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Liberty Alliance Having Problems
torre writes "This article would suggest that there seems to be some chaos in the Liberty Alliance fight against Passport. Between Sun's Jonathan Schwartz claiming defeat to Microsoft as it has the market tightly controlled with the help of windows to Novell's Justin Taylor who says that Microsoft's Passport has got nothing to offer when it comes to the enterprise. Should be interesting to see how things pan out."
This article seems to have written in a deliberately misleading manner from a few out of context quotes. They put words in a Sun executives mouth (as far as I can see nobody has "conceded defeat") and then makes out that there is a rift because others haven't "conceded defeat".
One of the thing the Sun guy says is "I don't think it will be very long before we have a pervasive non-Microsoft client". That doesn't sound like conceding defeat to me.
Microsoft added a fake left curling single-quote to most of it's fonts about ten years ago. Toy 'desktop' systems like Word, MS Publisher, BOB use these quotes in order to look 'cool'.
Standards-based browsers: Netscape, Mozilla, Konqueror, Opera don't nesesarily display this non-standard 'quote' the way IE does. They default to showing a question mark when confronted with theis non-standard quote.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
"Any time you use any Microsoft technology, you HAVE to sign-up for a passport license."
Not true. I've got people in my office today who have laptops running Windows XP. They are *not* forced to sign up for Passport. Let me repeat: They are not forced to sign up for Passport.
When you do need (note: I didn't say forced) to sign up for Passport is when you use their IM stuff. That is a choice you can make. It's a choice you make when you sign up for Hotmail. There's no forcing going on.
And no, Paypal doesn't require a Passport to sign up. I have no idea where you conjured up that idea.
I played Asheron's Call (online RPG published by Microsoft) for about 2 years. Then one day, poof, you can't log on to play the game without Passport. I guess you could argue that I didn't have to play that game, but after a 2 year investment... Personally, I'd call that an example of being forced to sign up for passport. It actually adds a step in the logon process, slowing things down for me.