Ask a Legal Expert How MS Ruling Affects Open Source

By now we all know about Judge Kollar-Kotelly's decision in the Microsoft antitrust case. The effect of this ruling on Linux and Open Source use and future development is not yet clear. For those of you who have been wondering about this, we have a special interview guest: Attorney Lawrence E. (Larry) Rosen, Linux Journal's popular Geek Law columnist, who is surely one of the best-qualified people in the world to answer questions on this topic. (Usual Slashdot interview rules apply.)

Comments

Re:How do consumers benefit? No, really!

[Malcontent]

"Horrible, those damn bastards might install patches to keep worms from spreading like Code Red and Nimda, because people who pirate their software typically aren't smart enough to secure it. Those bastards!"

On the other hand they might read your dard drive, extract your outlook email list and send it to MS so that the list could be used for spam. Or maybe they might disable all non MS products on your hard drive or they might change all your preferences to use MS products as default.

Why not? you gave them that right when you clicked OK. Would they abuse that right? Of course they would they are evil people who have done worse.