Why falling Flash prices threaten Microsoft, Mar 06, 2008

It seems that the £200 ultraportable Asus Eee PC can do no wrong. The size of a paperback, weighing less than a kilogram, with built-in Wi-Fi and using Flash memory instead of a hard drive for storage, the Eee PC has been winning positive comments not just from hyperventilating hardware reviewers, but also from ordinary people who have actually bought it.

It's not every day that the entire technical press goes bonkers over news in the open source world, but that's what happened last week, when Sun announced that it was buying MySQL.

Chris DiBona started using free software on his home PC when he was at college, and for the same reason that Linus wrote Linux: because he couldn't get on the machines in the computer lab. Later, DiBona joined VA Linux, which sold open source-based hardware systems, and ended up as one of the editors on Slashdot.

At a time when Firefox is steadily adding market share and chipping away at Microsoft's own market dominance in the browser sector, Apache's emerging vulnerability is a very dangerous signal to send.

I'm a big fan of Richard Stallman and his work – even though, the first time I interviewed him, he proceeded to criticise my questions before answering them, not a journalistic experience I'd had before. Without his vision and sheer bloody-mindedness in the face of indifference and outright hostility, we would not have the vast array of free software we enjoy today.

Some people are rubbing their hands in glee at the thought of Novell crashing and burning completely, but such a development could actually turn out to be one of the worst things to happen to free software.

Sun's announcement that it would be releasing Java under the GNU GPL confounded many of its critics (including myself) who had feared that the company was incapable of making such a bold move. Quite rightly, it has garnered praise from across the hacker world. But Sun's relationship with free software has not always been so idyllic.

I've been tracking the evolution of Microsoft FUD for nearly 10 years now, and wrote a short history of the subject a few months back. But even I was impressed when I came across Microsoft's latest effort in this department: it's truly a masterpiece of its kind.

It's a long-standing joke in the free software world that this will be the year when we see GNU/Linux make its breakthrough on the desktop - just like last year, and the year before that. What's really funny is that all the key GNU/Linux desktop apps are already being widely deployed, but not in the way that people have long assumed.

It's well known that Google runs its vast array of servers using a custom version of GNU/Linux. But this is only one aspect of its support for free software.

"GPL 3 is like GPL 2," Moglen says. "It wants you to be able to use free software in combination with non-free software, providing you do so in ways that don't obscure the user's rights in the free software parts."

This time it's patents that will ensure the downfall of GNU/Linux and with it, the entire world of open source. But before hanging up your certified geek propeller-hat and retraining as a dental hygienist, you might want to consider the following brief history of Microsoft's use of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) as a weapon against GNU/Linux.

If you're not brave enough to switch to Linux, there is an alternative. A live CD will let you try the software without installing a file on your hard disk.