Is Microsoft really lending Linux a helping hand?, Mar 07, 2008

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer recently announced his company's "Interoperability Initiative", a pledge to work together with the open-source world for both mutual benefit, and the benefit of customers and users. Given its past history, it's impossible to take Microsoft's claims at face value, but they certainly do warrant closer inspection.

It's a goal, says the company. Offering more ways to run Linux-based apps, like its recent deal with Amazon, will help..

The community's pushing a breakneck pace to add new kernel features, while struggling to keep up with bug fixes. Slowing down doesn't look like much of an option.

Linux distributors were sued for the first time last week over their operating systems. But despite recent rhetoric, Microsoft wasn't the plaintiff. Instead, the suit against Red Hat and Linux came from a subsidiary of Acacia Research, a company that calls itself the "leader in patent licensing."

The head of the Open Invention Network (OIN) has dismissed Microsoft's claims that Linux violates over 200 of its patents.

Microsoft patched fewer security flaws on its Windows Vista operating system than any other recently released desktop operating systems, the company boasted in a new study.

SCO was projecting that revenues of its SCOsource licenses for Linux would generate billions of dollars in revenues for the company, chief executive Darl McBride testified in a deposition on 27 March 2007.

SEC document shows that Microsoft is entitled to receive key technical documentation from the Linux distributor -- even if that documentation is not generally available to open source software developers.

"Touch one member of the Linux community and you will have to deal with all of us," Linux Foundation director Jim Zemlin warned Microsoft in a column that appeared 25 May on the BusinessWeek "Viewpoint" slot of its Web site.

The pact allows NASA's procurement department to select from HP desktops, workstations, blade PCs with Linux and Unix capabilities, servers, and printers, among other offerings.

A newly-discovered worm targeting OpenOffice attempts to download indecent JPEG images onto compromised Windows, Mac and Linux PCs.

Linux by comparison has never been found guilty of any patent infringements "making Linux a patent-tax-free alternative to Windows".

Ironically for Microsoft, Vista is just the shot in the arm that desktop systems with open-source Linux OS needs.

Dell's recent decision to ship Linux PC's will have major repercussions for the operating system and its progress onto the business desktop, according to an industry analyst.

Clustering as a technology dates back at least twenty years, but making it affordable is a recent phenomenon, and has been helped along enormously by the open source Linux operating system.

Red Hat, the largest business Linux distributor, is teaming up with the health care sector's largest company, McKesson, an US$88 billion-a-year pharmaceutical and IT supplier. Red Hat will provide a core of Linux and JBoss software geared to run McKesson's clinical applications.

Sun Microsystems wants Internet developers to deploy their Web infrastructures on Sun's Solaris 10 operating system. Its three latest releases aim to help.

It may be a pariah to Linux users in the United States, but litigious Unix developer The SCO Group apparently has friends in high places in tech-mad India.

Corporate adoption of Linux desktops is hindered by the inability to run Windows applications, the difficulty of installing and managing peripheral devices and the challenge of making users feel comfortable with the open-source operating system, a survey shows.

A group of former high-level execs from Red Hat are planning to launch a startup called rPath that will support customised Linux distributions.