There’s nothing that annoys me more* than Steve Ballmer spreading lies about various competing operating systems.

I’ve said before – if Linux (or any part of the average distro) infringes MS’s patents, then show us what it is and we’ll fix it.

The Show Us The Code website is a public pledge to Ballmer to do just that – show the community the supposed infringing code.

Your repeated claims that Linux violates Microsoft’s intellectual property has come to the attention of the Linux community. Not only that, but it’s been reported Microsoft has convinced businesses to pay for a Linux patent that you can’t provide.

Therefore, this website will serve as a response to this accusation, and within it, a request. The request is simple, since you, Microsoft, claim to be so sure of yourself: Show Us the Code. Show us the Code and Show Us the Patents. Lets make this crystal clear.

If Linux developers are made aware of the code and patented ideas, then the code can be omitted and Linux can re-write necessary aspects of the kernel or operating system. This is a fairly simple request and common courtesy. Why wave around lawsuit threats, threats that will cost Microsoft in a court room as well as the defendants? It lacks logic, especially when you consider that there are developers around the world who would be more than happy to work with Microsoft to resolve this issue. Don’t you owe it to your shareholders to work with others to ensure their intellectual property isn’t being violated?

He won’t do it, but we need to make sure as many people as possible realise he is talking complete rubbish.

The saddest thing about all this? It all boils down to greed.

Thanks to Inspirated for bringing this site to my attention in the first place!

* Not even my friends bugging me to keep playing the World of Warcraft trial. 😛

Just ordered a free OpenSolaris kit (just sign up, give your address and in 2-4 weeks you’ll get a nice pack full of OpenSolaris goodies, including a selection of distributions on CD).

I’m actually quite interested in the OpenSolaris project – once the OpenSolaris distributions mature a bit more, I’m actually think of trying it out as a server operating system. So far, things are early, and as yet not all of the OpenSolaris code has been opened, but Sun are doing a very good job.

In fact, Sun are just great. They’re by far the company contributing most to free software/open source projects and they just seem like a ‘good’ company (at the moment that’s true anyway). It’s nice to have a few Suns to balance out Microsoft’s behaviour and the ‘bad bits’ of other companies (*cough* Apple *cough* FairPlay). I’m not even going to talk about Novell.

There are some really killer features in the commercial Solaris product for the server space, things like Zones and DTrace. A lot of it’s been ported to Linux and BSD, but my ‘unexplored operating system’ radar is going off again. 🙂

Actually, it’s nice to use a Unix which does things differently from Linux occasionally. Not only is it fun to do some exploring, it sharpens your general Unix skills, which can only be a good thing.

In fact, I once got FreeBSD (4.x) onto the oldest computer in this house, which is an IBM-compatible PC with a 75 MHz Pentium processor and 16 MB of RAM. I actually got Apache to compile (after roughly 4 hours) and I installed PHP and MySQL too (thank goodness MySQL is a binary package or it would have been there for days!). It worked reasonably well as a web server, except for the fact that most pages incurred a 10 second delay and PHPMyAdmin would take about 20 minutes to load. 😀

I’ve since tried messing with FreeBSD (and NetBSD as well), but I always tend to get mixed up in the installation process. I guess I need some more practice.

W00t.

Apparently, as a response to this petition:

The Government remains committed to its policy that no patents should exist for inventions which make advances lying solely in the field of software. Although certain jurisdictions, such as the US, allow more liberal patenting of software-based inventions, these patents cannot be enforced in the UK.

Now we just need the rest of the world to follow suit, as just the UK won’t make much difference.

This OSNews article.

Ballmer:

“The deal that we announced at the end of last year with Novell I consider to be very important. It demonstrated clearly the value of intellectual property even in the Open Source world. I would not anticipate that we make a huge additional revenue stream from our Novell deal, but I do think it clearly establishes that Open Source is not free and Open Source will have to respect intellectual property rights of others just as any other competitor will.”

Clearly, Microsoft are openly admitting here that they are unable to sell Microsoft products on their own merits, and so they have to bully people into thinking that choosing open source solutions is legally unsafe by firing random bursts of intellectual property violation bravado.

Here’s a challenge for you, Steve. Show me some infringing code. It’s all out there, in the open. Show me some infringing code and we’ll collectively sort it out.

Except that’s not the point. MS don’t want to actually start a patent war – I guess they know full well they have infringed more than a few of other people’s patents, so they don’t want to open a can of worms.

The game is FUD. Fear, uncertainty, doubt. Here’s how it goes.

• Some open source solutions are better and cheaper than MS ones. Lots of people start investigating them to use instead of MS solutions.
• MS notices this and invents some wonderful reason why open source is ‘unsafe’ legally.
• MS spread the idea that “open source is unsafe”.
• The people that were investigating the open source products hear MS’s idea, believe it, and go “we don’t want trouble with MS lawyers, we better not choose the open source product”.
• These people go on to buy MS products.
• MS get money and retain market share.

I don’t think they can play that game forever. At some point, they’re going to have to change their strategy.

It’s just a shame they have to resort to such childish methods to sell their products. Imagine what they could do if they put all their time, effort and money into making great products instead of bullying the world into rebuying their stuff.

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

On BoingBoing:

Arnezami, a hacker on the Doom9 forum, has published a crack for extracting the “processing key” from a high-def DVD player. This key can be used to gain access to every single Blu-Ray and HD-DVD disc.

When will the recording/movie industries learn? Attempting to lock down consumers with ever more restrictive DRM is not going to work. Soon, we’ll get to a point where it’s easier to illegally acquire content than it is to purchase it, then jump through all the hoops to get it working legitimately (in fact, you could argue that we’ve already got there, with the whole ‘HD ready’ fiasco).

Sure, there are still practical issues with distributing 20 odd gigabytes of high definition movie, but it looks like AACS really was as completely rubbish as I thought it would be.

Clearly, DRM is flawed. The whole concept is. Good security algorithms are built on good mathematical foundations, then tested for years before they’re declared as secure. AACS simply didn’t have enough time to stand the test of time and get the heck pounded out of it, before it started being used.

DRM’s downfall is pretty much inevitable now, in my opinion. With Steve Jobs openly wanting it dead, it’s just a matter of when. And then everything will be great again. Oh, hang on, then there’s still Microsoft. Damn.

UPDATE: oooh, will this mean they’ll start revoking high-def players? Brilliant. Working one day, dead the next.

Firefox has taken off on home computers as the second most popular browser, and it’s looking very promising for open source, Mozilla and, more widely, non-MS software.

In fact, it supposedly has around an 11% global market share now, which is great news.

The next thing that needs to be tackled, however, is getting Firefox into the enterprise sector, and getting more and more businesses to roll it out. And before that can happen, Firefox needs:

• An MSI installer for Windows, to make it easy for Windows administrators to roll it out across all desktops instead of running exes manually on each workstation.
• Integration with Microsoft Active Directory, and respect for AD policies, like IE has now. It’s far too much to configure hundreds of installations of Firefox manually. Many corporate environments utilise proxy servers and other network setups, and there needs to be a way to get this configured centrally via AD or similar and rolled out to all FF installations.

If this happens, sysadmins are much more likely to choose Firefox for security reasons, and if it becomes as easy to manage remotely as IE is now, Firefox 3.0 will hopefully be a winner.

I’m not saying the personal sector isn’t important though – we still need to keep pushing Firefox to the average PC user and marketing it.

The success of Firefox could also prove vital for FOSS becoming mainstream in the future. If people use Firefox and have a good experience with it, they then associate open source with good user experience and being a good product. If that happens, we’re much more likely to see FOSS becoming more mainstream, which is good. Best of all, it keeps the traditional software companies on their toes and making good, well-priced products. 🙂

So, Vista hit the shelves yesterday. Now, anyone that knows me even a little bit will know that I sometimes indulge in a little healthy Microsoft bashing now and then, but today I’m going to try and be balanced.

I could rant on and on about how Vista is good, and at the same time how it’s bad, but for now I’m just going to share with you three of the things I like and three things I don’t like about Microsoft’s new release. Bear in mind that the last version I used was Release Candidate 1 and not the final version, so some of what I say might be out-of-date or based on the pre-release version.

» Read the rest of this post…

Sorry for the lack of postings recently, I’ve just got back online following a nasty period of ISP downtime. Sucks, huh.

You’ve undoubtedly read this all over the place already as I’m so late to pointing this out, but Apple have released some UK-centric versions of their now famous (and much spoofed) Mac guy and PC guy ads.

While I think the formula is getting a bit tired, the UK audience for the most part haven’t been exposed to these ads, so I think they actually work really well. Actually, I’m quite surprised that most of the ads are virtually word-for-word the same as their US counterparts in places, except for one unique one (Tentacle) and liberally sprinkled British colloquialisms.

Interesting to watch, anyway, though – if only just to see how they differ from the US versions. Watch them here.

On a completely unrelated note – how is it that when you come back from a couple of days and you get almost literally drowned in feeds? I think I’ve just about caught up…

From InformationWeek:

Running Windows Vista’s new Aero graphical interface doesn’t impact PC performance, a study sponsored by Microsoft claims.

According to speed measurements of more than 60 common business chores, which were conducted by North Carolina-based Principled Technologies for Microsoft, using the Aero interface “had little or no negative effect on Windows Vista’s performance.”

Rule number one is never believe the results of any study ‘sponsored’ by any company/organisation with any interest whatsoever in the results. Even not-for-profits like Mozilla. Only independent studies. Bias sucks.

Don’t believe this. Or any other ‘sponsored’ study.

I love virtual desktops. They rule – they come as standard in virtually every Linux setup and you can get third party programs for other operating systems too. Combine that with the eye candy of Compiz and you have productivity and beauty in a crisp sugar shell. Sorry about the Smarties reference.

Anyway, this is my setup for coding. When I’m happily hacking away (like I have been for the past, oh – four days non stop?) I like to have my virtual desktops like this. By the way, clicking on the screenshots will not allow you to spy on me – they will not get any bigger. Don’t even try. Sorry about the blur too. Needs must, I’m afraid.

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