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Microsoft To Buy $100M More SUSE Support Vouchers
CWmike writes "Microsoft will buy and resell up to another $100 million worth of enterprise support subscriptions for Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system. Two years ago, Microsoft agreed to buy and resell $240 million worth of the vouchers. Susan Hauser, general manager of strategic partnerships and licensing at Microsoft, confirmed that some of the subscription vouchers were sold to customers for less than face value, though none were given away for free."
Except providing Silverlight itself to Linux wouldn't lock people into Windows.
.net, or Mono.
.net always struck me as being buggy garbage, and it's not portable, which means only Windows users get the benefit of using the software. On top of that, I'm pretty sure it isn't that hard just to hand-code the functions you need that .net "helpfully" provides.
.net, is very likely to sue or threaten to sue the tar out of anybody stupid enough to think they'll be safe using any Microsoft "standard."
What I see instead is Microsoft helping Moonlight and Mono development in the hopes of torpedoing them in the not too distant future, possibly by prodcing a new version of Silverlight and NOT releasing any specifications on its new features and making sure any Silverlight-producing software only produces those new Moonlight incompatible features. Then Microsoft starts spouting FUD at them about patent violations, despite having aided them before.
As a programmer, I've always made a point of avoiding "convenience" technologies, such as Java,
Java is bloated, slow and unstable. It saves the programmer a lot of hell for porting and a handful of other things, but it royally screws over the end user who has to put up with a runtime environment and all the MAJOR flaws of Java.
Mono is much the same way, although portable, but it also has one major disadvantage going towards it: It's contaminated IP. Knowing how likely it is that Microsoft, despite "opening" the specifications for
This is why many developers are too afraid to trust both of Microsoft's Shared Source licenses. One is laced with an NDA, so it's already a boner, but the second "open source" license is non-commercial only and many believe it is too risky to trust for the same reason I don't trust Mono, people have seen the IP, now Microsoft might have leverage to start making claims it was copied IP.
I am beginning to think that maybe Darl McBride was attacked viciously by a penguin as a child.
I would agree, if the vouchers were not FUDed to mean that they are some sort of legal protection against Microsoft's actions. They are saying that if you dont buy whatever they sanction (suse/xandros/linspire), then the CIO is open to lawsuit.
Novel, Xandros and Linspire should be taken out and shot in the head. They are true traitors to the open source community and should be barred from using the Linux trademark.
NO SIG
Interop is a good thing, yes. But Microsoft's "interop" means FUD for anyone not playing into its patent SCAM.
NO SIG