Posted on 05/13/2007 4:05:27 PM PDT by Zakeet
Free software is great, and corporate America loves it. It's often high-quality stuff that can be downloaded free off the Internet and then copied at will. It's versatile - it can be customized to perform almost any large-scale computing task - and it's blessedly crash-resistant.
A broad community of developers, from individuals to large companies like IBM, is constantly working to improve it and introduce new features. No wonder the business world has embraced it so enthusiastically: More than half the companies in the Fortune 500 are thought to be using the free operating system Linux in their data centers.
But now there's a shadow hanging over Linux and other free software, and it's being cast by Microsoft. The Redmond behemoth asserts that one reason free software is of such high quality is that it violates more than 200 of Microsoft's patents. And as a mature company facing unfavorable market trends and fearsome competitors like Google (Charts, Fortune 500), Microsoft is pulling no punches: It wants royalties. If the company gets its way, free software won't be free anymore.
(Excerpt) Read more at money.cnn.com ...
Or, one could hope, the process would show MS is not interested in 'fixing' violations but in strong-arming a revenue stream.
Huh?
Guessing I was not clear. On a PC operating Windows XP, if your system crashes, you get what is referred to as the "blue screen of death." You computer locks up and you have to reboot (restart it).
However, in most instances you do not lose your work (letters in word, art in Photoshop, things you were working on when it crashed). Once the system is restart, Windows XP asks you if you want to recover the data that was not saved when the crash occured.
In ohter words, that long letter you were nearly done with is not lost just because the system locked up.
Not so with a Mac Computer, as I briefly stated in my earlier post. When a Mac crashes, you lose all work. Thus my comment "At least that Blue Screen of Death will let you recover your data that you were working on before it crashed."
Hope that clarifies it. If not, let me know and I will have another shot at it.
Understood. But give credit to where it is due. That’s not the operating system, that’s each individual application watching out for itself.
BINGO!
Yep, I remember that - I was a Unix guy at the time DOS became popular. One of the reasons it never really "worked" is that not many third party DOS apps/utilties respected SWITCHAR, so it was inconsistent as to whether it worked or not.
I think that is true (in regards to Kildall), but what I posted is also true - Gates/Microsoft did not initially write MSDOS (intially known as PC-DOS). He bought it. See this article
The stop watch for equitable estoppel starts now? I think estoppel by silence probably applies too.
Ballmer is a shrewd billionaire businessman and Stallman is a fundamentalist leftist kook who wants all software to be free. You bet there's conflict.
Microsoft counters that it is a matter of principle. "We live in a world where we honor, and support the honoring of, intellectual property," says Ballmer in an interview. FOSS patrons are going to have to "play by the same rules as the rest of the business," he insists. "What's fair is fair."
Free software hippies like Stallman want to make countless free copies of other people's software then distribute it without paying a dime back to the originator. The US is currently losing billions as foreign governments especially communist ones are standardizing on these clones from Stallman and others using his software license.
The free world appears to be uncowed by Microsoft's claims. Its master legal strategist is Eben Moglen, longtime counsel to the Free Software Foundation and the head of the Software Freedom Law Center, which counsels FOSS projects on how to protect themselves from patent aggression.
Hardly, they're in complete panic and Moglen recently announced he was stepping down as chief counsel. The Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) also recently disbanded and was replaced by a more legal outfit than a "lab".
In response, companies began stocking up on software patents, with traditional hardware outfits like IBM leading the way, since they already had staffs of patent attorneys working at their engineers' elbows. Microsoft lagged far behind.
IBM recently sued Amazon over software patents, this is nothing new, the only thing that's new are the green party leftists like Stallman who think they're immune.
Yes, free software is a more sophisticated concept than many people think, and it is subject to a legally enforceable license of its own. That license was written by free-software inventor Richard Stallman, who set forth those goals in the GNU Manifesto.
Obviously Stallman is a leftist sham, his software isn't "free", it has it's own license and is based on his Marx like "manifesto".
That may be bad news for big corporate customers, which, judging from early reports, like the Novell deal. Presumably at least part of its appeal is that it provides peace of mind about Microsoft's patent claims. In the first six months, such marquee clients as Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, AIG Technologies, HSBC, Wal-Mart, Dell and Reed Elsevier have all acquired Novell Linux coupons from Microsoft.
Which drove the free software fanatics bananas. They really don't believe in free software, or free choice, they want to destroy intellectual property protections completely other than the ones that protect their viral license.
When it comes to software patents, though, Moglen thinks that's exactly the goal to be achieved. "The free world says that software is the embodiment of knowledge about technology, which needs to be free in the same way that mathematics is free," he says.
Further kookiness from these fruits, math is a numerical representation of nature, simply collecting and displaying that which happens naturally and is already there, while software is something that is developed for a purpose and has unique characteristics provided by the auhtor. These guys have been cloning other people's work and giving it away for free for years, now it looks like they may finally have to answer for it.
For reference, you're still using OS 9 with gobs of cheap user-submitted fonts, right?
Don’t you think that with all the money MS has, they could afford a better shill?
Get the hell out of here that Unix violates MS patents... Unix and its free diriviatives predate MS by a decade... the idea it violates their patents is absurd.
MS totalitarian grip is threatened and as such all lies and means must be employed to protect it.
Wise general rule: don’t feed the trolls.
Brilliant specific rule: never feed THAT troll.
IBM asked Gates, who didn't have anything at the time. So he licensed QDOS, a CP/M clone, and ported it. This wasn't fooling IBM, as IBM knew what was happening. But Seattle Computer products didn't, and soon after let Microsoft buy all rights to it for only $50,000. This was a pretty impressive move by Gates.
The last known thing that Gates actually wrote was the BASIC for the old TRS-80 Model 100. And that was pretty good.
Wow, I didn't know that. So it wasn't just the activist courts like I thought, but also Clinton yet again selling out our Constitution.
They don't have to publicly reveal it. Both sides would have experts who are allowed to look at it. I know because my company when through a $1M dollar lawsuit for something similar. We had to allow their expert total access to our code. We ended up kicking their butts in court!
IBM sold to Lenovo, which just inked a multi-billion dollar deal with Microsoft. Microsoft is here to stay for the most part.
I also read somewhere that the EU is at odds with MS and is fining them billions of dollars for anti-trust type stuff, I think.
Microsoft did some bad things in the 90s, but instead of looking for correction and justice the EU seems to be just milking the issue for all its worth lately.
Also, I think I read that Linux is now mandriva and is mostly a french thing now and that germany has already banned MS from government buildings.
Various departments and cities are switching, but there's no blanket ban.
I think I read somewhere also that google is working on it’s own operating system.
Low-quality rumor. But Google has made major changes to Linux, so they essentially have their own distro, but it's in-house.
LOL is that all you have in response? No I don’t work for Microsoft nor does anyone I personally know, I’m just opposed to green party leftists like Stallman who want to destroy US intellectual property protections and give free software clones of US products away to places like Cuba. Here’s he is singing “free software song” while he was there.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sJUDx7iEJw
Here he is singing about “Guantanamerica” while there too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SP-gN1zoI28&mode=related&search=
You support this green party kook huh.
Exposing Green Party leftist kooks is certainly not trolling. It sure seems to upset you though.
Your message was garbled. Please repeat.
No it wasn't. It was as clear as your intent, which is to attack me for exposing leftists then lie about it. But this is how the other side almost always reacts, so you get an F for originality too.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.