“It has come to be expected. Linux and open source news in 2006 was a potpourri of topics that included Windows-Linux interoperability, wild acquisitions and corporate spending sprees and stories of enterprise-level companies buying into open source and Linux en masse. Even better than that, many of yesterday’s Linux and open source stories listed below still have the legs to become tomorrow’s big news all over again.”
Unfortunately, with todays big Corp world, this is the only way companies can survive and protect their CEO’s by doing mergers or joining forces with the competition. Yes, some big Corps have spent a lot of money on Linux in the way of improvements and usability but they have also exploited it to the point of everything else. Until they are through with it or drained as much out of it they will flex the muscle of conformity to the point others will have to comply whether they like it or not.
I have been using Linux since 1999 and it has come a long way but I am afraid with the release of Vista the multi-media (a linux weak point) will be even tougher to get ironed out. The whole battle over patents, digital rights is out of control, plus the fact greedy CEO’s want to exploit anything to make a buck.
Presently, multi-media in Linux is almost an A+ but a few setbacks push it back to a A- and the fear of all of the digital garbage rights being pushed will set it back years or force the end users to purchase a license to view content that use to be free.
If it’s up to interoperability, MICROS~1 is holding back while Linux developers try to find out and implement hardware specifications, fiel formats and protocol contents. That’s really hard work. For example, what has MICROS~1 done for interoperability?
From the article:
It has come to be expected. Linux and open source news in 2006 was a potpourri of topics that included Windows-Linux interoperability, […] Microsoft, fondly referred to by some in the Linux community as the “Evil Empire,” was now touting itself as the number one fan of Windows-Linux interoperability. The partnership […] showed that Redmond was beginning to come around on Linux as a legitimate force in the enterprise.
I’d like to hear something like this: “Hi, my name is Steve Ballmer and I love this company. Because we recently bought some Linux stuff, Vista SP1 coming in 2008 will include access to ext2, ext3 and ReiserFS Linux partitions. Furthermore, our boot loader won’t erase the MBR, letting things like LILO or GRUB installed where they are. Our brand new Office 2009 will aslo include support for standard document formats such as SXW, our great Frontpage will produce HTML and even our printing subsystem will use Postscript! And you’re even allowed to install Linux programs on a Vista partition. Well, they won’t run because they are no EXE files, but you’re allowed to use Linux! All this for a very little price! Hey, I don’t know anything about what I just said, but it sounds good, ha? So come on, developers developers developers!” 🙂
In a SearchOpenSource.com exclusive, Red Hat general counsel Mark Webbink […] predicted in one year Novell would be history as a result of the partnership.
Well, we’ll see.