I posted my comment on Tim O'Reilly's An Open Letter to Jeff Bezos page and within an hour, nearly 200 new responses were posted on top of mine. If this rate keeps up, I think it will go a long way to convincing Amazon that they are headed down the wrong track. If we succeed in changing Amazon's course on these patents, it might set a precedent that will keep other companies from patenting the Internet to death. Tell everyone you know to go to this site and add their name to the list to keep up the momentum!
Actually, Office and Windows are both huge cash cows for Microsoft. For an inside perspective on Microsoft read this: Inside the Leviathan
Here's a quote:
"Financial analysts have long recognized that Microsoft's profit really comes from two sources. One is operating systems (Windows, in all its varieties), and the other is the Office suite of programs. Everything else -- Flight Simulator, Slate, MSNBC, mice and keyboards -- is financially meaningless."
As this article states, MS doesn't really care about the individual desktop, but rather the large volume customers. When computer distributors, such as Dell, look for a standard office suite to include with their Windows AND Linux computers, MS will be in a better position since the can support both platforms. When a large Fortune 500 customer is looking for an office suite, MS will be in a better position because they support Windows, Mac and now Linux.
If Linux starts to make large gains in the desktop market, you can bet that Microsoft will be there with their own distribution as well. Why not start hedging their bets with Office now. Of course, I would also expect that their dist would have proprietary additions and that MS apps would work better or have additional features with MS Linux.
Maybe Slade is under 18 and is therefore a minor. IANAL, but I'm pretty sure you cannot enter into a binding contract with a minor, so maybe he thinks the GPL doesn't apply to him. I doubt that would hold up in court, but I'm sure there would be some interesting arguments on both sides.
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Delphi currently ships with the source code to the VCL, I would expect that to become even more open when Kylix is released.
I posted my comment on Tim O'Reilly's An Open Letter to Jeff Bezos page and within an hour, nearly 200 new responses were posted on top of mine. If this rate keeps up, I think it will go a long way to convincing Amazon that they are headed down the wrong track. If we succeed in changing Amazon's course on these patents, it might set a precedent that will keep other companies from patenting the Internet to death. Tell everyone you know to go to this site and add their name to the list to keep up the momentum!
Actually, Office and Windows are both huge cash cows for Microsoft. For an inside perspective on Microsoft read this: Inside the Leviathan
Here's a quote:
"Financial analysts have long recognized that Microsoft's profit really comes from two sources. One is operating systems (Windows, in all its varieties), and the other is the Office suite of programs. Everything else -- Flight Simulator, Slate, MSNBC, mice and keyboards -- is financially meaningless."
As this article states, MS doesn't really care about the individual desktop, but rather the large volume customers. When computer distributors, such as Dell, look for a standard office suite to include with their Windows AND Linux computers, MS will be in a better position since the can support both platforms. When a large Fortune 500 customer is looking for an office suite, MS will be in a better position because they support Windows, Mac and now Linux.
If Linux starts to make large gains in the desktop market, you can bet that Microsoft will be there with their own distribution as well. Why not start hedging their bets with Office now. Of course, I would also expect that their dist would have proprietary additions and that MS apps would work better or have additional features with MS Linux.
Maybe Slade is under 18 and is therefore a minor. IANAL, but I'm pretty sure you cannot enter into a binding contract with a minor, so maybe he thinks the GPL doesn't apply to him. I doubt that would hold up in court, but I'm sure there would be some interesting arguments on both sides.