Finance Ministry Weaning Israel Off of Microsoft, Dec 30, 2003

Israel has joined what has increasingly become a worldwide crusade to break free of the Microsoft Corporation and their perceived monopolistic constraints.

The Ministry of Finance announced Sunday it will begin distributing Open Office, which is a package of basic software programs similar to Microsoft Office, for free starting this coming week. The ministry plans to distribute thousands of Open Office programs on CD-ROM at public computer centers and eventually community centers across the country throughout the coming year.

Every so often, there is a big shift in an industry. The shifts are not usually visible until long after they've happened, making you look back and say: "Oh yeah, things were different back then".

We are experiencing a major IT industry shift right now, and if you know where to look you can actually see it as it happens. This shift is all about Microsoft and open source.

"It's no secret that Linux is gradually penetrating everywhere. It is an operating system for all intents and purposes, with development options and scalability, and when factoring in all the costs, in many cases its adoption is a good idea," Lopez clarifies. "But the government is not spearheading any revolution. Linux systems were installed in the private sector and in the army way before the government arrived."

Microsoft's recent decision to pursue a royalty-bearing licensing strategy, which includes its internally developed FAT Allocation Table (FAT) file system, is stirring up new theories in the technology world.

Where many industry watchers applauded the move by the world's largest software company to open up its intellectual property, others saw it as a move to put a stumbling block in the way of Linux, the open source operating system whose growth threatens the dominance of Windows.

I am a program manager at Microsoft doing some research around how we can improve our operating systems. My goal is to help us identify capabilities, improvements, and features that Microsoft should be focusing on to help our customers over the next 5 years or so.

I am particularly interested in hearing from Linux users, and get their input about what they feel should be the priorities. In particular, I would like to better understand what it is that makes Linux and Open Source solutions so useful for you.

Streaming media provider RealNetworks on Thursday sued longtime nemesis Microsoft on antitrust charges, accusing the software giant of illegally using its Windows monopoly to hurt digital media rivals.

When the ACT's 17-member Legislative Assembly last week passed an obscurely-named Bill it fundamentally changed the landscape of government software purchasing in Australia.

Joining a number of jurisdictions worldwide — including several Brazilian cities — Australia's capital passed Democrats-sponsored legislation designed to give open source software a leg up.

Webmaster's note: I couldn't resist. It's Friday

Microsoft Corp. said Friday that its latest version of Office software inadvertently contained a font featuring two swastikas, and said it would offer tools to remove and replace the offending characters from the program.

Microsoft's patent appears to be platform agnostic, making it likely to apply to all operating systems including Linux and Unix. The operating system would recognise files to be run as applications by the HTML application file extension, .hta.

The National Health Service, Britain's biggest employer, is considering ditching Microsoft software after a row over mounting licensing costs.

Richard Granger, NHS IT director, has ordered a trial of a Linux-based system from Sun Microsystems as part of a £2.3 billion computer modernisation plan. The plan could see Java Desktop software rolled out across the NHS's 1 million staff and 800,000 computers to replace Microsoft's Windows operating system and Office suite of programmes.

It isn't often that LinuxWorld has the chance to bring you a verbatim report from the China People's Daily, but it's the exception that proves the rule. So here, with out compliments, is a story from this week's English-language edition of the only daily newspaper in the world whose Web site has permanent links to the Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping.

The story, from November 26, 2003, reads as follows:

Complicating matters for Microsoft is the rise of Linux, and a growing belief that increased security means less reliance on Microsoft products.

Reports this fall from the U.S. Computer and Communications Industry Association and Gartner Group, a respected U.S. technology research firm, concluded that having a "monoculture" of computer networks based on Microsoft software leaves corporations and governments vulnerable to a single point of attack and failure.

Well, ignoring the issues of the GPL and the legality of such a product, do we really think Microsoft would come out with a version of Linux? If history and Microsoft has taught us one thing, it’s that Microsoft don’t release out ‘versions’ of what is essentially somebody else’s product. Either they buy the company and merge the code into their own code base, purchase a distribution license from the company and use them as a partner for their products, or they develop their own interpretation of the same product.

Speculation that Microsoft might build a flavor of Linux into Windows Server 2003 has been rife since May, when the company said it was licensing the Unix source code and patent from the SCO Group. That action followed SCO's infamous US$1 billion lawsuit, filed in March, which accuses IBM of improperly lifting copyrighted Unix technology and building it into Linux.

The Microsoft-Linux speculation has been fueled by Linux' increasing prominence on the enterprise server level, largely thanks to IBM, and Microsoft's historical willingness to react to competitive threats by creating its own versions of rival products.

Still, despite the speculation, there is considerable doubt that Microsoft will develop or distribute its own version of Linux anytime soon.

In the second quarter of 2003, just 40 percent of all desktop PCs shipped in Thailand had a licensed copy of Windows installed, an all-time low that likely will dip even further. Moreover, PC manufacturer Laser Computer has replaced HP as Thailand's top PC seller. Laser Computer sells only Linux PCs.

Microsoft Corp. is preparing a major PR assault over Windows' perceived security failings in which it will criticize Linux for taking too long to fix bugs, we have learned.

In a sign that the inroads made by the Open Source community are starting to rattle the software giant, Microsoft has hired several analysts to review how fast holes are patched in the open source software and is expected to announce that Windows compares favorably.

The mind boggles at the amount of fear that Microsoft has that people who search the Internet for knowledge, answers and understanding. Microsoft's fear is so great that it is willing to subvert what is truly one of the great inventions of history, searching the Internet, to a mere tool with one purpose, namely, to trick us all into buying Microsoft's software.

Throughout the 5-year-old Microsoft antitrust case, one of the chief potential rivals to Windows' dominance cited in court arguments has been Linux. And that was true again this week, when opponents of the 2001 Bush administration settlement with Microsoft returned to appeal that ruling.

The sole holdout state, Massachusetts, asked the court to impose remedies that it contends are needed to help Windows rivals, which essentially means Linux. The state, which was the first to seek action against Microsoft, wants the settlement to require the Microsoft Office suite to be ported to Linux.

Even before the Blaster attack, security was gnawing at Microsoft's stature. It had been cited among the reasons that various government agencies in the United States and abroad have become more serious about adopting alternatives such as the open-source Linux operating system.

Security, simply put, is beginning to play a larger role in decisions about what software companies buy.

Microsoft gadfly Michael Robertson, the CEO of Lindows.com and the guy who greeted the letter from Microsoft lawyers telling him to take down his MSfreePC Web site with a raised middle finger, now says that 10% of each claim against Microsoft's $1.1 billion settlement with California over the price of Windows that the site processes will go to a needy Linux company that the claimant picks from a Lindows-supplied list.

The offer is for "a limited time" only - exactly how long is unclear and includes such possibilities as poor old Mozilla, the more buoyant OpenOffice.org, Gnome, KDE or Debian.

Robertson is out to see that as much of that alleged $1.1 billion in vouchers is siphoned out of Microsoft's bank account as he can and that a lot of it turns up at his bank.

Microsoft, meanwhile, has labeled the scheme "fraudulent" and claims that it will result in bogus claims that the settlement claims administrator denies because Lindows is ignoring the rules established like producing receipts.

One of the organisations involved in the UK government's open source trials is Newham Borough Council, which was already evaluating open source software when the trials were announced, and earlier this year there was a considerable amount of publicity about the possibility of Newham switching its desktops to open source. Microsoft certainly wouldn't welcome any local government losses to open source, but the possibility of losing the desktop is particularly worrying for the company, because that's where it makes an awful lot of money.

"It's not a question of whether open source in itself is disruptive...it's how vendors react to it," Bittinger told ZDNet Australia ahead of his address at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2003 in Sydney next month.

A good example is Microsoft's reaction to Thailand's People's PC project--which saw the proliferation of open-source software as computers powered by Linux TLE, a Thai version of the Linux operating system, was the mainstay of the scheme.

In response to the growing popularity of the project, the software behemoth had to slash prices on Windows XP and Office to participate in the program, a move Bittinger described as "dramatic". Other critics labeled it as a sign of desperation.

The judge in the Microsoft Corp. antitrust case urged government lawyers Friday to investigate why only nine companies so far have paid Microsoft to license its technology for their own software products, agreements central to the success of a landmark settlement negotiated with the Bush administration.

"I think all of us had hoped for more agreements," U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly acknowledged during a hearing Friday. "I am interested in finding out why we don't have more licensed products."

The judge said the nine companies that already signed agreements "look like it's pretty much the heavy-hitters." But government lawyers explained it will take months to determine whether the deals will substantially ensure Microsoft can't abuse its control over computers running Windows software.

The judge scheduled another oversight hearing in January.

At the core of Ballmer's remarks is a fundamental misunderstanding not only of Open Source, but of software development as an art rather than as a business. Cutting to the bone of his remarks, he is saying that Microsoft developers, since they are employees, are more skilled and dedicated than Open Source developers. They are better, Ballmer suggests, because Microsoft developers have their rears (presumably their jobs) on the line. All those lines and all those rears are part of a road map, he says, and because of that road map the $30 billion plus Microsoft gets each year isn't too much for us to pay, so the model works pretty well.

This is nonsense. It is nonsense because Steve Ballmer, like Bill Gates before him, confuses market success with technical merit. Microsoft's product roadmap is a manifestation of a business plan, and what matters in Redmond is the plan, not the map, which is in constant flux. How many technical initiatives has Microsoft announced with fanfare and industry partners, yet never delivered? Dozens. That is no roadmap.

Ballmer flatly rejected the notion that Linux--with its user-driven rather than vendor-driven development process--is doing a better job than Microsoft at addressing security. "We get a lot of questions. People say, 'We have a security problem; let's fix it. What's your road map for this? What about this? What about this? What about this?' " he said. "There's no road map for Linux. There's nobody to hold accountable for security with Linux. There's nobody's rear end on the line."

"It's not all that surprising that Linux is viewed as more secure by software developers," Schindler said. "Windows has had nearly weekly critical security updates from Microsoft, and three of four developers target Windows. Development experience talks."

Microsoft may have failed to occupy the stand it booked at this year's Linux Expo in London's Olympia conference center, but some of the company's products did make a showing, even if the company might rather they had not.

On the stand of a multimedia-oriented Linux distribution called dyne:bolic, operating system author and maintainer Jaromil--the moniker he prefers to be known by--was demonstrating a hacked Xbox that can be used to offload processing tasks from a mixed cluster of PCs and Xboxes.

Information worker productivity is at a tipping point, becoming a workspace for innovation, integration and teams, with Microsoft itself making a major transition and working with its partners to make this happen, Jeff Raikes, Microsoft's group vice president on productivity and business solutions, said Friday.

Addressing several thousand attendees at the Worldwide Partner Conference, he took a swipe at Linux, open source and StarOffice, saying, "they simply accept the view that what they have is good enough. That view does not foster innovation. Being where we were with Office 1997 is not good enough for us," he said.

Forrester Research Inc. has changed its policy toward vendor-sponsored research following last month's publication of a controversial Microsoft Corp.-funded study that compared the cost of developing applications on Linux and Java to a Microsoft-based approach.

The policy change was announced in a letter written by George Colony, the CEO of the Cambridge, Massachusetts, company, and posted to the Forrester Web site late last week.

"We will no longer accept paid for, publicized product comparisons," Colony said in an interview. "The best example of that would be the Microsoft report."

Microsoft Corp. faces a proposed class-action lawsuit in California based on the claim that its market-dominant software is vulnerable to viruses capable of triggering "massive, cascading failures" in global computer networks.

The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday in Los Angeles Superior Court, also claims that Microsoft's security warnings are too complex to be understood by the general public and serve instead to tip off "fast-moving" hackers on how to exploit flaws in its operating system.

Microsoft's chief Linux strategist, Martin Taylor, advised the company's partners not to be seduced by the higher-margin service opportunities offered by commercial Linux platforms because they won't last.

Faced with the impending launch by Red Hat and SuSE of major upgrades to their distributions in October -- and their increasingly avid efforts to entice channel partners -- Taylor came out swinging during a meeting with CRN and sister publication VARBusiness at Microsoft headquarters in the US.

A computer security expert who contributed to a paper deeply critical of Microsoft has been dismissed by his employer, a consulting company that works closely with the software giant.

Dan Geer, a longtime computer security researcher, and several colleagues released a controversial study on Wednesday that called the ubiquity of Microsoft software a hazard to the economy and to national security. Although independently financed and researched, the study was distributed by the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), a Washington-based trade association largely made up of Microsoft's rivals.

According to the report and its seven authors--security consultants and leaders of several security firms--the biggest problem is the over-reliance by corporations and governments worldwide on Microsoft's products.

"The problem is that of monoculture," said Bruce Schneier, one of the paper's authors and a co-founder of security firm Counterpane. "As long as all computers are running the same OS, they're all vulnerable."

Webmaster's note: I looked at my calendar and it is not April 1 or December 28, and it is CNN.

Gates and IBM executive vice president Steve Mills said their companies' three-year collaboration had developed tools that will let computers conduct secure transactions whether they run Microsoft's Windows platform or others, such as IBM's WebSphere or the open-source Linux system that is given away.

"We're being as inclusive as we can," Gates said of Microsoft's role in the cross-platform project. "This is a fabric for someone to do e-commerce that's independent of the operating systems that are out there."

Webmaster's note: This is the letter that is linked to in the ZDNet article: Xbox update shuts out Linux

Using Linux

That was months ago. In the meantime, next to playing great Xbox games, I was running Linux on it. I was using the MechAssault game as a bootloader for the great GNU/Linux operating system. I do not feel that what I did was unlawful, because the Xbox is my property, and I am free to do anything I want with it. I even don't feel guilty, because even if it's true that my Xbox has been sold below price - remember that I own six games, which should pay for the difference.

The Xbox being a computer now, I stored files on the Xbox hard disk. I stored files on the C: and E: drives. C: is the drive containing the system software, i.e. the Xbox Dashboard, and E: is normally used for savegames and for copied audio CDs.

The update disables the bug that allowed Linux to be installed, according to Michael Steil, one of the principal members of the Xbox Linux Project. "As soon as the Dashboard is updated, our application to disable the Xbox's anti-Linux protection (version 1.0) will not work any more," he said, adding, "we're working on a version 2.0."

He said the update also erased a directory on the Xbox's hard drive that had contained a document he created and stored using Linux. "I never allowed Microsoft alter anything on my Xbox through the Internet, and I never signed anything that contains a permission for Microsoft to do so," he wrote in an open letter to Microsoft, published on the Xbox Linux Web site. "I never allowed Microsoft to delete anything on my Xbox through an Internet connection."

The state attorneys general involved in the Microsoft Corp. antitrust cases said Thursday they have created an online complaint form to report suspected violations of an antitrust settlement with the company.

Complaints can be submitted anonymously at the Web site, which is maintained by California's attorney general and paid for with funds Microsoft provided to enforce a judgment with seven states and the District of Columbia.

Outside experts said the new flaws were nearly identical to problems that were exploited by the so-called Blaster infection, which spread last month with devastating damage. Computer users who applied an earlier patch in July to protect themselves must still install the new patch from Microsoft.

The fact is that Asia doesn't like the idea of being beholden to an American company, especially when they can knock up their own operating system using their own citizens. Microsoft has meanwhile tried to stem the flow towards open source by offering price cuts and generous discounts, but it seems to be losing the battle.

Webmaster's note: The key words here are paid for by Microsoft

A Microsoft-commissioned study has found that companies could save up to 28 percent by developing certain programs with Windows instead of Linux, the software company plans to announce on Tuesday.

The study, conducted by Giga Research and paid for by Microsoft, compared the likely costs over four years for a dozen medium-size and large businesses that were developing Web-based portals. Giga examined the costs of creating a portal using Microsoft's Windows operating system and related development tools as compared with those of Linux-based systems using Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) tools.

The people installing Linux systems are not dunces, and (particularly if they're installing them on what Microsoft regards as it's own turf) they'll have gone into the costings pretty damn thoroughly. They're not going ahead with Linux because they don't know any better, they've got their own "facts", based on their own research and experience. If Microsoft products really are, or become, more cost-effective then customers' experiences and perceptions will change in Microsoft's favour. As politicians all know, really, when you say it's a matter of getting the message across you really mean that the customers have figured out the product stinks. So once they've kicked you out you stop whining about the message and get down to fixing the product.

The conclusion is clear. Microsoft has decided that a business-friendly administration, combined with the new focus on terrorism over domestic issues, means that they have a green light for their "take no prisoners" business strategies. With only the State of Massachusetts still making any kind of anti-trust noise, Bill & Co. are back on the warpath, seeking a Microsoft hegemony on the desktop. If they can succeed inmaking enough of the killer desktop apps (IM, word processing, spreadsheets) non-open standards, they can control the market.

And with the Justice Department asleep at the switch, they may very well succeed.

Webmaster's note: We posted a story about this same situation on Aug. 21. But it bears repeating that Microsoft, in order to keep their sites on line, needs a company that makes extensive use of Linux. As of Aug. 28 - 11:01 UTC microsoft.com was still "running" Linux.

According to Internet services company Netcraft, Microsoft changed the DNS of its Web site so that requests for pages are no longer handled by Microsoft's own network, but instead by the Akamai cache servers -- which consists of 15,000 Linux-based servers spread around the globe.

Between the Blaster worm and the Sobig virus, it's been a long two weeks for Windows users. But nobody with a Mac or a Linux PC has had to lose a moment of sleep over these outbreaks -- just like in earlier "malware" epidemics.

Mac OS X's firewall isn't enabled by default either, but it's much simpler to enable. Red Hat Linux is better yet: Its firewall is on from the start.

Webmaster's note: At the time of the posting of this article here at Linux.org, 15:50 UTC, Netcraft was still showing www.microsoft.com running Linux

A Microsoft spokeswoman said the company "respects the fact that [its partners and vendors] may have diversified business models and operate in mixed IT environments. Microsoft's main concern is doing whatever it takes to help ensure customers can get to the Blaster worm patch to protect their computers.... Microsoft is using Akamai's extensive worldwide network to distrubte the massive traffic that is illegally being directed at Microsoft by hackers."

In the absence of windowsupdate.com the first stop of incoming requests was the Akamai caching service which Microsoft uses. This runs on Linux, hence Netcraft report a Linux host, but behind this the Microsoft servers were still operational, hence the report of Microsoft IIS running on Linux. So Microsoft isn't running Windows Update on Linux, and although it's using a service provider that runs on Linux, those services are still fielding back to Windows 2003 servers, clear?

The software giant, which considers Linux one of the biggest threats to its business, recently finished installing all the hardware and software needed to do just that in its Enterprise Engineering Center, where Microsoft recreates business customers' systems to test and demonstrate Microsoft software deployed on their networks.

But that's as far as Linux will get within Microsoft, said Martin Taylor, the company's new strategist for Linux. The stack of servers is solely for research into the open-source software, in which the underlying code can be downloaded, shared and modified freely.

An Internet worm targeting Microsoft Corp. Windows users was spreading rapidly around the world Tuesday, triggering computer crashes and slowing Web connections, experts said.

The worm, dubbed Blaster but also known as LoveSan or MSBlaster, carried a message for the Microsoft chairman: "Billy Gates why do you make this possible? Stop making money and fix your software!!"

The Computer & Communications Industry Association, a trade group representing Microsoft rivals, including Sun Microsystems and Oracle, plans to form a lobby group to urge governments to use the Linux operating system.

"We want consideration for Linux; we want a nice, level playing field," Minchak said. "The primary focus is not to go after Microsoft at all." He declined to disclose members of the proposed lobbying group, which hasn't been formed officially.

Webmaster's note:The NY Times requires free registration

The European Commission went on the offensive today in its antitrust case against Microsoft, saying in a preliminary ruling that the company continues to abuse its dominance in operating systems.

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