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The whole thing is really odd! I mean what if ballmer is really 100 % right ? what if there are truly blatant patent infringements ? that could mean that a group of Microsoft programmers during the late 1990s and early 2000s deliberately contributed free code to the linux code base with the intention to eventually create the case of patent infringement. It is as if a group of open source programmers had access to some portions of windows code, copied it almost exactly in linux, sold it ideally as their own free source creation and then stabbed the open source community in the back.
Hmmmmmmm, then who did it ? who are these oddball guys ? hmmmm..... so many mysteries!
Funny on Windows being UNIX like. UNIX was originally an AT&T (back when they owned Bell Labs which is now Lucent) baby. Ex AT&Ters I knew used to say MS-DOS meant:
M icrosoft
S tole our
D amn
O perating
S ystem
Funny - there was a time both MS and SCO sold Xenix variants. By the way SCO won't be suing MS - When their CEO owned DR DOS (the erstwhile CP/M) of which MS-DOS (the erstwhile QDOS [Quick and Dirty Operating System]) is considered to be a thinly veiled knock off of they tried suing MS and didn't get very far at all.
Even IBM in the early days of MS rise to dominance finally settled their lawsuit with MS over similarities between OS/2 and Windoze. That was in a day when IBM was more powerful than it is now.
MS has deep pockets - they can't win competitively so have always resorted to bullying tactics to gain or keep market share. With such deep pockets its fairly easy to do - especially when you have an administration that throws out antitrust proceedings as soon as it takes office.
It could be. He said more than once that Ballmer is a programmer, which everybody knows, he is not. Perhaps Ballmer (old6598) is a programmer as well.
But the most intriguing is the number old6598 uses. 65 inverted (56) is the year Ballmer was born. And "98" was the year Ballmer got promoted as the president of Microsoft...
If there is anybody who can buy M$ from petty cash it's the media conglomerates
right now there are 5 just 5 of them and thay have the power to controll every thing
every thing that americans see and hear on the media ALL of it news papers,tv networks,
cable tv,radio,magazines,music studios and movies every thing ( in the next year there will most likly be just 3 of them ) the only excption is the internet the last place where there is any free speach
no right now M$ is swiming with sharks that could swallow them with eases
Microsoft is bigger than that.
DRM in Windows gives Microsoft a really big hammer to use on the media companies, given the ubiquity of windows and the technological convergence of media delivery systems.
Basically, Microsoft is gaining a lock on media conglomerates means of delivery, and with DRM, Microsoft is gaining control of both how and whether the content gets delivered.
More comments about this, today at the Inquirer. Pretty interesting stuff.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Charlie Demerjian
....
Three reasons. First, the Linux community will go to extraordinary lengths to remain in the spirit and letter of the law, a trick Microsoft has yet to attempt anywhere. If it knows what the problem is, it will be fixed before you can say "dance monkeyboy, dance".
....
Last is the simple fact that if Microsoft had anything that would hold up in court, they would have sued someone by now. There has been much made of the question of who to sue, and the fact that most Linux customers also happen to be Microsoft customers too. I don't buy either argument.
....
The reason is that MS went into shake down talks with Red Hat, and it ended up with Red Hat telling MS which orifice it could place their patents in, and by the way, the door is that way. If MS had anything, it surely would have shown them to Red Hat during that time, and if it did not show Redhat anything, well, that gives you a good idea about the strength of its arguments.
So, Redhat either saw the evidence and laughed, or did not see the evidence and laughed. Either way, it has a lot of IP lawyers, and they decided that MS had the joke of a position. Had MS had the slightest shade of a case, it would have signed something with Redhat....
I think that's very odd since the source code of MS is not available.How do you infringe on something unknown? But it might be about something like opening windows with a pointer.As long as they don't articulate themselves what this is really about it's just the usual Ballmer BS (and there's a lot more where it came from since he is full of it).
"Our precious IP is worth beeelions, and you must honor our sacred intellectual property, which is behind this curtain. We can't exactly show you or identify it with specificity, but trust me, it's worth oodles and boodles, and you are violating it. We just can't show you precisely where and how. But we don't want to sue you, so we will let you use Linux anyway, if you just sign on the dotted line and pay us for code we didn't write but we'd like to tax because it's winning in the marketplace and we don't know how to make money fair and square against it."
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