More Ballmer FUD

Continuing with the theme from my previous post, now Ballmer is (what else) openly spewing FUD that Linux infringes on Microsoft’s patents. Here is a link to Q&A with a Seattle Pi reporter.

The juicy bits –

"…our number one competitor in the data center for new applications has been Unix. Unix, Unix, Unix, Unix. … What is the popular form of Unix on Intel? It's Linux."

NO you STUPID MORON. The one thing that your backdoor funded FUD lawsuit from SCO has proven is that Linux does not contain any UNIX. Period. It’s a separate operating system written by the collaborative efforts of people all over the world.

"…Linux comes from the community -- the fact that that product uses our patented intellectual property is a problem for our shareholders..."

"…anybody who uses Suse Linux is appropriately covered. There will be no patent issues. They've appropriately compensated Microsoft for our intellectual property, which is important to us. In a sense you could say anybody who has got Linux in their data center today sort of has an undisclosed balance sheet liability, because it's not just Microsoft patents. Because of the way open-source works, there's nobody who's been able to do patent coverage or patent indemnification behind that."

How does any reasonable reporter hear that and not immediately jump up and say “WHICH PATENTS are you referring to?” The XNOR operator, or conjugating verb patents? You need to remember that the one company that has been constantly sued for usurping intellectual property is Microsoft. And despite billions spent on their legal team they have always lost or settled out of court.

This is SCO FUD redux. And you know the Enderle’s and George Ou’s of the world are jumping with joy. Hey, here we go on the FUD train. I now await the constant regurgitation now of how Linux infringes on Microsoft’s patents. Only Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet had the balls to say “If Linux violates Microsoft’s patents, let’s see the proof”.

I stated in my previous post that Novell had made a deal with the devil. And this once again proves it. All that Port 25 interoperability crap was just Microsoft buying time till they came up with this new extortion scheme. This disgusting, despicable company has NO redeeming features what so ever. They truly make me sick and the public and tech (non) reaction to their daily shenanigans make me even more sick. I know boycotts don’t work. But I can’t see how any reasonable open source developer can justify collaborating with these asshats. I wish I was a developer so I could call them just to spit in their face. They make me that angry.

In the meanwhile, all I can do is write my blog and bring to light the evils of this evil company. And hope that if you are reading this it will open your eyes to this despicable monopoly.

New Hard Drive

My trusty old Powermac G4 (circa 2001) was getting pretty full, so yesterday I decided to put in a new Hard Drive. The hardware installation was a breeze and took me about 5 minutes. The only gripe I have is that when you put a brand new unformatted drive in a Mac, it recognizes the new drive as unformatted but doesn't automatically prompt you to format (initialize) the drive. You have to go to disk utilities and actually pick "Erase" drive in order to format it. There is no simple "click to format" button. Very Un-Maclike.

I then decided to install a fresh copy of OSX Tiger on the drive. I could have used Carbon Copy Cloner, but figured it would be good to do a fresh install. I used my OSX DVD disk and the install went very smooth. What I love about OSX is that it automatically recognized my old HD as having the more recent version and picked the new HD automatically to install OSX on. A nice touch. But what really impressed me was after the OSX install and restart, the option automatically came up to transfer all my settings from the old HD to the new one. This is a feature of Tiger I had never used and it is just awesome. You can use it to transfer all your stuff from an old Mac to a new one or from an existing HD or partition on your machine to a new one. I picked the checkboxes to transfer everything - network settings, users, files & folders and let OSX do its thing. It took about 45 minutes and the result was simply amazing. Everything transferred without a hitch, down to the desktop pictures and shortcuts I had on my old HD. I then downloaded the combined updater for OSX 10.4.8 and ran it to bring my OS current. I had to run software update for the latest version of iTunes as it wasn't part of the combined updater. No glitches whatsoever. All my hundreds of iPhoto images were right where they were supposed to be. My iTunes purchased songs played without any license warnings.

This is why I bought a Mac in the first place and why I continue to evangalize the Mac platform. No matter what the Microsoft fanboys claim, Windows has NEVER been able to do stuff like this. At least not as seamlessly and effortlessly as a Mac.

The other shoe drops

With the ink barely dry on the Novell sell out - I mean agreement with Microsoft, Ballmer is already on the FUD campaign. For anyone that thinks the Novell-Microsoft deal is in anyway good for Linux, think again. It would do well for people to remember what "E" comes after Embrace and Extend. Now that the Microsoft sponsored SCO fud campaign (read lawsuit) has fallen flat on its face, Microsoft wanted a new angle to attack Linux. I have said this before. Microsoft is like any predator. They will separate the herd and then then go after the lone gazelle. Divide and conquer. Till yesterday the Linux vendors were united. The obvious intent is now to separate Red Hat from the herd and go after them.

So Ballmer now wants patent talks with other linux vendors. Excuse me while I go throw up. Haven't we have seen this before with SCO?. Here's a quote from the eweek article.

The distributors of other versions of Linux cannot assure their customers that Microsoft won't sue for patent infringement. "If a customer says, 'Look, do we have liability for the use of your patented work?' Essentially, If you're using non-SUSE Linux, then I'd say the answer is yes," Ballmer said.

Here we go. Remember a few years back when Ballmer threatened Linux with patent threats? The reaction at that time caused an uproar and some serious backpedaling from the MS PR department. Well I guess the time has come now to repeat the threats. So now if you don't use SUSE Linux (read if you use Red Hat) then the Microsoft will sue you for patent infringement. Of course they have never once through all these years told the Linux community what Microsoft patents Linux infringes upon. SCO FUD redux anyone?

I am so proud of Red Hat that they are standing their ground. Here is their public response to this nonsense.

I love this line "We will not compromise." Amen, brother!.

I like Novell. I still admire them for standing up to SCO and for supporting Linux. Novell along with IBM has enough patents that Microsoft would never dare target them directly. Novell has now willingly or unwittingly aligned themselves with a snake in the grass, and have obviously not learned from the lessons of history. They might make a few short term market share gains but the computing landscape is littered with the corpses of the so called "partners" of Microsoft.

When you make a deal with the Devil, you will end up losing your soul. Period. No matter how tempting the deal is, and no matter how smart you think you are, the end result is inevitable. Today, Novell lost its Linux soul. They will never get it back and they will live to regret this day.