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Footgun! | 478 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Footgun!
Authored by: tiger99 on Saturday, June 09 2012 @ 08:40 AM EDT
So, having done its stuff in court recently, Larry has passed the Footgun™® to Steve.

Regardless of what I think about Ubuntu or their actions, this has to be very good indeed, because M$ will be distributing FOSS, some of it GPLv2, and even better, some GPLv3, with all the consequences. There are no "consequences" for honest people who abide by the licence terms, except that the FOSS community may respect them and buy more of their products, but if M$ exhibit their usual corporate Gatesian behaviour pattern, I am sure that there will be severe consequences. Busybox vs M$ perhaps? (Note that Busybox have a solid track record of winning....)

By the way, I am posting from a machine which has just been upgraded from Debian to Kubuntu 12.04. KDE4 is now well and truly sorted. I consider that Canonical's biggest mistake was in going with Gnome and Miguel, instead of putting effort into KDE sooner. But now they have hived it off to someone else, their second biggest mistake. If I am right, Kubuntu will really flourish.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

I suppose that depends how you define "distributing" and for what purpose
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, June 11 2012 @ 09:55 AM EDT

So... MS handing out coupons to Suse which Novell then installs - does that protect you from patent claims? Are you sure?

When I was describing preventing the hosted OS from functioning properly, I wasn't talking about patents.

I was simply talking about:

    MS providing a functioning API communication mechanism for the hosted OS, which MS then later pulls due to ... err.. "performance issues" and claims the hosted OS is responsible.
Or...
    They accidentally use different API's internally for MS' purposes but the "standard" API's respond much more slowly for the host OS.
Or...
    They accidentally partially break the API's being used by the hosted OS so the hosted OS isn't as stable as it otherwise would be - and then blame the hosted OS.
You know.... Microsoft's well proven historical tactics. Only, on the Azure they'll have full immediate control rather than relying on third parties to install the new patch.

My point about "does it matter" was referring to the fact that total control will be in MS' hands. As a result, they can sabotage all they'd like no matter who is handling the Linux install. So...

    Does it matter who handles the initial installation when you still have to fully trust Microsoft with things they've shown they are trustworthy on?
I don't think it does matter: Just don't trust Microsoft!

RAS

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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