Squawking about Linux, and feathering its own nest. (2 articles below)
From the UK site called The Register Ballmer: "Linux is a cancer" By Thomas C Greene in Washington Posted: 02/06/2001 at 18:18 GMT
Microsoft CEO and incontinent over-stater of facts Steve Ballmer said that "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches," during a commercial spot masquerading as a media interview with the Chicago Sun-Times Friday.
Ballmer was trying to articulate his concern, whether real or imagined, that limited recourse to the GNU GPL requires that all software be made open source.
"The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source," Ballmer explained to an excessively credulous, un-named Sun-Times reporter who, predictably, neglected to question this bold assertion. [...] "Government funding should be for work that is available to everybody," he says patriotically. But "open source is not available to commercial companies," and should therefore be regarded as a violation of the public trust. [...] "Our goal is to try to educate people on what it means to protect intellectual property and pay for it properly" (read 'eternally'), Ballmer says.
If by 'educate' he means punish with higher costs those who fail to appreciate the wisdom of volume software leases, and inconvenience Win-XP users who like to re-format on a regular basis with a limit of two clean installs, then perhaps he might have chosen different wording.
'Train' or 'housebreak' strike us as somewhat more in tune with the subtext.
--- Full article at: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/19396.html See also: http://content.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20010110S0006
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From the WSJ June 7, 2001 New Windows XP Feature Can Re-Edit Others' Sites By Walter S. Mossberg
[...]
[One] feature, which hasn't yet been made public, allows Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser -- included in Windows XP -- to turn any word on any Web site into a link to Microsoft's own Web sites and services, or to any other sites Microsoft favors. In effect, Microsoft will be able, through the browser, to re-edit anybody's site, without the owner's knowledge or permission, in a way that tempts users to leave and go to a Microsoft-chosen site -- whether or not that site offers better information. [...] Here's how the Internet Explorer Smart Tags work: On a PC with Windows XP, when you open any Web page, squiggly purple lines instantly appear under certain types of words. In the version I tested, these browser-generated underlines appear beneath the names of companies, sports teams and colleges. But other types of terms could be highlighted in future versions. If you place your cursor on the underlined word, an icon appears, and if you click on the icon, a small window opens to display links to sites offering more information. For instance, in the new browser, a Washington Post Web article on Japanese baseball players was littered with eight Microsoft-generated links that the Post editors never placed on their site. [...] "ONE MICROSOFT OFFICIAL says the feature will spare users from '"under-linked" sites. But who decides if a site is "under-linked?" It's up to a site's creators to decide how many, and which, terms to turn into links, where those links appear, and where they send users. It's part of the editorial process. In the case of the Washington Post article, the editors included plenty of links but chose to list them at the bottom of the article and in a box to the side of the text. Microsoft decided otherwise. [...]
--- Full article at: http://public.wsj.com/sn/y/SB991862595554629527.html
On the same issue see also: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/19557.html and http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/18160.html
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