The 10 Dumbest Lies of the Micro-hoo-gle-cahn Saga

Once promising to be the most-scrutinized corporate governance event in history, this Friday's meeting of Yahoo shareholders will now likely unfold in anticlimactic fashion, diffused by the forced-coziness between Carl Icahn and Yahoo's board.

So as we approach the six-month anniversary of Microsoft's initial run at Yahoo, what better time to assess the overall game of the Micro-hoo-gle-cahn saga?

After dozens of parses over the past six months, Jack Flack has identified several reality-challenged themes that collectively explain why no player in the drama as emerged as the good guy, or even the smart guy.

So to entertain you while the proxies are being tabulated, Jack Flack presents "The 10 Tastiest Porky Pies of Micro-hoo-gle-cahn."

OpenOffice.org 2.3 available in the Linux Identity Office magazine

Software Developer Hans Reiser Leads Police To Wife's Body

Thirty-one-year-old Nina Reiser was last seen dropping off the couple's two children at Hans Reiser's home in Oakland, Calif. in September 2006. Police found her vehicle with groceries and Nina Reiser's pocketbook and cell phone inside. Since the phone's battery was missing, police were unable to trace her last steps through cell phone tower signals.

It's not the Gates, it's the bars

That statement may surprise you, since most people interested in computers have strong feelings about Microsoft. Businessmen and their tame politicians admire its success in building an empire over so many computer users.

Debian 4.0r3 available in the Linux Identity Set magazine

SCO Reorganizes its Reorganization Plan

According to what SCO told us, and has yet to detail to the court because they’re still working on it, it’s a result of the due diligence.

Things are supposedly looking even brighter than before.

Bankruptcy trustee skeptical as SCO punts on reorg plan

Novell insists it’s winning the Linux wars

In the third of a series of interviews by Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin, Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian (right) insisted his company is not being hurt by its association with Microsoft.

“Novell grew 200% in the SUSE Linux marketplace year-over-year from an invoicing perspective,” he said. The overall market is growing at 22% according to IDC,” and “we’re taking some market share from our competitors.

ISO approval: A good process gone bad

You may have read our background article about ODF and OOXML and why Red Hat believes OOXML should not be approved as an ISO standard. This time, we focus on how the standardization process has been compromised at ISO.

ISO’s JTC-1 directives were designed to provide a fair, consensus-based way to design standards that are portable, interoperable, and adaptable to all languages and cultures. The OOXML proposal has suffered from two basic problems: (1) voting irregularities, and (2) the use of a fast-track process for a complex, new, large specification that has not received adequate industry review. The resulting specification was driven almost exclusively by one vendor, has not achieved industry consensus, and has had thousands of issues logged against it, largely due to issues involving implementability, portability, and interoperability. Although resolutions have been proposed for many of the issues that have been raised, there is virtually no time to review these resolutions to determine whether they fix the problems. And the voting irregularities have raised serious issues with the fairness of the process.

Is Microsoft really any more trustworthy?

Microsoft continues to prey upon the overly cautious with patent deals

Apparently Microsoft has a thing for conservative Japan. Just when I thought Microsoft had closed patent cross-licensing deals with every Japanese firm ever to have considered corporate existence, Microsoft surprises me with a deal with Onkyo.

So far Microsoft's list includes the needy (the various second-rate Linux distributions and Novell, which is a first-class Linux distribution with second-class aspirations of how to build on its technical merit) and the overly cautious (Japanese and Korean electronics companies for whom it's easier to just pay rather than try to figure out whether Microsoft's machinations are worthy). Microsoft might consider this a Very Good Start, but to me it looks like a Very Poor End to Microsoft's attempts to afflict the world with its dubious patent-rattling.

Update: McBride ousted at SCO, lawsuits to continue

SCO CEO likely will be forced out of job

Microsoft's latest interoperability pledge: How free is 'open'

No move by Microsoft to share information with its competitors will ever be taken at face value, and certainly yesterday's new Interoperability Principle will come under very close scrutiny. Is this the opening of the floodgates the EC has been demanding?

In incremental, measured, if slow steps, Microsoft has made some efforts to comply with directives from the European Commission to make its software and protocols more interoperable with products from other manufacturers. Yesterday, the company surrendered one more boundary between its interoperability policy and the EC's dream situation, making a huge chunk of the information it published in response to the EC's order available to developers free of charge.

Microsoft To Open Source: Let's Be Friends

Microsoft's new openness and interoperability plan focuses on high volume products such as Windows Vista (including the .NET Framework), Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007, as well as future versions of these products.