A Little Piece of History from Groklaw: Microsoft vs EU
This is absolutely brilliant.
This is living history. I wanted you and your children and your grandchildren to know some of those they can thank, because when almost all the vendors were signing peace pacts with Microsoft, taking settlement money and slinking away from the case, they stayed to fight to the end. Their role was essentially to speak for FOSS and to make sure the court and the EU Commission understood the technology and the needs of Linux and Samba and all those trying to compete with Microsoft from the Free Software/Open Source community. Unbelievably, they won.
PJ. You’re a star.
Coolest EU City Goes Open Source!
How appropriate is this? The Dutch, an amazingly cool and unflustered nation, are planning to move the entire government administration of Amsterdam over to Open Source software. Apparently several districts/agencies are trialling OSS now and the final decision will be made in December. But with a statement like this:
All government agencies must change to open source software, the national government says in an action plan presented today.
it sounds like it is already a done deal.
As well as the press release there is also a concise description of the project and business case (in pdf).
Nice one Holland. Let’s support the Dutch; go and buy some Heineken or Edam 😉
Microsoft loses EU Antitrust appeal.
The EU Court of First Instance has upheld the EU commission’s anti-trust case against Microsoft for bundling media player with Windows, and server/network interoperability.
It will be interesting to see if they (M$) decide to appeal again (they have just 2 months) and also if they have enough proper documentation to actually explain how their networking protocols really work!
Of course one possible outcome is that nothing changes; M$ just continue to pay the fines but keep their competitive advantage. I wonder which is really more costly to them?
On the networking front, the Samba team should be quite happy about this decision I’d have thought.
Update: it seems that they are very happy: here’s a press release issued jointly by the FSFE and the Samba team.
Oh goody, yet another BAD day for Microsoft… Perhaps, now we all know (officially) that Microsoft are crooked and anti-competitive, many of the visitors to this site will stop using Internet Explorer now, and then start migrating their desktops to one of many free and Open Source alternatives (Just like Amsterdam is doing) 🙂
