IP-spoofing is useless for cracking in a machine unless you do something very clever. With IP spoofing you never get an answer back (unless you sit on a router where between the target and the spoofed host, but someone who "ownez" a router could have more fun then stupid DOS-attacks). The usual tactic is going through a chain of already cracked hosts where you can manipulate the logs. Spoofing could come into play when you send the command to the DDOS clients sitting on the cracked hosts. There you don't need an answer. But you could also simply use a cracked host. Perhaps spoofing can help to make the DDOS more effectiv by ie. using non-existant hosts or hosts on the same subnet as the spoofed addresses. IE. you could ping www.example.com with large packets spoofed to come from www2.example.com, also hitting www2.example.com with the echo-replies.
The main use for spoofing in the DDOS-attacks lies in simulating "real-world traffic" and making it harder to track the sources. The victim is unable to stop your DDOS attack at its border routers if it cannot find a common characteristic in it. If you spoof with random ip-adresses you eliminate a big common denominator.
About your first point, yes there this aspect of fair use. But here it's more like a friend giving me a cd of photoshop. Now it's clearly not fair use if I install it on my computer without purchasing a license.
Now you say He already had permission to download that was granted when the file was placed on a publicly accessable FTP site.
If it's on a publicly accessable site, a member of the public is not breaking the law by downloading it.
But when I find and download a copy of a new game on tripod (without it being advertized as warez) and download it, isn't this illegal? Let's say I don't know it's warez (lived the last 10 years with some monks in tibeth) but it's need for speed 7 (whatever). Imagine the crackers deleted all copyright notices. Can I now legally own this copy of the game?
Re:An interesting loophole...
on
BeOS For Linux!
·
· Score: 1
IANAL (I should have mentioned that before), but I read that somewhere, don't remember where. Here's a link I know found in google. There it says:
A computer program is protected by copyright because it constitutes a literary work under the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.[2] From a purchaser's point of view, unless there is some agreement with the owner of the intellectual property in the program, it is almost impossible to use software without infringing the copyright. This is because, in order to load and run a program, the program has to be copied from its permanent storage medium, into the computer. Legitimate use of software therefore depends on having the permission of the owner of the copyright.
So how could someone downloading the beos.tar.gz from an ftp-server know he acted legal unless he finds a text inside giving him the permission to do so. It was stated that the linux-package wasn't announced on beos.com. Perhaps I'm ignorant, but downloading something isn't legal just because you can.
Re:An interesting loophole...
on
BeOS For Linux!
·
· Score: 2
Uhm, actually it's the other way around. If there's no license granting you to do anything with that 40MB data you just downloaded, you're effectivly warezing. It's not all allowed what is not explicitly forbidden.
I always think of that also being some kind of R&D. Linux will mature more and more. The SMP always gets more finegrained. There are more and more really cool Open Source apps/features for Linux which first would have to be ported to Solaris. Take for example the new NWFS (Novell-File System), ReiserFS etc. Or this SCO app-server (tarantula?).
It's open source, it's linux, it will be mature. True, linux isn't as "enterprise" as Solaris is, but it's slowly eating it's way up there. I bet Sun has no chance in staying ahead up to 8 Prozessors past Linux 2.8/3.0. But it's valuable to have linux available _now_ on sun-hardware because the developers can design advances with portability in mind and test them. Not to say that linux on UltraSparc isn't worthy now, I just want to point out that it can only get better, both kernel and app related.
Mind you, they have "tweaked" the ftp-server not to show directory listings. Oh, and they obscured the location on the referring webserver (redirects) and did some other tricks (referer) to make you go through their side.
But this link works really well, I have 80kByte/s at the moment;-).
It is all a bit different then you think. Whenever a government organisation wants to buy something they have to check if the services or goods do not exceed 200,000 Euro.
Yes, I shouldn't have talked about 3000 licenses.
The important part here is that one of the things you are not allowed to specify what product you want. Only what it is intended to do.
That was the real point I was trying to make. Said article talks about linux and it's viability for office applications, file and printserver, about cost, service options and states that linux+(corel office/applixware etc.) are completely able to replace a windows desktop machine. Following the rules I know about (and the things you mentioned), which are posed on gov'orgs for acquiring services and goods, the presence of ms-ware at every desktop today is very dubious if not against the law. OTOH someone has to evaluate software and I think the omnipresence of windows is based on the fact that nobody "official" stated: "Most of the things you can do with windows are possible in linux too - for free". So you could pose deaf and dumb and just lookout for WinXX. But the situation changes with this official report.
By the way, the same questions occurs in case of star office for windows.
Uhm, the study was from "Koordinierungs- und Beratungsstelle der Bundesregierung für Informationstechnik in der Bundesverwaltung", that is kind of a central authority for IT knowledge of the german government ("Authority of coordination and consulting for IT in the german administration"). If someone decides to buy 3000 lincenses of windows 2000, it could happen that he has to justify his decision against the "Bundesrechnungshof" (central authority of accounting in the administration) which are very strict. He now officially has information about a competing product which at least is cheaper and evaluated positive by an official authority. This report could even get companies like Suse ground to sue the government if they are not asked for a bid.
Yes really. I don't want to say that pulling this article means they now want to offer more information or things like that. But from a publicity point of view this should be interesting. Before nobody but some interested groups would have seen this information. Now this has a touch of conspiracy and suddenly is interesting for many more people. The discussion forum at heise is exploding, the ct will report about that study next week - now the article or followers will be somewhat more - uhm - entertaining for non-techis. Other newspapers will follow, even perhaps nontechnical. The ministry will get a lot of heat, people are discussing if there's a connection to some deals concerning free software from ms for schools. Every newspaper can point out that free software is for free, they will not bother to discuss the TOC-issue so no chance for the ms-fud. They just will say "This costs xxx DM, open source cost 0 DM and you pay this with your tax." Germans are very suspicious against government deals in the moment anyway, so this could hit a nerve.
numeric applications of all kind for solving partial differential equations
finite elements, particle methods esp. in 3-dimensions (very computing intensive), finite difference (nobody uses that anymore IMNSHO), whatever they use in molecule modelling.
For what is that used:
crash simulation (cars etc.), airplane design, engine design, meteorologie (- very ugly because of 3-d problems) etc, fluid dynamics, nuclear weapons simulation (- somewhat ugly for other reasons).
There's no way there will be ever enough computing power even for very non esoteric applications. For instance imagine doubling the density of weather stations in three dims, this results in 8 times more input-data which causes 64 times more computing (theoretically) and perhaps much slower convergence of your solving algorithms.
TummyX, I'm a bit late but I perhaps you'll still read it. Thanks for the explanation concerning the user stuff, but I forgot something, I wanted to add said users _remotely_. I forgot to mention this cause in unix/linux/bsd this wouldn't matter (hehe, this proves my point somewhat even more;-)). And while we're at it, does someone know how to reboot nt remotely from linux - and no, no ping o'death and brothas please.
Well, neither me nor dufke said anything which goes so far as you tried to picure it. And - nt cannot *be* unix, if it could we had apache final on nt for a long time. NT *pretends* to be posix compliant, but it isn't. I'm also not saying that something like iis should use COM. I just get the feeling that COM/ActiveX isn't mature and stable enough to be used to tie servers (and client-software!) so closely to the underlying OS. And I assume IIS *is* implemented very low-level into NT and IIS is designed for speed and pays a tradeoff in overall stability. For example I administer an nt-server with IIS sitting next to a linux server with apache. Both combos seem to have problems, there seems to be some bug in my apache which sometime causes one apache process to consume 99% of the cpu time without doing anything (and without being shot down). What happens is the system gets slow but still works, and killing the offending process cures the problem. OTOH IIS (or some software we use with it) has some problems too, but IIS manages to render the whole system unusable when this occurs, it fails to serve any website at all, one service after the other dies a painfull death and in the end we have to call the provider to reboot the machine manually. Bugs occure in _every_ software, but MS seems to have choosen a design where a small bug more often leads to heavy problems.
BTW: AOE II starts to crawl on my system after half an hour of gameplay;-).
Well said, a real informative text and it concurs with my experiences. But there's one thing that I would like to comment, you said:
NT is a DESIGNED os, and was not 'evolved' like unix and 'hacked' together over time.
I have two problems with this sentence. First, I don't think unix was a hack, it cleary was not designed for solving the same problems as win32. There are many things which are more hackish in nt than in unix, mostly the bluring between kernel-level, UI-level and "server"-level (IIS etc.). The remote managment capabilites of nt-servers are _bad_ and everything microsoft has done to ease that situation was very hackish IMO. And from my experience the urge to have good benchmarks seems to have negativly affected the stability of the whole system. In my opinion a server should have a cli which is capable of configuring the whole server, so I am able to manage it remotly through a slow link and to ease automating of tasks. For example adding 1000 users with a generated password in nt seems to need more skills than in unix/linux, at least I didn't find a way to do it. I believe it's possible, but the way to achieve this is highly non-intuive IMO.
And there's my second point, more fundamental. Things like ActiveX, COM etc. shouldn't be seen as part of the OS. They should be OS-independant (yeah, nice dream). It also seems to have a very negative impact on the overall security if this very complicated and code intensive infrastructure is tied to every service reachable through the internet. Take a look at bugtraq/nt-bugtraq for the exploits which habe emerged in the last months (rain forest puppies posts are very informative).
However, when it comes time to do something different or if something doesn't work right with windows you can easily find someone to help you, with linux you can find the information you need if you know where to look.
And unfortunately I (as many here) always get the impression of myself always being the one who is asked for help. I did it for the last few years and now I'm filled up, I changed something. From last year on I refuse to help people who used ms-word to write important long documents in spite of me advicing them to use latex. I tell them: "If you use latex - on windows if you must - you'll get every help I can give you, if you use word, I will not help you." I wouldn't extend that to the os, but doing it for applications seems fine to me. And it makes sense, with word I'm really not able to help when for instance this nice piece of software decides to shuffle around footnotes. It could help if many people did the same, instead of giving "lusers" the feeling that they buy (our) support together with some ms-software.
You're right, OTOH it's clear that nobody is obliged to vote for someone who is "featured by slashdot". That wasn't (err - shouldn't have been) my point, I didn't express myself clearly. This is a chance for people to get their _collective_ asses up and do something with minimum effort. This is a chance of using the power of the sheer number of people reading slashdot. This shouldn't mean a borg style of behavior from slashdot readers. Imagine a case: Say ICANN wanted to regulate that domains only are "lend" to private individuals, i.e. when after a year a company wants that domain they get it. Now this story goes to slashdot and 5.000 people mail to ICANN (cc'd to zdnet/wired/whatever) that they as "members" oppose this idea. Or better, perhaps "at large" members could be allowed to vote.
My point is that participation is always good, and withdrawel of that participation later with great publicity is alway possible, and a joint effort of slashdotters could show ICANN a great interest of people in getting democratic structures for internet regulation.
Well, as the subject says. How about forming a kind of team slashdot there. I guess if they really do voting, we could really make our voice heard./. itself could provide the ground for discussing more or less uniform voting. For instance we could try to get someone the linux/slashdot/open source/geek (whatever) to the directors board. I know not all people have the same opinion on everything, but I do expect even the lowest common denominator here on slashdot to differ often from the AOL/MS/ POV.
I too think the notion of "enterprise os" is a little far fetched for now. But - and this is a big but - as you say the ms'esque enterprise thingy (which mustn't be confused with the _real_ enterprise) is an area where linux is a real danger for microsoft. Nobody in their right mind would use win2000 (or linux) for let's say bank transactions, but there's a big area between these uses and small office appliances where good but not maximal reliability is needed. MS wants to go there, but combine the public perception of linux being more robust than everything MS has ever produced with these additional industrial ha-features and I predict microsoft will face more and more problems on it's way.
I don't understand what Microsoft would have to gain by porting Office to Linux.
Live insurance;-) - and a very cheap one.
Really, you should pose the question the other way around: "What could Microsoft loose by not having Office on Linux available in time?"
See, what was their revenue in the last six month: $11.5 billion.
What would they loose if linux got 5% of the desktop market in a year and they couldn't deliver office for linux: approx. 5% of their revenue of selling office
What does that mean in numbers (I can only guess here and I estimate 1/5 of their revenue comes from office): $1.15 billion
OTOH, what do 40 developers cost a year: let's say 40x200,000$ = 8,000,000$.
So IMO they would be plain silly not to be able to quickly deliver office for their strongest rival OS when needed.
What if we win the DVD case, and it becomes legitimate to use DeCSS; I don't want to wade through numerous copies of a program porporting to be "DeCSS" before finding the real thing! Huh? What about going to i.e. freshmeat in this case. Ok, you'll find two now, but this should be managable.
Slashdot Mirror
IP-spoofing is useless for cracking in a machine unless you do something very clever.
With IP spoofing you never get an answer back (unless you sit on a router where between the target and the spoofed host, but someone who "ownez" a router could have more fun then stupid DOS-attacks).
The usual tactic is going through a chain of already cracked hosts where you can manipulate the logs.
Spoofing could come into play when you send the command to the DDOS clients sitting on the cracked hosts. There you don't need an answer. But you could also simply use a cracked host.
Perhaps spoofing can help to make the DDOS more effectiv by ie. using non-existant hosts or hosts on the same subnet as the spoofed addresses. IE. you could ping www.example.com with large packets spoofed to come from www2.example.com, also hitting www2.example.com with the echo-replies.
The main use for spoofing in the DDOS-attacks lies in simulating "real-world traffic" and making it harder to track the sources. The victim is unable to stop your DDOS attack at its border routers if it cannot find a common characteristic in it. If you spoof with random ip-adresses you eliminate a big common denominator.
About your first point, yes there this aspect of fair use. But here it's more like a friend giving me a cd of photoshop. Now it's clearly not fair use if I install it on my computer without purchasing a license.
Now you say
He already had permission to download that was granted when the file was placed on a publicly accessable FTP site.
If it's on a publicly accessable site, a member of the public is not breaking the law by downloading it.
But when I find and download a copy of a new game on tripod (without it being advertized as warez) and download it, isn't this illegal?
Let's say I don't know it's warez (lived the last 10 years with some monks in tibeth) but it's need for speed 7 (whatever). Imagine the crackers deleted all copyright notices.
Can I now legally own this copy of the game?
IANAL (I should have mentioned that before), but I read that somewhere, don't remember where. Here's a link I know found in google.
There it says:
A computer program is protected by copyright because it constitutes a literary work under the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.[2] From a purchaser's point of view, unless there is some agreement with the owner of the intellectual property in the program, it is almost impossible to use software without infringing the copyright. This is because, in order to load and run a program, the program has to be copied from its permanent storage medium, into the computer. Legitimate use of software therefore depends on having the permission of the owner of the copyright.
So how could someone downloading the beos.tar.gz from an ftp-server know he acted legal unless he finds a text inside giving him the permission to do so.
It was stated that the linux-package wasn't announced on beos.com. Perhaps I'm ignorant, but downloading something isn't legal just because you can.
Uhm,
actually it's the other way around.
If there's no license granting you to do anything with that 40MB data you just downloaded, you're effectivly warezing.
It's not all allowed what is not explicitly forbidden.
Well,
I always think of that also being some kind of R&D. Linux will mature more and more. The SMP always gets more finegrained. There are more and more really cool Open Source apps/features for Linux which first would have to be ported to Solaris.
Take for example the new NWFS (Novell-File System), ReiserFS etc. Or this SCO app-server (tarantula?).
It's open source, it's linux, it will be mature.
True, linux isn't as "enterprise" as Solaris is, but it's slowly eating it's way up there.
I bet Sun has no chance in staying ahead up to 8 Prozessors past Linux 2.8/3.0. But it's valuable to have linux available _now_ on sun-hardware because the developers can design advances with portability in mind and test them. Not to say that linux on UltraSparc isn't worthy now, I just want to point out that it can only get better, both kernel and app related.
Here's a cool german mirror
t riebssysteme/beos5-personaledition.exe
;-).
ftp://ftp.computerchannel.de/shareware/freie_be
Mind you, they have "tweaked" the ftp-server not to show directory listings.
Oh, and they obscured the location on the referring webserver (redirects) and did some other tricks (referer) to make you go through their side.
But this link works really well, I have 80kByte/s at the moment
yeah that's right, I wouldn't trade (Windows NT && cygwin && bash && grep) for *nix anytime.
;-).
Grand unified theory of OS's:
OS has BSOD => OS != unix
um, please, that's no flamebait
You can find many of the popular unix tools for windows at http://www.gnusoftware.com.
...
You'll find bash, grep, cygwin, emacs
They've got some nice things there, look at geoshell's screenshots, you wouldn't believe it's windows.
Don't be dissappointed, I guess they have no chance to refer to the actual situation because the magazine should be already printed.
It is all a bit different then you think. Whenever a government organisation wants to buy something they have to check if the services or goods do not exceed 200,000 Euro.
Yes, I shouldn't have talked about 3000 licenses.
The important part here is that one of the things you are not allowed to specify what product you want. Only what it is intended to do.
That was the real point I was trying to make. Said article talks about linux and it's viability for office applications, file and printserver, about cost, service options and states that linux+(corel office/applixware etc.) are completely able to replace a windows desktop machine.
Following the rules I know about (and the things you mentioned), which are posed on gov'orgs for acquiring services and goods, the presence of ms-ware at every desktop today is very dubious if not against the law.
OTOH someone has to evaluate software and I think the omnipresence of windows is based on the fact that nobody "official" stated: "Most of the things you can do with windows are possible in linux too - for free". So you could pose deaf and dumb and just lookout for WinXX.
But the situation changes with this official report.
By the way, the same questions occurs in case of star office for windows.
Uhm, the study was from "Koordinierungs- und Beratungsstelle der Bundesregierung für Informationstechnik in der Bundesverwaltung", that is kind of a central authority for IT knowledge of the german government ("Authority of coordination and consulting for IT in the german administration").
If someone decides to buy 3000 lincenses of windows 2000, it could happen that he has to justify his decision against the "Bundesrechnungshof" (central authority of accounting in the administration) which are very strict. He now officially has information about a competing product which at least is cheaper and evaluated positive by an official authority.
This report could even get companies like Suse ground to sue the government if they are not asked for a bid.
Yes really. I don't want to say that pulling this article means they now want to offer more information or things like that.
But from a publicity point of view this should be interesting. Before nobody but some interested groups would have seen this information.
Now this has a touch of conspiracy and suddenly is interesting for many more people. The discussion forum at heise is exploding, the ct will report about that study next week - now the article or followers will be somewhat more - uhm - entertaining for non-techis.
Other newspapers will follow, even perhaps nontechnical. The ministry will get a lot of heat, people are discussing if there's a connection to some deals concerning free software from ms for schools.
Every newspaper can point out that free software is for free, they will not bother to discuss the TOC-issue so no chance for the ms-fud. They just will say "This costs xxx DM, open source cost 0 DM and you pay this with your tax."
Germans are very suspicious against government deals in the moment anyway, so this could hit a nerve.
Thats why I wrote "IMNSHO", and I didn't think long enough about it. You're absolutely right.
My background is variational methods (the theory of it) and I should have been more specific in narrowing the applications down.
numeric applications of all kind for solving partial differential equations
finite elements, particle methods esp. in 3-dimensions (very computing intensive), finite difference (nobody uses that anymore IMNSHO), whatever they use in molecule modelling.
For what is that used:
crash simulation (cars etc.), airplane design, engine design, meteorologie (- very ugly because of 3-d problems) etc, fluid dynamics, nuclear weapons simulation (- somewhat ugly for other reasons).
There's no way there will be ever enough computing power even for very non esoteric applications. For instance imagine doubling the density of weather stations in three dims, this results in 8 times more input-data which causes 64 times more computing (theoretically) and perhaps much slower convergence of your solving algorithms.
TummyX, I'm a bit late but I perhaps you'll still read it. ;-)).
Thanks for the explanation concerning the user stuff, but I forgot something, I wanted to add said users _remotely_. I forgot to mention this cause in unix/linux/bsd this wouldn't matter (hehe, this proves my point somewhat even more
And while we're at it, does someone know how to reboot nt remotely from linux - and no, no ping o'death and brothas please.
Well, neither me nor dufke said anything which goes so far as you tried to picure it.
;-).
And - nt cannot *be* unix, if it could we had apache final on nt for a long time. NT *pretends* to be posix compliant, but it isn't.
I'm also not saying that something like iis should use COM. I just get the feeling that COM/ActiveX isn't mature and stable enough to be used to tie servers (and client-software!) so closely to the underlying OS.
And I assume IIS *is* implemented very low-level into NT and IIS is designed for speed and pays a tradeoff in overall stability.
For example I administer an nt-server with IIS sitting next to a linux server with apache.
Both combos seem to have problems, there seems to be some bug in my apache which sometime causes one apache process to consume 99% of the cpu time without doing anything (and without being shot down). What happens is the system gets slow but still works, and killing the offending process cures the problem. OTOH IIS (or some software we use with it) has some problems too, but IIS manages to render the whole system unusable when this occurs, it fails to serve any website at all, one service after the other dies a painfull death and in the end we have to call the provider to reboot the machine manually.
Bugs occure in _every_ software, but MS seems to have choosen a design where a small bug more often leads to heavy problems.
BTW: AOE II starts to crawl on my system after half an hour of gameplay
But there's one thing that I would like to comment, you said:
I have two problems with this sentence. First, I don't think unix was a hack, it cleary was not designed for solving the same problems as win32. There are many things which are more hackish in nt than in unix, mostly the bluring between kernel-level, UI-level and "server"-level (IIS etc.).
The remote managment capabilites of nt-servers are _bad_ and everything microsoft has done to ease that situation was very hackish IMO. And from my experience the urge to have good benchmarks seems to have negativly affected the stability of the whole system.
In my opinion a server should have a cli which is capable of configuring the whole server, so I am able to manage it remotly through a slow link and to ease automating of tasks. For example adding 1000 users with a generated password in nt seems to need more skills than in unix/linux, at least I didn't find a way to do it. I believe it's possible, but the way to achieve this is highly non-intuive IMO.
And there's my second point, more fundamental.
Things like ActiveX, COM etc. shouldn't be seen as part of the OS. They should be OS-independant (yeah, nice dream). It also seems to have a very negative impact on the overall security if this very complicated and code intensive infrastructure is tied to every service reachable through the internet. Take a look at bugtraq/nt-bugtraq for the exploits which habe emerged in the last months (rain forest puppies posts are very informative).
However, when it comes time to do something different or if something doesn't work right with windows you can easily find someone to help you, with linux you can find the information you need if you know where to look.
And unfortunately I (as many here) always get the impression of myself always being the one who is asked for help.
I did it for the last few years and now I'm filled up, I changed something. From last year on I refuse to help people who used ms-word to write important long documents in spite of me advicing them to use latex.
I tell them: "If you use latex - on windows if you must - you'll get every help I can give you, if you use word, I will not help you."
I wouldn't extend that to the os, but doing it for applications seems fine to me. And it makes sense, with word I'm really not able to help when for instance this nice piece of software decides to shuffle around footnotes.
It could help if many people did the same, instead of giving "lusers" the feeling that they buy (our) support together with some ms-software.
Have you read the original posting?
He talked about his bank using beowulfs, not about a non-mainframe server.
Beowulfs in this context is absurd.
The post I replied to asked what my bank and my accounting department is running. They are running beowulfs.
/.-readers the name of the bank which is doing that.
Facts please. Tell your fellow
This is absurd.
You're right,
OTOH it's clear that nobody is obliged to vote for someone who is "featured by slashdot".
That wasn't (err - shouldn't have been) my point, I didn't express myself clearly.
This is a chance for people to get their _collective_ asses up and do something with minimum effort. This is a chance of using the power of the sheer number of people reading slashdot. This shouldn't mean a borg style of behavior from slashdot readers.
Imagine a case: Say ICANN wanted to regulate that domains only are "lend" to private individuals, i.e. when after a year a company wants that domain they get it. Now this story goes to slashdot and 5.000 people mail to ICANN (cc'd to zdnet/wired/whatever) that they as "members" oppose this idea.
Or better, perhaps "at large" members could be allowed to vote.
My point is that participation is always good, and withdrawel of that participation later with great publicity is alway possible, and a joint effort of slashdotters could show ICANN a great interest of people in getting democratic structures for internet regulation.
Well, as the subject says. /. itself could provide the ground for discussing more or less uniform voting.
How about forming a kind of team slashdot there.
I guess if they really do voting, we could really make our voice heard.
For instance we could try to get someone the linux/slashdot/open source/geek (whatever) to the directors board.
I know not all people have the same opinion on everything, but I do expect even the lowest common denominator here on slashdot to differ often from the AOL/MS/ POV.
I too think the notion of "enterprise os" is a little far fetched for now.
But - and this is a big but - as you say the ms'esque enterprise thingy (which mustn't be confused with the _real_ enterprise) is an area where linux is a real danger for microsoft.
Nobody in their right mind would use win2000 (or linux) for let's say bank transactions, but there's a big area between these uses and small office appliances where good but not maximal reliability is needed. MS wants to go there, but combine the public perception of linux being more robust than everything MS has ever produced with these additional industrial ha-features and I predict microsoft will face more and more problems on it's way.
I don't understand what Microsoft would have to gain by porting Office to Linux.
;-) - and a very cheap one.
Live insurance
Really, you should pose the question the other way around:
"What could Microsoft loose by not having Office on Linux available in time?"
See, what was their revenue in the last six month: $11.5 billion.
What would they loose if linux got 5% of the desktop market in a year and they couldn't deliver office for linux: approx. 5% of their revenue of selling office
What does that mean in numbers (I can only guess here and I estimate 1/5 of their revenue comes from office): $1.15 billion
OTOH, what do 40 developers cost a year: let's say 40x200,000$ = 8,000,000$.
So IMO they would be plain silly not to be able to quickly deliver office for their strongest rival OS when needed.
What if we win the DVD case, and it becomes legitimate to use DeCSS; I don't want to wade through numerous copies of a program porporting to be "DeCSS" before finding the real thing!
Huh? What about going to i.e. freshmeat in this case. Ok, you'll find two now, but this should be managable.