I think that one of the requirment of a settlment involving Microsoft is that they should be required to publish ALL of their file formats and protocols used to transfer any sort of data between computers.
These protocols should include such things as their SMB protocols, and their broken version of Kerberos.
As far as file formats, they need to publish the specs for all their office formats. This should not need to include such files as the PST file for Outlook and or the data files for their servers such as SQL Server which aren't intended to be moved to another computer and accessed by another person.
I'm a student at Georgia Tech and it was made pretty clear to us when we were registering and moving in to our dorms that use of the networks for personal profit were prohibited. In the Computer and Network Usage Policy it states that Computing facilities, services, and networks may not be used in connection with compensated outside work nor for the benefit of organizations not related to Georgia Tech. It goes on to discuss incidental use of the systems and networks but this does not sound incidental and because there was a prize offered I assume it would fall under compensated outside work.
The reason why no one objects to Oracle is because they're not attacking open source/free software for no real reason. Their software works with a lot of other software, both open source and not. "Other" software companies seem to have more a live an let live opinion of open source.
Oracle is different from MSFT in that while they make a complete solution and they encourage people to use it, you can also mix and match there products with other products.You have your choice of Oracle and none Oracle design tools, application server, and pre-built applications which can be used with their database. Their database product is probably available on the largest number of operating systems of any commercial database.
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I think that one of the requirment of a settlment involving Microsoft is that they should be required to publish ALL of their file formats and protocols used to transfer any sort of data between computers.
These protocols should include such things as their SMB protocols, and their broken version of Kerberos.
As far as file formats, they need to publish the specs for all their office formats. This should not need to include such files as the PST file for Outlook and or the data files for their servers such as SQL Server which aren't intended to be moved to another computer and accessed by another person.
Apple did come out today with the iPod and it is on there website here [apple.com]
I'm a student at Georgia Tech and it was made pretty clear to us when we were registering and moving in to our dorms that use of the networks for personal profit were prohibited. In the Computer and Network Usage Policy it states that Computing facilities, services, and networks may not be used in connection with compensated outside work nor for the benefit of organizations not related to Georgia Tech. It goes on to discuss incidental use of the systems and networks but this does not sound incidental and because there was a prize offered I assume it would fall under compensated outside work.
Oracle is different from MSFT in that while they make a complete solution and they encourage people to use it, you can also mix and match there products with other products.You have your choice of Oracle and none Oracle design tools, application server, and pre-built applications which can be used with their database. Their database product is probably available on the largest number of operating systems of any commercial database.