to extra windows spam from MS.

Give the usual MicroSquish business ethics, you will be signed up for "product information and news" for everything from X-10 to porn. Good luck, your mail box will soon look like my AOL account. I wonder if M$ have anything to do with that as well, there can'nt be that many dumb asses who buy a penis enarger sales kit. It would not be beyond the company that pays to have dead people write congressmen. Such is the stuff of software ownership and "aggesive" marketing.

As an internal email from M$ once told, there were two conditions for a new NT product that interfaced with Unix, that it make money for M$ and that it kill Unix. Needless to say, that project useful project did not happen.

Nope... (Re: X Windows)

[SlashChick]

Actually, it's not X Windows, but the X Window System. And actually, Microsoft Windows predates it -- Windows was released in 1983, and the X Window System's first commercial release was in 1986.

I'd guess that most product names that could help Lindows have already been submitted. Really, the name "Lindows" is pretty much doomed at this point.

The DMCA to the rescue

[Skiamorphic]

Actually, MS could never make use of these mailing lists.

Inclusion of an email address in a plethora of such addresses is s security mechanism known as chaffing (see Rivest et al).

Any attempt to extract an individual email address from such a welter runs afoul o0f the DMCA and would land Bill Gates in the penitentiary.

Re:The real problem...

[MisterBlister]

Maybe Lindows should port to Windows then..So Microsoft won't sue them!!

I know I for one could use a Windows emulator for Windows !!!

Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!!

That's not up to you to decide.

[Otis_INF]

As to the actual trademark issue, Microsoft calls their products "Microsoft Windows XP Professional" and we call ours "LindowsOS". There is no confusion.

There _is_ confusion, between 'Windows' and 'Lindows', as the majority of the crowd will call both products. Ask an average joe in the street if he knows the OS 'Windows' and he probably will say 'yes'. It's also not up to YOU to decide that there is NO confusion. the 'dows' in your name IS refering to Windows, not to Dow Jones or anything else.

And please, stop the yadda yadda about 'if you want to help extend their monopoly'... you try to make a living out of the hard work of others as you also did with MP3.com. If there is ONE person that should be ashamed, it should be you.