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How Microsoft Inadvertently Helps To Fund FOSS
christian.einfeldt writes "The State of California sued Microsoft for anti-trust violations, and now the proceeds of the settlement of that case are being used to fund the acquisition of computers for any school district in California. The terms of the settlement allow every school district in California to be reimbursed a set dollar amount for the purchase of computers with the software of their choice. Microsoft probably anticipated that school districts would mainly use the settlement to buy more Microsoft products, with a few Apple purchases sprinkled in here and there. But now that Free Open Source Software is being commercialized by hardware vendors such as Dell, System76, EmperorLinux, Zareason.com, and TechCollective.com, acquiring computers powered by FOSS is straightforward. I'm a volunteer sysadmin at a northern California public charter school and in my Slashdot journal I detail the step-by-step process for using Microsoft's money to pay for the Linux purchases of your school's choice." And then there's the Ubuntu team in Belgium that is raising funds by auctioning off a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate that a Microsoft rep gave them at a trade show. So far the bidding is up to 101.76 Euros, about $144.
This is about as irrelevant and pointless as kdawson can get. A hundred bucks or so that would raise wouldn't "fund" anything more than a catered lunch, if that.
This is as low as kdawson can stoop to, if he thinks stunts like this really helps the cause or promotes Linux in any way. It's just petty and childish behavior.
This is money the state bullied out of Microsoft pocket, it most definitely stinks. Sure this money was bullied out of the consumer pocket in the first place through copyright law, but what the state of California has done is a whole other league of stinkiness. The best thing would be to install Linux and give back the money to Microsoft.
\u262D = \u5350
die
because apple deliberately tries to tie their software to their hardware. Now that Macs run on a x86 architecture and MacOS is basically a modified version of BSD you would think that you could run MacOS on any PC. Not so - it has deliberate crippleware to stop it working on non-macs (or so it was the last time that I heard). You want to use their software? You must buy their over-inflated hardware. At least with what M$ is up to (with Media Player and IE), you do still HAVE the choice. MS office is designed to run on Windows, you can't run it on linux for technical reasons, but you could run it on something that mimics windows, like WINE or ReactOS. It hasn't been designed (afaik) to check that it's running on genuine windows and arbitrarilly refuse to work if it finds that its not, even if it actually would work were that check not there.
Also, they still ship 1-button mice.