Whatever the merit of his suggestions, the idea that ISO is new to high-pressure corporate gamesmanship and requires a condescending lecture from a titan of industry like "the CEO of Freecode" has to qualify as the laugh of the day.
After Web 2.0; discussions on forums like Slashdot, Digg etc. have shown that they can be a powerful influence on individuals, companies and public entities. The recent admission by the Vista technical team of a design flaw that throttles network performance when playing audio is a case in point. Apparently, the reports of the bug surfaced in a forum.
If indeed the OOXML is still adopted as a standard in Mar 2008, Microsoft will become a laughing stock... much more than what they have become after Vista's pathetic performance in the market. And the ISO will be expanded as the Incompetent Stupids Organisation.
If true International consensus is to be achieved, then the criteria for adopting a submission as standard must be altered. The present criteria state:
1. Over 67% of P-grade members to vote Yes. 2. Less than 25% overall members could vote No.
The scope for abuse wiht the above criteria exists because 'countries' like Khazakstan, Cote' de Ivorie and Cyprus have equal voting rights; and can become P-members as well. So, the ISO could consider modifying the voting requirements on the lines of the Senate / House pattern:
1. The over 67% P-grade members criterion to be amended as "Positive votes corresponding to over 67% of the total population represented". Populous natins like India, China, the UK, Brazil have all voted No. The present ISO rules allow this popular opinion to be sidelined.
2. Secondly, lots of new 'countries' have opted for voting and P-status. None of these have participated or voted in any other sphere of the ISO actvities. This points strongly to financial inducements and corruption, and cannot be dismissed as coincidence. The rules must be altered before the BRM in February.
3. Thirdly, Microsoft has admitted to wrong-doing in the voting process in Sweden. This alone ought to be sufficient for the ISO to null and void the entire submission, and debar said firm for a minimum period. There is no credibility if rules are blindly applied, when benefitting parties themselves are guilty of subversion. This is similar to the submission of licenses to the OSI - the standards bodies must take into account past conduct and sincerity; not just rule on technicalities.
4. Fourthly, the "Yes, with comments" option must be removed. This is meaningless, and mischevous. What incentive does a vested interest have in listening to these comments, and redressing the grievances?
5. The ISO must take a clear stance wrt patents. Any patent-encumbered submission must be rejected until: a. The submission is amended so as to be patent-free b. The patents in question have expired all over the world.
Let's see a bit more of the quoted response: The BBC Trust made it a condition of approval for the BBC's on-demand services that the iPlayer is available to users of a range of operating systems, and has given a commitment that it will ensure that the BBC meets this demand as soon as possible. They will measure the BBC's progress on this every six months and publish the findings....
So, if the BBC Trust's conditions have not been met by the BBC, why is this service being allowed to operate at all? There is no need to measure 'progress' on a commitment; it is just a YES or a NO.
What if only a few distros that accept DRM in the form of proprietary drivers from some select video cards.. are able to participate in this new thingy? Will that be measured as 'available on Linux'?
It's sad to see the BBC disobeying the BBC Trust, and getting away with this nonsense. While we get to read such nice articles on... yes, the same BBC!! http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6325353.stm
The freedoms built in to the net are under attack like never before, argues regular columnist Bill Thompson....
While Bill Thompson was talking about Windows Vista, he might have as well been referring to his own employer, the BBC. Sad state of affairs, really.
that large countries can't dominate small countries. If China and India decided everything...
But small countries are easily dominated by money-wielding vested interests... don't you think? The 51% "Yes" votes actually translate to less than 20% of the population of the nations that participated. That's a gross aberration, and the ISO must take note of it.
BTW, even if India AND China supported a standard, they'd only hae 33% representation - many more nations would need to support to reach 67%.
Countries like India and China... home to over 33% of the world's population - have voted "NO". Countires like Cote' de Ivorie and Cyprus have equal voting rights.
This population index anomaly must be rectified, before the ISO can regain any credibility as an International standards organisation.
as a Microsoft dev myself I like to think the technology field I base myself in is popular based on technical merits rather than stupid market hacking. Tactics like the OOXML fiasco only distract people from the actual benefits of MS technology.
There's a saying where I live that goes... "You just need to sample a single grain of rice to judge an entire pot..." Microsoft's dubious and nefarious tactics wrt OOXML have shown them to be ruthless cowards; and enemies of technical merit; as software developers like you must know.
Other than rewriting the same code every 3 years when MS decides to rebrand an technology and stop supporting old versions... what are these 'benefits' you see in MS technology? Spreading disinformation amongst the developer community is a very grave sin, in my book... much worse than 'Get the Facts' aimed at consumers.
Actually of the 26 latest P-members, 21 voted 'YES', 1 voted 'NO' and 4 abstained.
You could have said that and people would have believed you, so why lie?
After all the furore in Sweden, Norway and Hungary, would people still find it difficult to believe that a few 'coutries' like Cote' de Ivorie, Cyprus etc. were bribed to vote 'Yes'?
I think Microsoft should immediately found the MSO or Microsoft Standards Organisation. That way they will not need to pay hefty bribes to get their so-called 'standards' declared so.
I think extreme situations require extreme measures, and it is clear that the anti-trust control measures are not only ineffective; they are actually a suit of armour for Microsoft to further abuse their monopoly power. The world has close to a billion PCs now; that's a huge number given there's about 6 billion people. If the US will not act, and the EU will not be allowed to act... bodies like the ECMA and ISO will be subverted; then someone else has to take up the fight to bring justice.
More worrying than the monopoly is the fact that the PC burns much more power and is inferior as a platform compared to even small devices like cellphones, game devices and appliances. The failure of the OOXML fast track process shows that there is still hope, if only the whole world can act in concert. I suggest some measures to bring speedy correction in the PC industry:
1. Any component of the PC that does not conform to published, patent unencumbered standards must be taxed - this includes processors, video cards, winprinters, winmodems, audio devices, DRM chips, TCPA engines, kernels, hypervisors, operating systems, word processors etc. etc. The tax must be high enough to deter unscrupulous mfrs. to dictate their 'default' standards and abuse their positions to the detriment of the platform, the consumer and the market. A 30% tax should be levied for starters, and the corpus must be used to fund devleopment of 'free' alternatives in each segment above.
The recent network 'penalty' while playing system sounds in Vista is a case in point. Could Microsoft have got away with a 'published' audio device and driver architecture under a transparent benchmarking system? Who will compensate for the 'defective' protected media path architecture? Will the h/w mfrs freely replace their buggy cards with better performing ones? Countries other than the US must force them to do so.
2. Patents must be abolished in the PC industry - it is clear from the unholy MS - Novell alliance that even the biggest firms cannot enforce their patents, and they actually hinder innovation; and encourage cartels. The EU and several other nations do not still recognise s/w patents; the 15 year lifespan for a patent is absurd even in the h/w industry where monopolies can be built up in undre 5 years.
3. International standards need to be evolved that govern the use of the internet - it is too big and valuable to be subject to the machincations of a toothless US commerce agency. Companies that actively or passively contribute to the abuse of the internet must be punished and / or taxed. For instance, is a particular OS is the platform of choice for botnets, then the mfr. of the OS must fix the problem within a reasonable timeframe, or else open the source so the community will fix it themselves.
The proceedings in some of the standards bodies on the OOXML vote shows that they can govern the IT industry better than the anti-trust agencies. I tihnk they must be allowed to have a say, now that the US bodies have failed.
it means that we will have a flood of articles about Vista SP1, just like the initial flood of Vista articles. Seeing as there's now 2 articles already inside an hour.... I shudder to think how many we will see until March 2008.. or whenever SP1 comes out.
What can someone be xpected to say about a mere Statement of Intent from Microsoft, about a Service Pack.... which right thinking people would expect a big comapny to release RIGJHT NOW and solve teething troubles faced by Vista users daily?
The schedule for SP1 indicates MS is under zero pressure to deliver anything or do anything innovative. No point fantasizing about it.
Now what I will do with those documents is send them to my board of directors. They will read them.
I have already done so, in a private intranet forum... I've compared Microsoft's tactics to that of third-rate politicians in India. I'm sure when the top brass gets more and more details of this sordid episode, there will be zero resistance when I suggest that we simply avoid Active Directory, Exchange, Office and Sharepoint for our business systems.
but really its just one program thats not terribly popular that happens to have broken the GPL. I really don't think this is a "windows specific" issue at all...
I think this is Windows-specific. Companies who write software that works on Windows usually write non-GPL, non-Open-source, proprietary stuff... and it is reasonable to expect the GPL violations on Closed Source code would be harder to detect.
Software written for Linux generally tends to be GPL / Apache / MPL licensed... very few firms write proprietary code for Linux. Yes, I know there are exceptions... but I'm generalising. Even these proprietary offerings generally allow customers to inspect code, protocols etc. , unlike in the Windows world.
I think this is definitely a Windows specific issue, and this incident proves that GPL code allows firms to go to market quicker; and create vibrant, utilitarian applications. It demonstrates that the GPL is quite popular amongst the developer community, whatever folks from Redmond would have us believe.
All new initiatives and 'innovations' from Intel have been closed source, secretive and the technology is available to a few limited US h/w mfrs. The reason Linux became so successful is because of Intel's low-cost, standards-compliant, open-source hardware; but with initiatives like virtualisation, vPro, multi-threaded compilers etc. the balance gets tilted further in favour of TCPA and DRM partners; and puts Linux at a disadvantage in the Enterprise.
There is not a SINGLE technical detail about the bug in the article. The first paragraph pretty much says it all
If you actually read through till the last para, you ill note that the bug has something to do with Microsoft, Registry, Internet Explorer and registering programs.
Anyway, once Caldera started all the layoffs after the dot-com boom and SCO merge, a good chunk of engineering ended up at Novell.
I think that one phrase tells you a lot about why SCO sued people and Novell won't: Novell is a functioning business with a business plan.
Excuse me... but what has Novell engineered in recent years? It has engineered the acquisition of SuSE; and engineered an unholy suspicious contract with Microsoft.
None of these engineering efforts require technical acumen.
Every guy I worked with was passionate about open source, and making the world a better place, etc.
Since Novell makes zero revenue with Netware these days, why don't they Open Source it? They can make a lot of money over Certifications, Implementations and Training... like RedHat does with Linux. The fact that they haven't done; and the Open Enterprise SErver is now moving to Linux, means they are not committed to the ideals of Open Source.
Their acquisition of SuSE has actually killed a big non-US distro - which is beneficial to Microsoft, not Linux customers.
So many thousands of 'engineers' have got the Certified Novell Engineer certification... millions of devices have been designed around Netware.. and Novell has simply ditched them all.
If they will not maintain and enhance Netware, they ought to atleast Open Source the damn thing; maybe even GPL it. Netware and NDS have been very good pieces of work, and abandoning them has worked to Microsoft's and Intel's advantage.
With Netware, Novell was pretending to be a competitor to Microsoft's DOS and Xenix; with SuSE even the pretence of competing in the OS market has gone - it is now an unholy 'partnership'.
Novell's promise "Not To Sue" will not win them more customers for SuSE Linux. Customers will go in for Linux distros not tainted by Novell, Ximian Xandros etc.
Why is it so difficult to get? It's: the apostrophe indicates something is missing: he's (he is), she's (she is), it's (it is). Its: this is the possessive, since possessive do not have apostrophes: his, her(s), its.
I call bullshit. The first use of the apostrophe is the possessive case. Ex: John's ball Joe's socks Olympic committee's machines Microsoft's lousy Vista
In the latter 2 examples, when "It" is used to refer to the Olympic Committee or Microsoft, then "It's" becomes the possessive case. Ex: The Olympic Committee is looking fot relaible computers. It's choice is the Lenoveo brand. Microsft makes lousy operating systems. It's recent Vista bombed at most customer locations.
It's perfectly okay to use "it's" to signal possession.
On the other hand, his solution was to buy the expensive indemnification insurance he was promoting. I think large-scale products like the Linux kernel and Apache are better served by the GPL than by half-hearted smart-brained schemes that a few big names come up with once a while. Initiatives like the OIN actually take away from the good work accomplished by the GPL, IMO.
That was his response when OIN was formed. Linux and Free Software do not, repeat DO NOT ned the OIN for gaining mindshare or marketshare - the OIN is largely a distraction sponsored by an elite club, at odds with reality.
Now that GPL3 has neutered patent threats from Microsoft, Google's tie-up with the OIN seems actually a bad PR move.
And so while Microsoft might well get away in a court battle, the market has already made up it's mind when MS made it clear they will have nothing to do with GPL3. 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.
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever the merit of his suggestions, the idea that ISO is new to high-pressure corporate gamesmanship and requires a condescending lecture from a titan of industry like "the CEO of Freecode" has to qualify as the laugh of the day.
After Web 2.0; discussions on forums like Slashdot, Digg etc. have shown that they can be a powerful influence on individuals, companies and public entities. The recent admission by the Vista technical team of a design flaw that throttles network performance when playing audio is a case in point. Apparently, the reports of the bug surfaced in a forum.
If indeed the OOXML is still adopted as a standard in Mar 2008, Microsoft will become a laughing stock... much more than what they have become after Vista's pathetic performance in the market. And the ISO will be expanded as the Incompetent Stupids Organisation.
If true International consensus is to be achieved, then the criteria for adopting a submission as standard must be altered. The present criteria state:
1. Over 67% of P-grade members to vote Yes.
2. Less than 25% overall members could vote No.
The scope for abuse wiht the above criteria exists because 'countries' like Khazakstan, Cote' de Ivorie and Cyprus have equal voting rights; and can become P-members as well. So, the ISO could consider modifying the voting requirements on the lines of the Senate / House pattern:
1. The over 67% P-grade members criterion to be amended as "Positive votes corresponding to over 67% of the total population represented". Populous natins like India, China, the UK, Brazil have all voted No. The present ISO rules allow this popular opinion to be sidelined.
2. Secondly, lots of new 'countries' have opted for voting and P-status. None of these have participated or voted in any other sphere of the ISO actvities. This points strongly to financial inducements and corruption, and cannot be dismissed as coincidence. The rules must be altered before the BRM in February.
3. Thirdly, Microsoft has admitted to wrong-doing in the voting process in Sweden. This alone ought to be sufficient for the ISO to null and void the entire submission, and debar said firm for a minimum period. There is no credibility if rules are blindly applied, when benefitting parties themselves are guilty of subversion. This is similar to the submission of licenses to the OSI - the standards bodies must take into account past conduct and sincerity; not just rule on technicalities.
4. Fourthly, the "Yes, with comments" option must be removed. This is meaningless, and mischevous. What incentive does a vested interest have in listening to these comments, and redressing the grievances?
5. The ISO must take a clear stance wrt patents. Any patent-encumbered submission must be rejected until:
a. The submission is amended so as to be patent-free
b. The patents in question have expired all over the world.
More later.
Let's see a bit more of the quoted response:
...
The BBC Trust made it a condition of approval for the BBC's on-demand services that the iPlayer is available to users of a range of operating systems, and has given a commitment that it will ensure that the BBC meets this demand as soon as possible. They will measure the BBC's progress on this every six months and publish the findings....
So, if the BBC Trust's conditions have not been met by the BBC, why is this service being allowed to operate at all? There is no need to measure 'progress' on a commitment; it is just a YES or a NO.
What if only a few distros that accept DRM in the form of proprietary drivers from some select video cards.. are able to participate in this new thingy? Will that be measured as 'available on Linux'?
It's sad to see the BBC disobeying the BBC Trust, and getting away with this nonsense. While we get to read such nice articles on... yes, the same BBC!!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6325353.stm
The freedoms built in to the net are under attack like never before, argues regular columnist Bill Thompson.
While Bill Thompson was talking about Windows Vista, he might have as well been referring to his own employer, the BBC. Sad state of affairs, really.
I went back and read the original article....
Oh, the horror! That's a heinous crime on Slashdot! Not even the editors do that!!!
that large countries can't dominate small countries. If China and India decided everything...
But small countries are easily dominated by money-wielding vested interests... don't you think? The 51% "Yes" votes actually translate to less than 20% of the population of the nations that participated. That's a gross aberration, and the ISO must take note of it.
BTW, even if India AND China supported a standard, they'd only hae 33% representation - many more nations would need to support to reach 67%.
Countries like India and China ... home to over 33% of the world's population - have voted "NO". Countires like Cote' de Ivorie and Cyprus have equal voting rights.
This population index anomaly must be rectified, before the ISO can regain any credibility as an International standards organisation.
WHO'S ON THE DATABASE?
5.2% of UK population
Nearly 40% of black men
13% of Asian men
9% of white men
Source: Home Office and Census
Enuff said. When the remaining 91% are going to be DNA recorded, they start squirming. Majority of ethnic minorities kept quiet and bore it all....
as a Microsoft dev myself I like to think the technology field I base myself in is popular based on technical merits rather than stupid market hacking. Tactics like the OOXML fiasco only distract people from the actual benefits of MS technology.
There's a saying where I live that goes... "You just need to sample a single grain of rice to judge an entire pot..." Microsoft's dubious and nefarious tactics wrt OOXML have shown them to be ruthless cowards; and enemies of technical merit; as software developers like you must know.
Other than rewriting the same code every 3 years when MS decides to rebrand an technology and stop supporting old versions... what are these 'benefits' you see in MS technology? Spreading disinformation amongst the developer community is a very grave sin, in my book... much worse than 'Get the Facts' aimed at consumers.
Actually of the 26 latest P-members, 21 voted 'YES', 1 voted 'NO' and 4 abstained.
You could have said that and people would have believed you, so why lie?
After all the furore in Sweden, Norway and Hungary, would people still find it difficult to believe that a few 'coutries' like Cote' de Ivorie, Cyprus etc. were bribed to vote 'Yes'?
It ain't over 'till the fat man throws a chair...
l e.php?story=20070718060228231
...
Interesting you should say that:
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/artic
OOXML is not to everyone's liking, with Sun Microsystems being denied a seat, and Microsoft holding the chair (President)
I think Microsoft should immediately found the MSO or Microsoft Standards Organisation. That way they will not need to pay hefty bribes to get their so-called 'standards' declared so.
Faux standard was not certified.
[A]bort, [R]etry, [F]ail?
That is the DOS error message.. these are Vista days.
It appears Microsoft is polluting the ISO and offering gold to their 'Gold' partners...
Cancel / Allow ?
I think extreme situations require extreme measures, and it is clear that the anti-trust control measures are not only ineffective; they are actually a suit of armour for Microsoft to further abuse their monopoly power. The world has close to a billion PCs now; that's a huge number given there's about 6 billion people. If the US will not act, and the EU will not be allowed to act... bodies like the ECMA and ISO will be subverted; then someone else has to take up the fight to bring justice.
More worrying than the monopoly is the fact that the PC burns much more power and is inferior as a platform compared to even small devices like cellphones, game devices and appliances. The failure of the OOXML fast track process shows that there is still hope, if only the whole world can act in concert. I suggest some measures to bring speedy correction in the PC industry:
1. Any component of the PC that does not conform to published, patent unencumbered standards must be taxed - this includes processors, video cards, winprinters, winmodems, audio devices, DRM chips, TCPA engines, kernels, hypervisors, operating systems, word processors etc. etc. The tax must be high enough to deter unscrupulous mfrs. to dictate their 'default' standards and abuse their positions to the detriment of the platform, the consumer and the market. A 30% tax should be levied for starters, and the corpus must be used to fund devleopment of 'free' alternatives in each segment above.
The recent network 'penalty' while playing system sounds in Vista is a case in point. Could Microsoft have got away with a 'published' audio device and driver architecture under a transparent benchmarking system? Who will compensate for the 'defective' protected media path architecture? Will the h/w mfrs freely replace their buggy cards with better performing ones? Countries other than the US must force them to do so.
2. Patents must be abolished in the PC industry - it is clear from the unholy MS - Novell alliance that even the biggest firms cannot enforce their patents, and they actually hinder innovation; and encourage cartels. The EU and several other nations do not still recognise s/w patents; the 15 year lifespan for a patent is absurd even in the h/w industry where monopolies can be built up in undre 5 years.
3. International standards need to be evolved that govern the use of the internet - it is too big and valuable to be subject to the machincations of a toothless US commerce agency. Companies that actively or passively contribute to the abuse of the internet must be punished and / or taxed. For instance, is a particular OS is the platform of choice for botnets, then the mfr. of the OS must fix the problem within a reasonable timeframe, or else open the source so the community will fix it themselves.
The proceedings in some of the standards bodies on the OOXML vote shows that they can govern the IT industry better than the anti-trust agencies. I tihnk they must be allowed to have a say, now that the US bodies have failed.
it means that we will have a flood of articles about Vista SP1, just like the initial flood of Vista articles. Seeing as there's now 2 articles already inside an hour.... I shudder to think how many we will see until March 2008.. or whenever SP1 comes out.
What can someone be xpected to say about a mere Statement of Intent from Microsoft, about a Service Pack.... which right thinking people would expect a big comapny to release RIGJHT NOW and solve teething troubles faced by Vista users daily?
The schedule for SP1 indicates MS is under zero pressure to deliver anything or do anything innovative. No point fantasizing about it.
Now what I will do with those documents is send them to my board of directors. They will read them.
I have already done so, in a private intranet forum... I've compared Microsoft's tactics to that of third-rate politicians in India. I'm sure when the top brass gets more and more details of this sordid episode, there will be zero resistance when I suggest that we simply avoid Active Directory, Exchange, Office and Sharepoint for our business systems.
but really its just one program thats not terribly popular that happens to have broken the GPL. I really don't think this is a "windows specific" issue at all...
I think this is Windows-specific. Companies who write software that works on Windows usually write non-GPL, non-Open-source, proprietary stuff... and it is reasonable to expect the GPL violations on Closed Source code would be harder to detect.
Software written for Linux generally tends to be GPL / Apache / MPL licensed... very few firms write proprietary code for Linux. Yes, I know there are exceptions... but I'm generalising. Even these proprietary offerings generally allow customers to inspect code, protocols etc. , unlike in the Windows world.
I think this is definitely a Windows specific issue, and this incident proves that GPL code allows firms to go to market quicker; and create vibrant, utilitarian applications. It demonstrates that the GPL is quite popular amongst the developer community, whatever folks from Redmond would have us believe.
All new initiatives and 'innovations' from Intel have been closed source, secretive and the technology is available to a few limited US h/w mfrs. The reason Linux became so successful is because of Intel's low-cost, standards-compliant, open-source hardware; but with initiatives like virtualisation, vPro, multi-threaded compilers etc. the balance gets tilted further in favour of TCPA and DRM partners; and puts Linux at a disadvantage in the Enterprise.
There is not a SINGLE technical detail about the bug in the article. The first paragraph pretty much says it all
If you actually read through till the last para, you ill note that the bug has something to do with Microsoft, Registry, Internet Explorer and registering programs.
Anyway, once Caldera started all the layoffs after the dot-com boom and SCO merge, a good chunk of engineering ended up at Novell.
I think that one phrase tells you a lot about why SCO sued people and Novell won't: Novell is a functioning business with a business plan.
Excuse me... but what has Novell engineered in recent years? It has engineered the acquisition of SuSE; and engineered an unholy suspicious contract with Microsoft.
None of these engineering efforts require technical acumen.
Every guy I worked with was passionate about open source, and making the world a better place, etc.
Since Novell makes zero revenue with Netware these days, why don't they Open Source it? They can make a lot of money over Certifications, Implementations and Training... like RedHat does with Linux. The fact that they haven't done; and the Open Enterprise SErver is now moving to Linux, means they are not committed to the ideals of Open Source.
Their acquisition of SuSE has actually killed a big non-US distro - which is beneficial to Microsoft, not Linux customers.
So many thousands of 'engineers' have got the Certified Novell Engineer certification... millions of devices have been designed around Netware.. and Novell has simply ditched them all.
If they will not maintain and enhance Netware, they ought to atleast Open Source the damn thing; maybe even GPL it. Netware and NDS have been very good pieces of work, and abandoning them has worked to Microsoft's and Intel's advantage.
With Netware, Novell was pretending to be a competitor to Microsoft's DOS and Xenix; with SuSE even the pretence of competing in the OS market has gone - it is now an unholy 'partnership'.
Novell's promise "Not To Sue" will not win them more customers for SuSE Linux. Customers will go in for Linux distros not tainted by Novell, Ximian Xandros etc.
Why is it so difficult to get?
a post.html
It's: the apostrophe indicates something is missing: he's (he is), she's (she is), it's (it is).
Its: this is the possessive, since possessive do not have apostrophes: his, her(s), its.
I call bullshit. The first use of the apostrophe is the possessive case. Ex:
John's ball
Joe's socks
Olympic committee's machines
Microsoft's lousy Vista
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/g_
In the latter 2 examples, when "It" is used to refer to the Olympic Committee or Microsoft, then "It's" becomes the possessive case.
Ex: The Olympic Committee is looking fot relaible computers. It's choice is the Lenoveo brand.
Microsft makes lousy operating systems. It's recent Vista bombed at most customer locations.
It's perfectly okay to use "it's" to signal possession.
That was his response when OIN was formed. Linux and Free Software do not, repeat DO NOT ned the OIN for gaining mindshare or marketshare - the OIN is largely a distraction sponsored by an elite club, at odds with reality.
Now that GPL3 has neutered patent threats from Microsoft, Google's tie-up with the OIN seems actually a bad PR move.
And so while Microsoft might well get away in a court battle, the market has already made up it's mind when MS made it clear they will have nothing to do with GPL3. 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.