Three till Seven

Get the Facts is a Microsoft site I just stumbled upon through a Digg post, and I just can’t believe it. From the site:

This site is dedicated to helping IT professionals compare Windows and Linux on key platform considerations such as reliability, security, and total cost of ownership.

Honestly, do you really expect a company (any company, and any kind of company) to give an impartial, unbiased comparison of itself with one of its competitors? Would you trust a comparative review of Cingular’s cell phone service with T-Mobile’s if Cingular were the author, for example? What about a printer comparison, written by Hewlett Packard, of Hewlett Packard’s printers versus Lexmark’s? Even someone whose head is completely filled and accepting of Microsoft propaganda has got to admit that this sort of thing is likely to carry a heavy slant in favor of Microsoft’s products. Any reviews or articles quoted on this site will have been hand selected for their Microsoft-favoring attitudes.

If you want a comparison between how Linux and Windows will work for your situation, there is plenty of data out there by people with less bias than Microsoft itself. In the best-case scenario, you could educate yourself about the ins and outs of both systems and then give them both a try. But for the love of pizza, don’t go basing your decision to drop Linux or take up Windows as a result of something the creators and marketers of Windows said.

As Todd put it, “There’s some dumbasses out there that would believe that [the site]. It’s worth it to them [Microsoft] somehow, honey, or they wouldn’t have done it.” That’s got to be true. Either Microsoft has seen benefits from this site, directly or indirectly, or it’s being real hopeful. My guess is that the former is true because, as Albert Einstein said, “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”

Hahaha, this tickles me to death. In Jonathan Schwartz’s blog, he writes:

So what’s my view on this interview in Fortune—in which one of Sun’s business partners claims the open source community is trampling their patent portfolio?

You would be wise to listen to the customers you’re threatening to sue—they can leave you, especially if you give them motivation. Remember, they wouldn’t be motivated unless your products were somehow missing the mark.

All of which is to say—no amount of fear can stop the rise of free media, or free software (they are the same, after all). The community is vastly more innovative and powerful than a single company. And you will never turn back the clock on elementary school students and developing economies and aid agencies and fledgling universities—or the Fortune 500—that have found value in the wisdom of the open source community. Open standards and open source software are literally changing the face of the planet—creating opportunity wherever the network can reach.

— Jonathan Schwartz’s Weblog

It’s nice to see the CEO of Sun Microsystems advising Microsoft not to be a little pussy-bitch about this whole patent infringement claim.

I’ve been so disgusted since yesterday evening when I found out that Microsoft is alleging Linux of patent infringement, but today a few articles have calmed me down:

This is, to me, Darl II: “Our precious IP is worth beeelions, and you must honor our sacred intellectual property, which is behind this curtain. We can’t exactly show you or identify it with specificity, but trust me, it’s worth oodles and boodles, and you are violating it. We just can’t show you precisely where and how. But we don’t want to sue you, so we will let you use Linux anyway, if you just sign on the dotted line and pay us for code we didn’t write but we’d like to tax because it’s winning in the marketplace and we don’t know how to make money fair and square against it.”

— Groklaw

The author of the study that Microsoft cited, Dan Ravicher, says:

“Open source faces no more, if not less, legal risk than proprietary software. The market needs to understand that the study Microsoft is citing actually proves the opposite of what they claim it does.”
…
“The point of the study was actually to eliminate the FUD [fear, uncertainty, and doubt] about Linux’s alleged legal problems by attaching a quantifiable measure versus the speculation,” he said. “And the number we found, to anyone familiar with this issue, is so average as to be boring; almost any piece of software potentially infringes at least that many patents.”

— eWeek

Linus Torvalds responded to the claim:

“Naming them would make it either clear that Linux isn’t infringing at all (which is quite possible, especially if the patents are bad), or would make it possible to avoid infringing by coding around whatever silly thing they claim,” he said.

“So the whole, ‘We have a list and we’re not telling you,’ itself should tell you something,” Torvalds said of Microsoft’s stance in the Fortune story. And for good measure, he added: “Don’t you think that if Microsoft actually had some really foolproof patent, they’d just tell us and go, ‘nyaah, nyaah, nyaah!’”

— Information Week

Of course, even if Microsoft doesn’t sue anybody over these mysterious patent infringements, this kind of talk still tarnishes the name of Linux and open source software in general, which is what’s so damn frustrating to me. Pointy-haired bosses may be starting to explore outside their current Microsoft cage, catch wind of legal troubles with this hippie Linux stuff, and bail out before they’ve even begun. What does it take to constitute slander or libel, anyway?