On that list are IBM, Linspire and Sun. The original decision was bad for everyone, though it obviously didn't knock you off your pedestal.
I fail to see how that makes software patents good for anyone or that there is any justice to their administration. It does make current advocates of software patents look foolish.
"Fascist" is such a poorly defined word as to be useless to any form of argument short of these meant to invoke an emotional response.
Most rule of man over rule of law systems are always poorly defined. As the OP noticed, the apparatus of state is simply a facade when people are deprived of their rights. This is the only similarity between such systems but the only difference is a matter of how concentrated the power and how gross the facade. They all degenerate into proscription, confiscation of property, and exile which the US already has, and then mass arrests, purges and other horrors. The only reason for these things is to give and perpetuate the wealth and power of favorites at the expense of others.
Since the ACLU types tried to slow down the wiretaps, the FBI had plenty of free cycles to go after leakers of secret programs.
What makes you think they ever did anything else? OBL's capture? All the WMD they found in Iraq? Can you name any actual terrorists that have been caught by wiretaps, other than obviously incompetents who use chat rooms and try to trade stolen audio equipment for hand grenades?
At the time, Gonzo tried to justify the program in a similar but more direct way,
At the time, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said of the leak: "This is really hurting national security; this has really hurt our country."
and it's complete bullshit. Actual terrorists know that FISA can authorize wiretaps though a secret court and that their communications may be monitored without any public record. No information of use was gained by them learning the court was bypassed by a corrupt administration. Harm was only done to the administration and the backlash is purely political. What the administration is doing is both illegal and immoral. The only reason for them to bypass the already friendly FISA court is to spy on political opposition. FISA has given them all they might need for legitimate terrorist hunting and is dangerous enough on it's own. Domestic spying is Orwellian, unconstitutional and deeply unAmerican - it's opponents are patriots.
More judges need to rule that software patents of the obvious are unconstitutional (i think it was covered by the suffrage amendment) so that slashdot can return to reporting on google and the iphone instead of these patent stories.
It would be a great thing to eliminate business method and software patents. Until that happens, the costs of them should be shouted from the rooftops. Cool gadgets are not hard to make, but the business is impossible because of crap like this. M$ is the bad guy because they lobbied, right along with the other incumbents, for these stupid patents in the first place.
its a shame that they aren't sticking it to microsoft
Yes, if software patents were actually a competitive disadvantage to GWB's little pet company, things might change.
This case had ramifications WAY beyond any hassle for MS. Such a sizeable and far-reaching ruling over a couple of obscure patents would have sent a shockwave through the software industry--scaring the hell out of developers and encouraging the patent trolls even more.
This is really more of the same arbitrary justice that make software patents a bad idea in the first place. M$ can and does use the same threats anyway. Their prowess in court only strengthens their position as lord and master. Business method and software patents cover things that are not really inventions, so the results will always be arbitrary and manipulable. The court has decided to promote business rather than justice and such decisions have favored M$ more than once. On these grounds, M$ will violate the patents of other with impunity while threatening everyone else with ruinous legal costs.
What you have to understand is that M$ itself is a patent troll. Almost all of their software has come from predatory acquisitions but the market has dried up because people are no longer willing to risk their money in the business where M$ can crush them. You must have noticed that all of the innovative companies, Google, Wikipedia, Facebook and others are all using gnu/linux and avoiding the desktop in order to make money. M$ has built themselves a patent warchest to assail those businesses, and has been instrumental in setting up business method and other stupid patents. Others have taken advantage of the situation, but that does not make M$ any less culpable.
No additional certainty has been added to the market that can benefit anyone. The case is far from settled but it has already cost both companies boatloads of money. Only the largest companies could weather that kind of storm and this will keep investors and small companies out of the business.
Resources, they had more than enough of. Now things like Skill, Insight, Innovation (the real kind), Design Acumen... those were what they lacked.
I'm not sure M$ can afford to modernize their software base any other way than the way Apple did or even if they have time to do the same anymore. The Linux kernel alone costs $600 million. Other software will cost them plenty and they will have to create many drivers themselves because vendors would give them the finger and more to less restrictive systems until M$'s was a success. This is what's happened to Vista. It would be very difficult for them to make utilities as good as those available in the free software world. The gnu debugger, for example, had the attentions of more than 80 people. Even M$'s billions would go away quickly if they tried to do everything themselves to that kind of quality standard. Apple harvested free software and a lot of community involvement to get themselves into OSX. M$ had it's chance to do the same, but squandered it building digital restrictions instead.
So now they are claiming 60 million by the end of June? That would make 20 million coppies sold in June alone because they were boasting 40 million in May. Given that the market is on the order of 230 million a year, and most people don't want Vista, it's unlikely that many desktops were sold and less likely they all had Vista.
If things were really rosy for M$, you would not see systems with gnu/linux. That you do signals the end of the M$ monopoly.
M$ Fanboy, Macthorpe thinks that Vista has captured seven times the market share of gnu/linux:
2007 is much more the year of gnu/linux than it is the year of Vista.
Did you deduce that from the statistics that show that Vista is already being used on more than seven times the number of Linux machines?
No, I based it on low sales of Vista and industry disappointment. That's not suprising, given the 12% interest in Vista in polls of both business and home users. If those polls are correct, a 5% market share for Vista could only happen if something between 25 and 50% of all computers were replaced in the last six months. That's unlikely, so something is clearly wrong with your little market share boast.
Not even M$'s wildest boasts put Vista on that kind of footing. There are some one billion on internet connected computers in the world. M$ would like people to believe their channel stuffing has sold 20 million copies of Vista, a paltry 2%. Converting that to real users is something I'll let you bother with.
This is great if you want to support Microsoft and their deal with Novell. May I suggest a boycott?
It would be more productive to ask for the distribution of your choice and purchase only models known to work with that distro. I've yet to go wrong with a used Thinkpad but I would not trust a vendor supplied distro anyway. If it came with nifty tweaks, I would look at them and duplicate the setting, but change the binaries out.
The choice corporate customers have is Novel or Vista. If they chose Novel, it won't be long before vendors get smart and cut M$ out of the deal. GPL 3 has extinguished the patent threat, so the Novel deal is dead in the water anyway. It's not like it really provided and of the promised compatibility, so the extra cost is all waste and not even Novel will like it.
2007 is much more the year of gnu/linux than it is the year of Vista. First Dell, now Lenovo. Acer might soon decide their Singapore gnu/linux laptop has a market in the UK and US after all. That would leave HP as the only one of the big four desktop makers who don't sell models with gnu/linux. Driver support for Linux is already good but vendor demand is going to make it better, which is why M$ has done everyting in their power to keep vendors from doing this. Vista is a flop and no one is making money off the upgrade train anymore, so M$ has nothing to offer, vendors have nothing to lose and the M$ death spiral is on.
Death spiral? Yep. They did not have the resources to make Vista modern or even functional. Low sales of Vista have flatlined their revenue, so they will never have the resources to recover. Vendors are defecting and that lowers the likely hood that Vista will ever be ready and reduces their ability to sabotage free software with bogus non standards.
The non free way has finally failed. This will be good for everyone but M$.
IIS already has a pretty dramatic marketshare lead when it comes to the Fortune 1000.
This is the M$ zenith. The seeds M$ sewed back in the 80s and 90s are bearing fruit. All of those "free" copies of Windoze and Office bought the loyalty of millions of clueless MBA corporate wanna-be types. Their unmitigated ignorance and greed is also apparent in other mismanagement. It is only in big dumb companies that technical competence can be so thouroughly overridden by idealog management. Such irrational practices, can turn on a dime. Reality will catch up with these people, despite the size of their companies and it's already happening.
Working for most of the Fortune 1000 is miserable right now - they have their employees by the balls and they know it. Much of their M$ heavy stock funded retirement plans never gained their value back, so these companies are filled with old people who can't retire and are being worked to death. Their management is lining their pockets with bonuses while they fire employees, sell off capital and let the rest go to hell. The Mississippi River bridge collapse was just the beginning of the problems we will soon see. Power grids, plants, telephone networks and other vital infrastructure are all being run down under the stewardship of greedy asswipes who think they are rock stars.
Yes, and to me it's easier to see/find stuff then when I have to scroll for miles through the config files on my apache servers.
grep "keyword" -r
texteditor_of_choice "found_file.txt"
read helpful comments and edit to suit purpose
Also, don't forget to apt-cache search keyword webserver_of_choice to see if someone has not already done your customization for you. Google the results to see which is right for you.
Compare this to the average GUI maze of tabs and checkboxes without comments or rational directions. The choice is obvious unless you do exactly what Bill Gates thinks you should do and enjoy pressing "I agree" and "forward".
some n00b admin couldn't exactly master Apache in a weekend like they could IIS. I personally use Apache on my servers. But I could also take my good old time configuring them because I'm not planning on making any money from them.
If running a Wizard makes a master, "apt-get install apache" does too.
Money making is exactly where people have mastered Apache and there's plenty of their good work available as preconfigured packages for every distribution. Do you really want to go through money, paperwork, registration, activation and all that every time you add a new server? Do you really want to spend all of your time on endless patches that break your customization but don't do anything to thwart crackers?
Apache's lead remains substantial in both categories.... But less than two years later, Microsoft has narrowed that 50 percent gap to 16.7 percent. The margin is even tighter in active sites, where Apache leads Microsoft by just 12.2 percent.
This does not mean they are not purchasing their market share. Unless M$ gives their software away, or convinces the victim that it's "free" through some other licensing deal, LAMP has an unbeatable cost advantage. Even when M$ gives their software and service away, LAMP has an unbeatable technical advantage that can only be matched by other free software packages. Reading further we find:
It's worth noting that Apache has lost market share to another open source server, lighttpd (1.2% of all sites), and Google (4.4%) as well as Windows.
Some crook once said, "There's one born every minute," but M$ has to be close to saturating it's potential market. Anyone who hangs around long enough figures things out and moves to cheaper and more reliable service.
Of course, I have to laugh along with you because IIS topping LAMP is simply absurd. I've seen a few moves in this direction, but they are always some kind of top-down brain death that lessens reliability and features. In any competitive environment, where people are competent, IIS does not stand a chance.
Now, if only we could get those investigative journalists of yours to apply their talent where it really makes a difference...
Or if Daniel Lyons and Forbes could really understand technical issues and provide informed reporting instead of tired satire. Really, this guy's bad attitude comes across in his day job too.
That lawyer obviously reads Slashdot, she went straight for the largely irrelevant car analogy.
They post most of them here too. It's a pretty good piece of infowar. By making us all sick of something they think Joe Sixpacks likes, they think they are driving a wedge between Slashdotters and the rest of the world. Unfortunately for them, Joe Sixpacks can tell when M$ is blowing smoke up his ass with a false analogy. It's easy enough to ignore the analogy and make your point directly.
instead of it being merely trivial, you want Microsoft to hand you their property on a fucking plate so you don't have to make any effort? Entitlement issues, much?... And I thought being able to use things cross-platform was a fundamental freedom, not a chore. Which is it?
If it was really free it would be a deb and RPM package already. M$ would have to do nothing more than release it and the community would quickly do the rest. It's not free so each and every person who would use these inferior fonts have to crawl through M$'s binary anus. The process is not much easier for Windoze users but they have to live in the anus.
While existing customers might not implicate MS into GPL3 obligations; they may not have ANY future customers. And so, it is still a win for the FSF, without any need to go in to court.
This is really simple. All versions of the GPL are a license that leverages the power of copyright. M$ and anyone else can have it at no cost as long as they abide by the terms. When software is released under those terms, all distributors are bound by them or they don't have permission to distribute. If M$ wants to avoid GPL3, they will have to fork everything GPL2 and maintain it themselves. Their ability to maintain both that codebase and their own is zero as Vista demonstrates their inability to maintain their own code. I doubt there's anyone dumb enough to listen to M$ about this crazy talk about contracts - M$ has a simple choice between a stale distribution and a license that emasculates their patent threat.
M$ is trying to own free software, which is a blatant admission that free software works and non free can't compete. GPL3 prevents them from doing this with patents, so all the money they spent building a patent warchest was a waste. People who use patents to fight software freedom are not welcome to the free software party and are going to have to do everything themselves. Their FUD against GPL3 is not going to fool anyone, so they had better get coding.
Lenovo makes no claim as to what OS goes on this PC. Since MS has promised China Windows XP deals as cheap as $5....
There is no version of Windows that runs comfortably in the quarter VGA that SD TV is. WinCE and friends have a chance, but are feature and application poor compared to embedded gnu/linux.
.if it's rejected as an ISO standard, there is plenty of room for rejecting the present acceptance.
By the time that happens, other roadblocks will be in place. The greenlight to OOXML ushers in acceptance of Vista and the next generation of lock down. Look for select idiots to be pulling wasteful stunts like this and the public to be "served" with M$ only, patented crap file formats. The longer you wait to escape the M$ data trap, the more expensive it gets. The only way to stop the push is to demand free file formats. There is enough resentment at the upgrade treadmill to fight, but the fight is now pushed from a principled stand by leaders to squabbling over fanboy aggression. This makes Mass. State Government a willing tool in the M$ monopoly and upgrade treadmill. People in the state will have a choice between giving money to M$ or not being able to interact with their government.
Not to mention that the real point of the endeavor was to codify into law the use of a document built for OO.o's feature set, lacking the ability to handle MS's feature set, thereby prohibiting government use of MS's extra features. Basically, codify into law OO.o's feature set. OO.o can't compete with MS on features, so let the law render the feature set competition moot, at which point OO.o can compete on "free as in beer".
This has nothing to do with features or a competitive market. Word has yet to match the feature set of Latex and Word Perfect or Word Perfect's ease of use. The only reason people use Word is M$'s coercive monopoly and marketing power. In this case, Mass. is going to use Word in the future because of obvious government corruption, which overran both technical competence and the will of the people.
Almost all SD TV's make horrible monitors. I'd think you'd be better off with a OLPC from a usability standpoint.
You can go back and forth with this, bashing OLPC. Of course people are better off with OLPC and Gates will think of some reason he hates this thing, which answers his previous complaints, because it's not going to run Windoze.
Slashdot Mirror
On that list are IBM, Linspire and Sun. The original decision was bad for everyone, though it obviously didn't knock you off your pedestal.
I fail to see how that makes software patents good for anyone or that there is any justice to their administration. It does make current advocates of software patents look foolish.
"Fascist" is such a poorly defined word as to be useless to any form of argument short of these meant to invoke an emotional response.
Most rule of man over rule of law systems are always poorly defined. As the OP noticed, the apparatus of state is simply a facade when people are deprived of their rights. This is the only similarity between such systems but the only difference is a matter of how concentrated the power and how gross the facade. They all degenerate into proscription, confiscation of property, and exile which the US already has, and then mass arrests, purges and other horrors. The only reason for these things is to give and perpetuate the wealth and power of favorites at the expense of others.
Since the ACLU types tried to slow down the wiretaps, the FBI had plenty of free cycles to go after leakers of secret programs.
What makes you think they ever did anything else? OBL's capture? All the WMD they found in Iraq? Can you name any actual terrorists that have been caught by wiretaps, other than obviously incompetents who use chat rooms and try to trade stolen audio equipment for hand grenades?
At the time, Gonzo tried to justify the program in a similar but more direct way,
and it's complete bullshit. Actual terrorists know that FISA can authorize wiretaps though a secret court and that their communications may be monitored without any public record. No information of use was gained by them learning the court was bypassed by a corrupt administration. Harm was only done to the administration and the backlash is purely political. What the administration is doing is both illegal and immoral. The only reason for them to bypass the already friendly FISA court is to spy on political opposition. FISA has given them all they might need for legitimate terrorist hunting and is dangerous enough on it's own. Domestic spying is Orwellian, unconstitutional and deeply unAmerican - it's opponents are patriots.
LOL.
The courts are collaborators with obvious evil.
More judges need to rule that software patents of the obvious are unconstitutional (i think it was covered by the suffrage amendment) so that slashdot can return to reporting on google and the iphone instead of these patent stories.
It would be a great thing to eliminate business method and software patents. Until that happens, the costs of them should be shouted from the rooftops. Cool gadgets are not hard to make, but the business is impossible because of crap like this. M$ is the bad guy because they lobbied, right along with the other incumbents, for these stupid patents in the first place.
its a shame that they aren't sticking it to microsoft
Yes, if software patents were actually a competitive disadvantage to GWB's little pet company, things might change.
This case had ramifications WAY beyond any hassle for MS. Such a sizeable and far-reaching ruling over a couple of obscure patents would have sent a shockwave through the software industry--scaring the hell out of developers and encouraging the patent trolls even more.
This is really more of the same arbitrary justice that make software patents a bad idea in the first place. M$ can and does use the same threats anyway. Their prowess in court only strengthens their position as lord and master. Business method and software patents cover things that are not really inventions, so the results will always be arbitrary and manipulable. The court has decided to promote business rather than justice and such decisions have favored M$ more than once. On these grounds, M$ will violate the patents of other with impunity while threatening everyone else with ruinous legal costs.
What you have to understand is that M$ itself is a patent troll. Almost all of their software has come from predatory acquisitions but the market has dried up because people are no longer willing to risk their money in the business where M$ can crush them. You must have noticed that all of the innovative companies, Google, Wikipedia, Facebook and others are all using gnu/linux and avoiding the desktop in order to make money. M$ has built themselves a patent warchest to assail those businesses, and has been instrumental in setting up business method and other stupid patents. Others have taken advantage of the situation, but that does not make M$ any less culpable.
No additional certainty has been added to the market that can benefit anyone. The case is far from settled but it has already cost both companies boatloads of money. Only the largest companies could weather that kind of storm and this will keep investors and small companies out of the business.
Resources, they had more than enough of. Now things like Skill, Insight, Innovation (the real kind), Design Acumen... those were what they lacked.
I'm not sure M$ can afford to modernize their software base any other way than the way Apple did or even if they have time to do the same anymore. The Linux kernel alone costs $600 million. Other software will cost them plenty and they will have to create many drivers themselves because vendors would give them the finger and more to less restrictive systems until M$'s was a success. This is what's happened to Vista. It would be very difficult for them to make utilities as good as those available in the free software world. The gnu debugger, for example, had the attentions of more than 80 people. Even M$'s billions would go away quickly if they tried to do everything themselves to that kind of quality standard. Apple harvested free software and a lot of community involvement to get themselves into OSX. M$ had it's chance to do the same, but squandered it building digital restrictions instead.
So now they are claiming 60 million by the end of June? That would make 20 million coppies sold in June alone because they were boasting 40 million in May. Given that the market is on the order of 230 million a year, and most people don't want Vista, it's unlikely that many desktops were sold and less likely they all had Vista.
If things were really rosy for M$, you would not see systems with gnu/linux. That you do signals the end of the M$ monopoly.
M$ Fanboy, Macthorpe thinks that Vista has captured seven times the market share of gnu/linux:
2007 is much more the year of gnu/linux than it is the year of Vista. Did you deduce that from the statistics that show that Vista is already being used on more than seven times the number of Linux machines?
No, I based it on low sales of Vista and industry disappointment. That's not suprising, given the 12% interest in Vista in polls of both business and home users. If those polls are correct, a 5% market share for Vista could only happen if something between 25 and 50% of all computers were replaced in the last six months. That's unlikely, so something is clearly wrong with your little market share boast.
Not even M$'s wildest boasts put Vista on that kind of footing. There are some one billion on internet connected computers in the world. M$ would like people to believe their channel stuffing has sold 20 million copies of Vista, a paltry 2%. Converting that to real users is something I'll let you bother with.
This is great if you want to support Microsoft and their deal with Novell. May I suggest a boycott?
It would be more productive to ask for the distribution of your choice and purchase only models known to work with that distro. I've yet to go wrong with a used Thinkpad but I would not trust a vendor supplied distro anyway. If it came with nifty tweaks, I would look at them and duplicate the setting, but change the binaries out.
The choice corporate customers have is Novel or Vista. If they chose Novel, it won't be long before vendors get smart and cut M$ out of the deal. GPL 3 has extinguished the patent threat, so the Novel deal is dead in the water anyway. It's not like it really provided and of the promised compatibility, so the extra cost is all waste and not even Novel will like it.
2007 is much more the year of gnu/linux than it is the year of Vista. First Dell, now Lenovo. Acer might soon decide their Singapore gnu/linux laptop has a market in the UK and US after all. That would leave HP as the only one of the big four desktop makers who don't sell models with gnu/linux. Driver support for Linux is already good but vendor demand is going to make it better, which is why M$ has done everyting in their power to keep vendors from doing this. Vista is a flop and no one is making money off the upgrade train anymore, so M$ has nothing to offer, vendors have nothing to lose and the M$ death spiral is on.
Death spiral? Yep. They did not have the resources to make Vista modern or even functional. Low sales of Vista have flatlined their revenue, so they will never have the resources to recover. Vendors are defecting and that lowers the likely hood that Vista will ever be ready and reduces their ability to sabotage free software with bogus non standards.
The non free way has finally failed. This will be good for everyone but M$.
IIS already has a pretty dramatic marketshare lead when it comes to the Fortune 1000.
This is the M$ zenith. The seeds M$ sewed back in the 80s and 90s are bearing fruit. All of those "free" copies of Windoze and Office bought the loyalty of millions of clueless MBA corporate wanna-be types. Their unmitigated ignorance and greed is also apparent in other mismanagement. It is only in big dumb companies that technical competence can be so thouroughly overridden by idealog management. Such irrational practices, can turn on a dime. Reality will catch up with these people, despite the size of their companies and it's already happening.
Working for most of the Fortune 1000 is miserable right now - they have their employees by the balls and they know it. Much of their M$ heavy stock funded retirement plans never gained their value back, so these companies are filled with old people who can't retire and are being worked to death. Their management is lining their pockets with bonuses while they fire employees, sell off capital and let the rest go to hell. The Mississippi River bridge collapse was just the beginning of the problems we will soon see. Power grids, plants, telephone networks and other vital infrastructure are all being run down under the stewardship of greedy asswipes who think they are rock stars.
Yes, and to me it's easier to see/find stuff then when I have to scroll for miles through the config files on my apache servers.
Also, don't forget to apt-cache search keyword webserver_of_choice to see if someone has not already done your customization for you. Google the results to see which is right for you.
Compare this to the average GUI maze of tabs and checkboxes without comments or rational directions. The choice is obvious unless you do exactly what Bill Gates thinks you should do and enjoy pressing "I agree" and "forward".
some n00b admin couldn't exactly master Apache in a weekend like they could IIS. I personally use Apache on my servers. But I could also take my good old time configuring them because I'm not planning on making any money from them.
If running a Wizard makes a master, "apt-get install apache" does too.
Money making is exactly where people have mastered Apache and there's plenty of their good work available as preconfigured packages for every distribution. Do you really want to go through money, paperwork, registration, activation and all that every time you add a new server? Do you really want to spend all of your time on endless patches that break your customization but don't do anything to thwart crackers?
FTFA:
This does not mean they are not purchasing their market share. Unless M$ gives their software away, or convinces the victim that it's "free" through some other licensing deal, LAMP has an unbeatable cost advantage. Even when M$ gives their software and service away, LAMP has an unbeatable technical advantage that can only be matched by other free software packages. Reading further we find:
Some crook once said, "There's one born every minute," but M$ has to be close to saturating it's potential market. Anyone who hangs around long enough figures things out and moves to cheaper and more reliable service.
I think you meant:
// no
or
/* no */
Of course, I have to laugh along with you because IIS topping LAMP is simply absurd. I've seen a few moves in this direction, but they are always some kind of top-down brain death that lessens reliability and features. In any competitive environment, where people are competent, IIS does not stand a chance.
Now, if only we could get those investigative journalists of yours to apply their talent where it really makes a difference...
Or if Daniel Lyons and Forbes could really understand technical issues and provide informed reporting instead of tired satire. Really, this guy's bad attitude comes across in his day job too.
That lawyer obviously reads Slashdot, she went straight for the largely irrelevant car analogy.
They post most of them here too. It's a pretty good piece of infowar. By making us all sick of something they think Joe Sixpacks likes, they think they are driving a wedge between Slashdotters and the rest of the world. Unfortunately for them, Joe Sixpacks can tell when M$ is blowing smoke up his ass with a false analogy. It's easy enough to ignore the analogy and make your point directly.
A silly AC taunts:
instead of it being merely trivial, you want Microsoft to hand you their property on a fucking plate so you don't have to make any effort? Entitlement issues, much? ... And I thought being able to use things cross-platform was a fundamental freedom, not a chore. Which is it?
If it was really free it would be a deb and RPM package already. M$ would have to do nothing more than release it and the community would quickly do the rest. It's not free so each and every person who would use these inferior fonts have to crawl through M$'s binary anus. The process is not much easier for Windoze users but they have to live in the anus.
While existing customers might not implicate MS into GPL3 obligations; they may not have ANY future customers. And so, it is still a win for the FSF, without any need to go in to court.
This is really simple. All versions of the GPL are a license that leverages the power of copyright. M$ and anyone else can have it at no cost as long as they abide by the terms. When software is released under those terms, all distributors are bound by them or they don't have permission to distribute. If M$ wants to avoid GPL3, they will have to fork everything GPL2 and maintain it themselves. Their ability to maintain both that codebase and their own is zero as Vista demonstrates their inability to maintain their own code. I doubt there's anyone dumb enough to listen to M$ about this crazy talk about contracts - M$ has a simple choice between a stale distribution and a license that emasculates their patent threat.
M$ is trying to own free software, which is a blatant admission that free software works and non free can't compete. GPL3 prevents them from doing this with patents, so all the money they spent building a patent warchest was a waste. People who use patents to fight software freedom are not welcome to the free software party and are going to have to do everything themselves. Their FUD against GPL3 is not going to fool anyone, so they had better get coding.
Lenovo makes no claim as to what OS goes on this PC. Since MS has promised China Windows XP deals as cheap as $5 ....
There is no version of Windows that runs comfortably in the quarter VGA that SD TV is. WinCE and friends have a chance, but are feature and application poor compared to embedded gnu/linux.
By the time that happens, other roadblocks will be in place. The greenlight to OOXML ushers in acceptance of Vista and the next generation of lock down. Look for select idiots to be pulling wasteful stunts like this and the public to be "served" with M$ only, patented crap file formats. The longer you wait to escape the M$ data trap, the more expensive it gets. The only way to stop the push is to demand free file formats. There is enough resentment at the upgrade treadmill to fight, but the fight is now pushed from a principled stand by leaders to squabbling over fanboy aggression. This makes Mass. State Government a willing tool in the M$ monopoly and upgrade treadmill. People in the state will have a choice between giving money to M$ or not being able to interact with their government.
Not to mention that the real point of the endeavor was to codify into law the use of a document built for OO.o's feature set, lacking the ability to handle MS's feature set, thereby prohibiting government use of MS's extra features. Basically, codify into law OO.o's feature set. OO.o can't compete with MS on features, so let the law render the feature set competition moot, at which point OO.o can compete on "free as in beer".
This has nothing to do with features or a competitive market. Word has yet to match the feature set of Latex and Word Perfect or Word Perfect's ease of use. The only reason people use Word is M$'s coercive monopoly and marketing power. In this case, Mass. is going to use Word in the future because of obvious government corruption, which overran both technical competence and the will of the people.
Almost all SD TV's make horrible monitors. I'd think you'd be better off with a OLPC from a usability standpoint.
You can go back and forth with this, bashing OLPC. Of course people are better off with OLPC and Gates will think of some reason he hates this thing, which answers his previous complaints, because it's not going to run Windoze.