I can't saw for certain about Microsoft, but I have seen some commercial licenses in which the software publisher can audit the business licensing its software. The way these things usually go, if the number of licenses which the business should have paid for is off by a certain percentage (someplace between 5-15%), the business also pays for the audit.
Regulators and legislators are your new systems architects. I've had to deal with them in the US for years about tech issues. According to them there are three principles of systems architecture:
Computers can do:
(1)Anything;
(2)Immediately;
(3)Without cost.
The timing of this announcement is odd. It would have made a lot of sense to announce this at Linux World two weeks ago. CEO Carmony was all over the place and you couldn't get away without getting multiple copies of Freespire. It wasn't that hard to get a copy of Linspire either. But Carmody was saying that his company made its money from charging for CNR.
Two weeks later CNR is free. I don't know why that change occurred, and there can be any number of reasons for it, but I have a thought. Perhaps the usual response by the attendees at the Lindows Lounge was simply, "I ain't paying for this no matter what." Or perhaps the sign up factor for CNR after the show was dismal.
I don't think you throw out your business model because a bunch of geeks walk away from you. But maybe if you need those geeks to get more business down the road, maybe you do.
People who work for monopolies shouldn't threaten to use their market power. Seems this is more than dumb. Some clever lawyer working for Google might use this to start a law suit, which could include a request to either inspect Vista source code for anticompetative tricks or perhaps an injuction against distributing Vista until it is shown that no such anticompetative tricks exist in Vista. MS's slogan from the 90s of "the work's not done until Lotus won't run" could come back to haunt them....
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...between an open source and proprietary airline.
Linus Torvalds will come home and find the head of a penguin in his bed.
I can't saw for certain about Microsoft, but I have seen some commercial licenses in which the software publisher can audit the business licensing its software. The way these things usually go, if the number of licenses which the business should have paid for is off by a certain percentage (someplace between 5-15%), the business also pays for the audit.
Regulators and legislators are your new systems architects. I've had to deal with them in the US for years about tech issues. According to them there are three principles of systems architecture: Computers can do: (1)Anything; (2)Immediately; (3)Without cost.
The timing of this announcement is odd. It would have made a lot of sense to announce this at Linux World two weeks ago. CEO Carmony was all over the place and you couldn't get away without getting multiple copies of Freespire. It wasn't that hard to get a copy of Linspire either. But Carmody was saying that his company made its money from charging for CNR. Two weeks later CNR is free. I don't know why that change occurred, and there can be any number of reasons for it, but I have a thought. Perhaps the usual response by the attendees at the Lindows Lounge was simply, "I ain't paying for this no matter what." Or perhaps the sign up factor for CNR after the show was dismal. I don't think you throw out your business model because a bunch of geeks walk away from you. But maybe if you need those geeks to get more business down the road, maybe you do.
I still remember 12:34 pm on May 6, 1978 as the best such thing of all time. It was 1234 on 5/6/78!
People who work for monopolies shouldn't threaten to use their market power. Seems this is more than dumb. Some clever lawyer working for Google might use this to start a law suit, which could include a request to either inspect Vista source code for anticompetative tricks or perhaps an injuction against distributing Vista until it is shown that no such anticompetative tricks exist in Vista. MS's slogan from the 90s of "the work's not done until Lotus won't run" could come back to haunt them....