Any kind of big media company ... want to actively encourage other people to release their creative works under very free licenses. Preferably, BSD-style The old, "What's ours is ours and what yours is ours, thanks for giving" license. Microsoft and others love that and this tool reflects that love. The choices are restricted and the defaults are just what M$ would like: * "Allow commercial use of your work" is first with a default of "yes". * "Allow modification of your work" is the ONLY other option, with a default of "Yes" Attribution choices are missing which would make this a 2.5 license only. Indeed, OO2 shows a link to the 2.5 license page defined by the author. The defaults are very similar to earlier BSD licenses, which Microsoft loves and encourages. Cnet's description, "This window allows people to set restrictions on use," is amazing because the defaults do everything to strip away all control and allow maximum exploitation. -- Friends don't help friends install MS junk. ----------- Microsoft invested $150 million in Apple in 1997 ----------- Section headings from the downloadable PDF include: # Microsoft has Designed its Multimedia Product to Exclude Competitors and Extend its # Monopoly Power # Microsoft has Used its Monopoly Power and Anticompetitive Tactics to Try to Defeat # Quicktime # Microsoft Repeatedly Pressured Apple to Give Up Quicktime and Cede the Multimedia # Playback Market to Microsoft # to Thwart Quicktime, Microsoft Employed Punitive and Exclusionary Actions # The Technical Problems and Misleading Error Messages Introduced by Microsoft Impair # Quicktime's Performance and Impede Apple's Ability to Compete # Original Equipment Manufacturers and Independent Software Vendors Fear Reprisal from # Microsoft if their Business Conduct does not Conform to Microsoft's Wishes ----------- That "special hardware" is also known as ANY VISTA-COMPATIBLE NEW COMPUTER. In fact, if you have reasonably new hardware, you're probably already infected with it. That's why this is scary -- because Microsoft has the ability to leverage its monopoly to force the "special hardware" on the public, and the RIAA/MPAA/BSA have the political power to outlaw "non-Trusted" machines (which of course would only be used for "piracy" anyway, you know)! ------------ One thing I remember from back then was how MS screwed over IBM. They sold IBM Windows at a higher price because they had a competing operating system, OS/2, and strongarmed them into trying to not let them let out the secret that there were other OSes besides Windows. Also, they double screwed IBM by delaying their OEM licenses until after the "back to school" sales rush. ------------ Get back under your rock troll. Had you RTFA, you would know that the complaints which are not yet resolved relate to MS publishing specs for MS protocols. From TFA: "In addition to fining the company 497 million euros, the commission ordered Microsoft to disclose technical documentation that rival makers of server software need to develop programs that work properly with the Windows operating system." This was the 'meat' of the ruling and MS has yet to produce said documentation in any usable form. In fact the arbitrator [wsj.com] for the EU (who, incidentally, was chosen by MS) even commented to the EU officials that the documentation they(MS) had produced was useless. -- Beware of he who denies you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. ------------ Microsoft managed to stall OpenGL 2.0 and other improvements for the longest time by claiming potential patent infringements with its vertex and pixel shader technologies. As a result OpenGL stalled for some time. Microsoft has since left the OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) after doing the damage it needed to do. Deja vu. ------------ There will be plenty of people that are tired XP and its constant security problems by now. They will upgrade the day Vista is out, thinking it will be the solution to all their problems. The advertising for Vista will be *very good*. You can bet on that. Microsoft will make sure that people using XP will not be able to easily communicate with the new applications on Vista. Companies will be scared of having some computers running XP and newer ones running Vista. Companies loving standardising things. People will upgrade before too long. If not voluntarily, they will be forced to. The only thing Microsoft need to do to almost guarantee success is to get the thing released soon before Mac + Linux start getting too popular! ------------ The behavior of Microsoft executives during the United States v. Microsoft case – for example, Bill Gates quibbling over the meaning of simple words, and a Microsoft vice president insisting the judge had told him to ship a version of Windows which did not work - earned astonishment, amusement, and ridicule in the press. ------------ All large computer vendors in the USA (with the exception of Apple Computer), and the majority in other countries, bundle Microsoft Windows with their personal computers. Some free software advocates speculate that this bundling has occurred because of undisclosed agreements between Microsoft and the large computer vendors (Dell, HP, IBM) where the best discounts are given only when Windows is shipped on every single computer from that vendor. ------------ Remember the Stacker fiasco where Microsoft misappropriated Stacker code, and stabbed Stac Electronics in the back? ------------ Heck, I've even got a few legit copies of Office98 still in their shrink wrap around here somewhere (along with copies of Win95 sr2, NT4, and Win2000 ... you'd be amazed at how many shrinkwraped packages people never open and just discard). Maybe I can offer them on eBey? :) Microsoft would likely classify this as an illegimate sale on the basis of some sort of logic. Remember just because you paid for them doesn't mean you own them, not at all... At least according to Microsoft. ------------ Having TPM hardware in the machine at all is bad enough... if you move to Vista there will (quite literally) be no escape. The computer you purchase will not belong to you and will be deliberately designed to be secure against you, rather than for you. Vista will be the software component of this lockdown. Now look at IBM -- for them to base their business around Vista would make them *completely* under the control of Microsoft. Their desktops could be secretly backdoored, their data locked down and only accessible with the permission of Microsoft. 100% Bill's bitch. Why submit to that when you can (and are) pay off Red Hat to work on a Trusted Computing version of the Linux kernel (google for the project)... and have that kind of control yourself? Smaller companies and normal consumers though... that's a different matter. They are going to be screwed royally with the introduction of Vista. They just don't realise it yet, and won't until they've paid over their cash to Dell or HP. DRM throughout the system (apps and data), and all under the control of Uncle Bill and his Rights Management Servers. ------------------ The historical context is simple. At the time, code was shared freely, to the profit of everyone involved. Everyone stood tall, until Gates and his ilk arrived, standing on the shoulders of giants and proclaiming they were the tallest motherfuckers around. The whole idea of someone "owning" a chunk of computing is bunk. It always has been. It hurts us all. Do you think Microsoft would be where they are today without freely-available code? If so, take back Altair BASIC, take back the TCP stack in MS-Windows (taken from BSD TCP), take back MS Internet Explorer and MS HTTP. Take it all away, and see where Microsoft stands. ------ Odd how Bill Gates doesn't really like to tell the side of the story where he stole PDP-10 time from a Seattle company (which went out of business), one of the Universities in Seattle (which kicked him and Paul Allen out when they found out about it), and even Harvard University. Yes, the PDP-10 time used to run 8080 simulators. Used to write that initial Basic interpreter ... stolen. Pot. Kettle. Black -------- With this decision to uphold the patents, the USPTO reversed its October 2005 decisions against the patents. PUBPAT had strived for over two years to strike down the FAT patents (5,579,517 and 5,758,352), on the grounds that they contained "prior art." The New Party Line Now let's review what Microsoft is doing. Huw gives us five bullet points: 1. Claim that linux isn't free. 2. Pretend that Shared source is the same as Open Source 3. Make a big deal about the migration costs of moving to Linux 4. Use the Forrester report to claim that Linux is insecure 5. Belittle the quality of the toolset available on Linux Dear Microsoft Apologist, Did you tried to format a bigger than 32Gb drive under windows with FAT ? Why doesn't Microsoft open up NTFS? Because they don't believe in interoperability. "The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000." That line is just classic Gates, the computer time may have been worth $40,000 but Gates never paid for it. Gates and Allen did not even have authorization to be using the university machines in question, something Gates himself would probably liken to "theft". I don't think Gates has changed at all, he's still a liar. As for Microsoft, they still market vapourware and I believe the next product will be called "Vista". A CARELESS mistake by Microsoft programmers has revealed that special access codes prepared by the US National Security Agency have been secretly built into Windows. The NSA access system is built into every version of the Windows operating system now in use, except early releases of Windows 95 (and its predecessors). The discovery comes close on the heels of the revelations earlier this year that another US software giant, Lotus, had built an NSA "help information" [local] trapdoor into its Notes system, and that security functions on other software systems had been deliberately crippled. Microsoft has done this several times: one version of Windows was designed to report to Microsoft all the software on your hard disk; a recent "security" upgrade in Windows Media Player required users to agree to new restrictions. Microsoft employed lobbyists such as Jack Abramoff ($1,100,000) and Grover Norquist (>$280,000) whose practices are now being scrutinized. Quote from Microsoft's former OEM chieftain Joachim Kempin to Bill Gates: "I'm thinking of hitting the OEMs harder than in the past with anti-Linux. ... They should do a delicate dance." If you don't maintain a clear separation between data and procedure, you are going to end up with a system that is impossible to maintain or improve without breaking compatibility, among other problems. It seems to me that Microsoft has been violating this basic principle of computing for at least 10 years now. MS likes to tightly cross-couple its data with its programming, apparently for marketing reasons (there certainly is no engineering benefit to this practice). Whether you look at Microsoft office products through historical practice or through the rosey lenses of computing theory, you see that they are deficient in providing for long term compatibility. Digital Research DOS: Superior to MS DOS but was sabotaged by Microsoft via bogus error messages Read "World War 3.0" by Ken Auletta then read "Barbarians Led by Bill Gates: Microsoft from the Inside" 1. Microsoft is a convicted monopolist - Fact. 2. Microsoft has written software and spent billions - specifically to crush competition and reduce the user experience - FACT. 3. Microsoft fudged a demo during trial - under OATH - Fact. X-Box: Microsoft sells you a product and threaten to sue you for using it to its full. "I guess I've made it very clear that we view an Intel investment in Go as an anti-Microsoft move, both because Go competes with our systems software and because we think it will weaken the 386 PC standard. . . I'm asking you not to make any investment in Go Corporation" - Bill Gates Microsoft has been rapped over the knuckles over an anti-Lunix advertising campaign. The Advertising Standards Association in the UK has ruled that the ad makes "misleading" claims, and has told the company change the copy on the advertisement forthwith. Commentary: Like many readers, I find Microsoft's Get the Facts (GtF) ads repugnant, especially when they appear on sites dedicated to Linux and open source software. I understand that such organizations' editorial and ad sales staffs operate independently, meaning neither side tells the other what content it is or isn't allowed to carry, but I still don't like it. Happily, however, the bogus GtF ads may not be around much longer. The ads are part of an evolving strategy for Microsoft. Its reputation became so tainted during the '90s that it became impossible for the company's own spokespeople -- from Chairman Bill Gates on down -- to speak with any credibility. That's why they began to disguise their identity and to outsource their marketing to paid shills in the press and elsewhere to deliver their lies. Finding folks with more credibility than they have has never been a problem for Microsoft. Microsoft claims that its software is more secure than a bank vault have not impressed South Africa's advertising standards authority Microsoft claimed in an advertisement that its software is so secure, it will make hackers extinct. As it turned out, it was the ad which bit the dust. "Windows ain't done til Lotus won't run" filtering out ecards from Blue Mountain Arts Making WinNT incompatible with SAMBA Making Windows incompatible with DR DOS Subsuming Kerberos and making it incompatible with original OEM's forced to pay MS per CPU they shipped whether it had Windows on it or not Using propaganda to scare users Using misleading advertising The BSD TCP/IP network stack was openly "pirated" by Microsoft Manufacturers forced to sell blank computers for the same price as computers with windows A better analogy would be like Microsoft purposely sabotoging their own document format to make it impossible for other word processors to legally interoperate with it. Wait no, A better analogy would be like Microsoft serving up broken web pages to the browsers of competitors. No, wait. A better analogy would be like suggesting Microsoft would break Windows so that it would refuse to run under a competitor's version of DOS. Maybe it's like Microsoft shipping a browser that has the option to uninstall other software vendor's browsers. Or Microsoft forcing OEM's to pay them a fee for every computer they ship, with or without Windows installed. Perhaps it's like Microsoft hiding crucial API's from everyone but themselves, and when forced to expose them for all to see defining "all" as anyone who can pony up 50 thousand dollars plus additional fees. Or Microsoft attempting to ship broken versions of Java to destroy the standard. Or forcing OEM vendors to carry Microsoft ads, and only Microsoft ads, on all desktops sold. Or negotiating with another company for a year only to steal their technology. And then refusing a court order to turn over all e-mails from that period. Microsoft having Office 95 ask for a memory address at the 2GB limit, even though no desktop machine at the time came with even 512MB. The sole purpose of this exercise? To have Office not be able to run on OS/2, whose VM had a limit of 512MB (the shame!!!). Or about making Office 95 docs incompatible with all previous versions of Office (again, a direct stab at forcing everyone to upgrade, and leaving OS/2 out in the cold. It wasn't so much about other word processors, since none of them could accurately deal with the ever changing screwed up word markup, and they were always months and months behind at the time.) Or, how about Microsoft selling an "OS" to IBM before they actually owned the rights to it? At the end of 2003 Microsoft decided to require licensing fees for the use of its FAT filesystem on consumer electronics devices and solid state media. Every USB storage device, digital camera, portable audio player, memory card, printer and television manufactured to use FAT would add $0.25 to Microsoft's pockets, with a cap on total royalties of $250,000 per manufacturer. Yes, it's absurd, but FAT is no longer free. Get the world hooked on an inferior technology and then start collecting royalties – be prepared for more of these tactics. More recently, Microsoft had to pay InterTrust $440 million to settle matters related to Microsoft's misuse of InterTrust's DRM (digital rights management) patents. Spyglass was "taken" by agreeing to a contract in which they received a portion of the revenue which Microsoft was going to recieve by "selling" Internet Explorer. Microsoft set the price at $0.00, so of course, the Spyglass share was nothing. Setting a price of $0.00 effectively killed Netscape at the same time, by criminally extending their OS monopoly to destroy the market for Internet Browsers) . Netscape couldn't compete with a "free" competitor which was subsidized by monopolistic profits "earned" on the OS. Per the famous famous Microsoft phrase, the zero dollar cost of IE "cut off their air supply". I agree that you don't want to meet those criminals on a bridge in the dark.