June, 27, 2001 archives

david stutz, of microsoft, says, "We are sincerely concerned about the GPL, and its impacts upon the ecology of the developer community." like how microsoft may not be able to extract money from every player in the ecology. and how microsoft may not be able to take government-funded work, extend it, leverage their monopoly, and lock everyone else out unless they fork out the cash.

i've never heard of a company getting killed as a result of competition from their own product being released as open-source. how many companies have you heard of microsoft maiming and killing?

a groundbreaking new feature on the news page. by clicking on the 'weather' header, you can set the zip code for the weather to grab. (requires cookies and javascript.)

maybe someday i'll add a way to opt out of individual news sources from the headline listings.

and okay, maybe it isn't very groundbreaking.

here's a thought i'm surprised i haven't seen floated more: va linux's new strategy is an eye towards an eventual acquisition by red hat. but first va linux is going to have to show some signs of life with their new strategy. (what is interesting to me is that va is now competing primarily with collabnet, which appears to have some major clients like sun and hp sewn up, and has a hell of a head start in the commercial side of the market. va has, of course, a rather large head start in the non-commercial side of that market with sourceforge.)

despite some of the initial "microsoft wins" sort of headlines and stories you may have read, the appeals court did not at all exonerate microsoft, as dan gillmor explains. the appeals court upheld the rulings that microsoft has a monopoly in the operating system market, it used unfair business practices to maintain that dominance, and it must be restrained from further abuses. the appeals court just vacated the breakup order as a remedy, primarily because judge jackson acted like a jerk.

i got my jury duty check today—$156. i already spent $64 of it by ordering more memory for my laptop (my primary computer these days). i'll probably go spend some more of it on cooking implements later today. i am living large.

looks like open source c# and cli implementations are on the horizon. i hope the cli implementation isn't under the gpl, or there's almost certainly going to end up being at least a third implemention. (in addition to that one and microsoft's.)