c0t0d0s0.org

Charlie Schluting of enterprisenetworkingplanet.com wrote an insightful piece, why working together with Microsoft is not something evil.

Sun is a company that "gets it." There is no business that can run wholly on Linux or Solaris, at least not yet. Whether the goal is to get rid of Microsoft products or not, one must contend with the fact that every business has a Windows presence. That, my friends, means interoperability and cooperation is required.

This is perfectly correct. You can open source everthing, you are an ideal host for your communities. When it comes to business, you have to live with the fact, that Redmond, Microsoft and their products exist. Customers use their products. So cooperation with Microsoft isn´t evil, it´s a necessity.

At the end it´s a sign of the things, that have changed at Sun in the last two years:

Sun is increasingly moving toward a more cooperative competitive environment. Sun, before Schwartz, was extremely hostile toward its competitors. The two biggest sore spots, IBM and Microsoft, have been successfully turned into allies. Well, at least partners who compete. Sun is keeping its enemies, as well as its friends, close at hand.

Wenn man dieser Umfrage der Computerwoche glaubt, dann hat Vista ein kleines Adoptionproblem.

It´s so easy to protect your iPod from theft: Hide-a-pod made from 100% genuine disembowled Zunes:

How can you do this so cheap?
There were a lot of disappointed kids last Christmas who wanted an iPod but were given a Zune by some well-meaning friend or relative. Consequently, there is a glut of Zunes available on eBay every day. We buy ‘em cheap and throw away the guts to make our product at a great price.

Microsoft states, that Linux violates 235 of their patents. I assume, that this number is greatly exaggerated. But: Even when your enemy has 235 bullets, one is sufficient to kill you. And the interesting question is: Can you dodge 235 bullets? Interesting times ahead.

There even seems to be a raging cold war regarding this topic. Roger Parlof of Fortune wirtes in Microsoft takes on the free world:

So if Microsoft ever sued Linux distributor Red Hat for patent infringement, for instance, OIN might sue Microsoft in retaliation, trying to enjoin distribution of Windows. It's a cold war, and what keeps the peace is the threat of mutually assured destruction: patent Armageddon - an unending series of suits and countersuits that would hobble the industry and its customers.

This was not unexpected, but this made my day: Alex Ionescu writes in his blog, that he is able to break the digital rights management of vista. He was able to deactivate driver signing and thus he can inject a driver that circumvents the copyright protection mechanisms. If this is true, this has two interesting implications:

• Strictly interpreted the keys for Vista to play HD content must be revoked and all new HD medias need a new key for windows. This is not exactly the stuff you want to hear promptly to the general availability of Vista
• Driver signing was touted by Microsoft to be an protection against malware. This proctection didn´t even survived the GA day. Can you really trust Microsoft that they are able to build a secure OS?

I hope that his breach will be confirmed soon. They had five years to develop the next version of XP, and weren´t able to make it right. One question: Who were the NSA employees who helped Microsoft? The janitor and the till girl in the cafeteria? Sorry for the spitefulness, but i expected more from the allmighty National Security Agency.

How absurd must the mininum requirements for doing wordprocessing, data entry and spreadsheet get to force companies to rethink their perpetual upgrade cycle of Windows Machines. Heck, you can´t even start Vista on a machine, that was capable to run Wing Commander, the mininum graphic card to start Aero has vastly more compute power than the supercomputers used to calculate the european weather forecasts in the early nineties and you need more memory to start Vista than my computer i´ve used to layout the "Abiturzeitung" of my brother 11 years ago had as harddisk.

The usabiliy doesn´t got that much better since Windows 95. We have still no decent build-in speech recognition, the Apple Newton handwriting recongnition worked quite as good as on 100 Mhz ARM than on a Intel C2D with 25 times the processor frequency.

Essentially we have the same things and thoughts in the windows world as in 1995, only in true color, with antialiased fonts and when we make an error, we get an 16-channel polyphonic Dolby Digital 7.1 EX boing.

Vista is only a bad ripoff of the operating system from the Infinite Loop in Cupertino. Really? Look at this video to learn the naked truth!

Peter Gutmann wrote an excellent essay about the costs of the content protection in Vista, that we even incur when we plan not to use Vista.

This document analyses the cost involved in Vista's content protection, and the collateral damage that this incurs throughout the computer industry.

and

Here's an offer to Microsoft: If we, the consumers, promise to never, ever, ever buy a single HD-DVD or Blu-Ray disccontaining any precious premiumcontent [Note E], will you in exchange withhold this poison from the computer industry? Please?

Glücklich scheint die Opensource-Gemeinde mit dem Deal zwischen Novell und Microsoft nicht zu sein. So schreibt das Sambs-Team im Announcement Samba Team Asks Novell to Reconsider:

The Samba Team disapproves strongly of the actions taken by Novell on November 2nd.

und

For Novell to make this deal shows a profound disregard for the relationship that they have with the Free Software community. We are, in essence, their suppliers, and Novell should know that they have no right to make self serving deals on behalf of others which run contrary to the goals and ideals of the Free Software community.

So im gedanklichen Hintergrund stellt sich mir jetzt die Frage, was wohl passieren würde, wenn das Entwicklungsteam eines wesentlichen Bestandteils der Umgebung einer der Grossdistributionen plötzlich die Lizenz entziehen würde. Als Gedankenspiel: Das Samba-Team zieht die Lizenz von Novell für Samba zurück. Zunächst einmal waere dadurch natuerlich Novell/Suse massiv betroffen. Viele Microsoft-Migrationsstrategien haben Samba als wesentliches Element. Das ganze geht aber noch weiter. Eine IBM ist beispielsweise für ihre Affinität zu Suse bekannt. Projekte würden sehr viel komplizierter werden, denn jetzt könnte beispielsweise eine Suse Samba nicht supporten.
Nungut ... alles im Grunde nur Kleinigkeiten, aber wenn man das Bild etwas weiter spinnt, könnte man auch zu einem etwas unschönen Schluss kommen: Die Zeit der nebeneinander lebenden, sich zankenden, aber doch ganz gut vertragenden Hersteller von Distributionen dürfte vorbei sein. Äusserst schwergewichtige Spieler wie Oracle betreten das Feld und totgeglaubte Spieler stehen auf und erfreuen sich bester Gesundheit (Solaris).
Das heisst, das das Spiel sehr viel schwerer wird als bisher. Ja, ich glaube auch noch, das es eine zeitlang noch gross gehypte Migrationen von Solaris nach Linux geben wird. Man muss sich aber auch fragen warum: Meistens sind diese Migrationen vor 2 Jahren gestartet worden oder basieren auf zwei Jahren alten Studien, die heute niemand mehr hinterfragen mag, weil das womoeglich Konsequenzen für die Propagierenden haben wird. Wenn jetzt aber nicht mehr so einfach Umsatzwachstum genieriert werden im linuxfremden Markt, dann wird der Kampf in der Linuxsphere selber anfangen. Und dann wird mit genau den gleichen Bandagen gekämpft, wie es beispielsweise die kommerziellen Unixe schon länger machen. Ob diese Entwicklung allerdings von den Entwicklern von grossen und mehr oder weniger alternativlosen Opensource-Tools gutgeheissen wird beziehungsweise nicht zu Abwanderungen führt, könnte sich als eines der grossen Probleme der OSS-Welt in den nächsten Jahren herausstellen. Denn den wirklichen Test, wie sich OSS, GPL und shareholdervalue-Business-Bandagen vertragen .... dieser Test steht noch aus. Und das Announcement das Samba-Teams könnte da ein Vorgeschmack sein.

The one and only feature that i would call more than a 10.4-ripoff in Vista is now offically dead. Here is the report of an microsoft developer in mabushi speak. Or as an independet view : The Fishbowl or Developing on the edge.

There is one inevitable rule in software project management: For the real date of completion ask one of the old die-hard project managers, not a high ranking people manager.
You find an very interesting weblog entry about the delays for Windows at Philip Su´s weblog: Broken Windows Theory. He wrote an long but good essay about the internal problems of the Vista Development. He is an insider, because he works for Microsoft. So he should know it.
Whenever a schedule isn´t controlled by the needs of the project, you seed a forseeable failure. Either you cat abyssal quality and missing features galore or you will miss your schedule. Or both like in the case Microsoft Vista ... (Does anybody remember WinFS?).
Microsoft stands not alone with such problem. At several high profile delays (like the german toll collect), the rumour mill goes, that the internal project plans forecasted the ultimate date of finalization astonishingly correct, but out of some reasons a much earlier date was presented to the outside.
PS: I like the phrase "processes going thermonuclear". And every company is vulnerable to this, when there are no designed-in shortcuts in the processes that helps to keep the processes under control. There is no sense to completely reiterate an approval process when you only changed the color of your car. In any normal family you will discuss the colour, not the complete descision to buy the type of the car.

Okay, Microsoft will give his employees 100 Dollars for every bug they find in Vista. Okay, based on my experience with Microsoft products many employees will get really rich really fast and Microsoft will be the next Chapter 11 candidate

With Two-Factor-Authentcation removed from the Vista-Release yet another feature was killed. But when each interesting feature in won´t make it in Vista, the rationale of migrating to Vista is more than questionable. Why should someone migrate from XP to Vista? Only for a nicer GUI with more bells&wistles? An operating system with new bugs, new security holes, a new interface, but without any real advantage. From my point of view Vista will be the biggest flop since the construction of the tower at Babel.

When I´m really pissed about something (and to my shame i have to confess that i´m often pissed about something, but this got really better in the last few month), I remember a chinese proverb used by my manager: "If you sit by a river long enough, the dead bodies of your enemies will float by you".
And when a microsoft apologist like Paul Thurrot is really disappointed of Windows Vista a really big dead body had his float-by.

Scott McNealy thinks Windows Edition N will not make a difference
Arnet: Sun proposes to the princess of storage

For cryin' out loud, people, this is Sun! It invented Java. It has software that runs on every possible platform already. It has Solaris, a popular OS that got a mighty face-lift just last November. Do you really think Sun needs to acquire a software company? If so, how about starting a snow-selling business in Alaska next winter?