As the article "Should We Fear the (Microsoft) Geeks, Bearing Gifts?" states, we should be wary of Microsoft's intentions here. Microsoft's worst market and the one that has the most growth is in the web server space. But should we really be all that worried?

There is no end to the stupidity of decision making in IT, but when it comes to dollars and cents, especially these days, it is hard to justify an expensive Microsoft Windows operating system. On top of the Microsoft cost, it will also require lots of other expensive security programs and management tools just to keep it running and secure. Thousands of dollars worth of software just to run the worlds best free web server, Apache? 

That sounds monumentally stupid and costly. Perhaps we shouldn't be worried until Microsoft starts giving away their operating system to everyone and just charges for support.  Free as in beer will only get you so far, but I think that is the only way that Microsoft will ever be able come close to competing. Open Source will swallow them whole in few more years. They already know it.

It will be even worse for them with the economy in the state it is in. Everyone is looking to save a buck. I think it will cause a lot of true blue Microsofties to rethink their purchases like I finally did over 10 years ago. There is no room for loyalty when the company you are being loyal to is pretty much ripping you off. 

Microsoft director of corporate standards, Jason Matusow is quite frankly a jerk. He thinks that a person, organization, city, state, nation, or continent, can't take advantage of open source unless they can code it. I've added a few extra items in the list, but I'm just extrapolating his idea, which is ridiculous. The reason is simple. Microsoft doesn't allow you to code their operating system or applications, yet he is asking you to use them. How silly is that? One system allows you do jump in and code away, if you have the skills to do it, while the other system keeps their crap bloated code to themselves whether you have the ability or not. I can't help but find it funny that Matusow can't see the irony in his complaint.

I think that they should put their code with their mouth is and open everything up to South Africa. Make all of their software truly free and open source just to apologize for Matusow's ignorance. I know that won't happen. But hey, it would be a fun experiment. Oh but that won't work because no one in Africa can code right? 

Someone better tell that to South African Mark Shuttleworth who started Thawte and then created the Ubuntu Linux Distro. I wonder where he learned to do all that?

Microsoft Supporting ODF? -- Close, But No Cigar - I wish I could wholeheartedly applaud the Microsoft announcement about native support for ODF, but I can't. Of course, it's better to have native support for ODF, no matter what motives may have influenced Microsoft's announcement, and I'm glad about that for the sake of end users. But it hasn't happened yet. Was the word 'vaporware' not coined for Microsoft? In any case, I'm in the "I will believe it when I see it" category when it comes to Microsoft. They've earned my caution.

And I see danger signs for FOSS I'd like to share with you, so you can consider them. Once again, the problem is software patents. Internet News indicates that commercial Linux/FOSS vendors, and the GPL license that Linux comes with, will be excluded:

Microsoft, however, frames its latest moves as part of fulfilling a company-wide interoperability initiative that it announced in February.

Uh oh. Remember this from February, when Microsoft announced the availability of APIs?

Microsoft has officially pulled is Yahoo offer. In my mind furthering their already huge plunge into the dark waters of irrelevancy. No large company in their right mind would want to merge with Microsoft at this point. Firstly, Balmer is no Gates. Balmer reminds me of an angry junior high school teacher who is trying to make himself feel important by bulling the kids. Well this time the kids stood up for themselves.

I don't even understand why Yahoo was attractive to Microsoft in the first place. Anything useful from Yahoo would be killed by the Microsoft's culture. You can't "borg" Yahoo. It just wouldn't make any sense for a "Windows Only" company to take over a company like Yahoo that has used so much open source to fuel its features. While I'm not exactly a Yahoo fan either, I think their open source usage and support is to be commended.

I don't think Microsoft's leadership is capable of understanding Yahoo's technology choices or supporting them after a merger. If they aren't buying them for their technology, what else would they buy them for? If its for their users, then they would be in for a horrid shock. After killing their services with "Microsoft" technology and idiotic marketing shams, how many users would be left? I guess the scariest thing is that Microsoft's leadership actually thought this was a remotely good idea. It just shows the complete level of delusion of its leadership.

Ars Technica has reported that the OOXML document format is now an ISO "standard". I find it ironic that this was announced on April 1st. I'm still hoping that its really an April Fool's joke, but it is not.

I find it pathetic that no one has even implemented this standard yet. Not even Microsoft. Usually there are a number of groups that begin implementing a hot standard before it is even ratified as an ISO standard. But not here.

I don't trust Microsoft to do the right thing for its customers. They do a good job of doing the right thing for themselves. The Microsoft track record of even doing the right thing for themselves isn't very good lately either after the total disaster that is Vista. They are cleary willing to make an inferior product just to implement nasty terrible anti-consumer things like the DRM that is built into Vista.

I imagine that they can't wait to fool governments around the world with their new ISO document standard to lock everyone into expensive, bloated, proprietery Microsoft products. Buyer beware!

This is hilarious. I couldn't pass it up

Click here to view the video

Yet another sucker Linux vendor caves to Microsoft.

So I guess there are a lot more supposed open source OS vendors that don't give a crap about what open source stands for than I thought there were. How could so many Linux distributions make deals with Microsoft?

I'm so mad at SuSE, TurboLinux, Linspire and Xandros. For shame! All of you. Have you no backbones? Morals? Brains?

Thankfully, no one can steal Linux away from me. We have Canonical (Ubuntu), Redhat, and Debian still standing their ground.

I hope that Microsoft and these other bozos realize that every time they make another deal like this they anger and dissolution even more people. SuSE was, up until they completely lost their minds with Microsoft, one of my favorite distros. In some strange way I'm glad they made themselves irrelevant to me and pushed me into the waiting arms of Ubuntu.

I found this brilliant parody at Groklaw today. I love the Princess Bride so much, and this was just brilliant.

Oh and in case you didn't know, software patents are stupid. How could you possibly patent logic or math? If it can't be done fairly than it shouldn't be done at all. These systems were created to encourage innovation not stifle it. At this point I'm not even that concerned about the big "threat from Microsoft" against free/libre and open source software. I'm just amused by it all. The more useless Linux vendors that sign agreements with MS the happier I am. They just make it clear who actually understands FLOSS and who doesn't. I wouldn't want to deal with supposed FLOSS company that doesn't even understand that philosophical and legal basis that underlies their main products. So no worries from me about any of this. To me this is like watching a bad reality show and just enjoying the complete melt down of contestants that can't take it anymore. 

I found this cool article over on http://livingwithoutmicrosoft.org. It points to this interview of two Harvard economists. Its interesting to me that the discussion turned to piracy and how it actually helps Microsoft. One commenter saying "..if they stopped Chinese people using pirated copies of Windows, Linux would become the number 1 OS overnight."

I quite agree there. If people decided to be ethical about their computing Linux would become number 1 almost overnight. That's what happened to me. In my college days, when I was terribly cash strapped but hungry to learn about computers, I took 30 3.5" disks to Kinkos and I zipped the entire hard drive. I then took it all home and figured out how to manually reinstall all of the applications back onto my Windows 3.1 system at home. Thus I had MS Office, Word Pefect, Corel Draw, PageMaker, Lotus 123 etc... everything useful you could want or need.