Opera Software ships version 8 of its browser, Apr 20, 2005

Opera Software moved back into the limelight today with the release of the final version of Opera 8 for Windows and Linux, and a beta of 8 for Mac also available.

When Microsoft announced victory in its battle with open source for the hearts, minds and wallets of Newham council last month, the press naturally asked to see the report Newham's decision was allegedly based on. Er, yes, the report would be forthcoming, we were told. So we gave it a few days, and asked again. And again. And again. But mysteriously, although Microsoft executives are prepared to shout from the rafters about what's in the report, the report itself never seems to arrive.

Fortunately, there are ways to get hold of documents that have been presented, as the report was, to public bodies, so if Microsoft is still unable to find it, then The Register is now in a position to help them out. And an enlightening read it is, too.

Almost three years ago the naval systems arm of major UK defence contractor BAE Systems took the decision to standardise future development on Microsoft Windows. an immediate effect was to commit BAE's joint venture CMS subsidiary, AMS, who specialise in naval Combat Management Systems, to implementing a Windows 2000-based CMS system for the new Type 45 Destroyer. But this prompted strong internal opposition from some of AMS' engineers, who had a sound background in Unix and who had, despite resource starvation and a companywide policy to standardise on Windows, been investigating open source alternatives as a foundation for future combat systems.

They lost. Acting as spokesman for the concerned engineers Gerald Wilson compiled a 50 page dossier detailing the unsuitability of Windows as a foundation for a naval command system, and arguing that BAE's Unix history and expertise made open source UN*X a logical and viable way forward. The company then made him redundant. In May of this year Wilson reiterated his concerns to the board of BAE Systems at the company's AGM, pointing out that Windows is "proprietary technology owned by a foreign corporation", has "many and continuing security flaws", and is not even warranted by Microsoft itself for safety-related use. Why then, he asked, is AMS "shunning established engineering practice" by developing the Type 45's CMS on Windows.

Dell has a long history - regularly documented in these pages - of not quite getting behind Linux on the desktop. Dell Linux machines do pop up every now and again, but what desktop efforts there are find themselves first consigned to obscure corners of the operation, then disappeared, no doubt because of lack of demand. Why is this? One can surmise that Dell's closeness to Microsoft has something to do with it, but one now has less reason to merely surmise, because Linspire CEO Michael Robertson has broken cover with a few claims, and a few numbers.

Over now to Tanenbaum himself, who has made an entertaining attempt to set the record straight here (you may not get in right now, as traffic is already heavy). He observes that Brown, who flew to Amsterdam to interview him in March, is "not the sharpest knife in the drawer", and says: " I quickly determined that he didn't know a thing about the history of UNIX, had never heard of the Salus book, and knew nothing about BSD and the AT&T lawsuit. I started to tell him the history, but he stopped me and said he was more interested in the legal aspects. I said: 'Oh you mean about Dennis Ritchie's patent number 4135240 on the setuid bit?' Then I added: 'That's not a problem. Bell Labs dedicated the patent.' That's when I discovered that (1) he had never heard of the patent, (2) did not know what it meant to dedicate a patent (i.e., put it in the public domain), and (3) really did not know a thing about intellectual property law. He was confused about patents, copyrights, and trademarks. Gratuitously, I asked if he was a lawyer, but it was obvious he was not and he admitted it. At this point I was still thinking he might be a spy from SCO, but if he was, SCO was not getting its money's worth."

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.

Australian telco Telstra will be one of the first major customers to roll with Sun's Mad Hatter Linux desktop, according to a report in The Australian. Telstra has been trialling the product, released this week under the much more boring name of Sun Java Desktop, following its decision last year to investigate Linux systems as an alternative to Microsoft.

Lindows.com's more exciting version of the claiming process is available at MSfreePC.com, and goes approximately as follows. You fill in a series of forms that take you through the initial hurdles of the process, being told to go away if you didn't purchase software for use in California during the relevant period. 10,000 will get a free PC, which won't cost Microsoft a cent because it's nothing to do with Microsoft. In addition to this, the monetary value of the claim will depend on the amount of Microsoft software bought.

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.

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?

Currently it is abundantly clear that Microsoft has a 'get Linux' policy, and as far as the PC companies (and indeed the customers) at the other end of the shotgun are concerned, this will have a discouraging effect. But it will be discouraging for all sorts of not obviously retaliatory reasons. Say you've done a bit of piloting of Linux systems in your company, you figure you're all set for a general rollout, but then people in your own company start coming to you explaining how much green-lighting it is going to cost, because you lose the special pricing deal Microsoft is offering? This is the slush fund in operation, and as far as Microsoft is concerned it's all perfectly legitimate and part of the product marketing process. It's certainly difficult to tag discounts as retaliation - unfair, maybe, but you can argue the toss about that for a long time.