[Halfmanhalfamazing]

The worst thing I can think of above all else is DRM.

Yes, *YOU* are a thief.

[pikachu]

Will Linux benfit from Micro$oft's SNAFU. Well, I think some politician will step in to FUBAR the situation and we'll all go back to BOHICA. SS,DD!

[Mr. K]

please explain?

[Sthitch]

This simply shows that Microsoft did not and does not have the monopoly that the chattering class claims they had. If Massachusetts can shakeup the computer industry by making what amounts to a consumer decision not a statutory or legal one this should prove there monopolistic contention null and void.

[rwa265]

Would you mind explaining a few things for those of us who are not red hatters?

What is DRM?
Who is a thief?
How is Open Document Format used? Is it similar to .txt or .rtf? Can it be used in Microsoft Word, or wordpad? If not, how?

This sounds like a good thing, but I'm not sure how it is used.
Where did the term red hat come from?

[ShadowAce]

[N3WBI3]

OSS PING

If you are interested in the OSS ping list please mail me

[Doohickey]

Assachusetts want to get something for nothing, and will therefore get exactly what it pays for.

[shadowman99]

Not Massachusetts. It's all about Google.

The watershed moment is Google's action the week with Sun. Their new partnership will place a link to Open Office on the Google bar that many IE users happily install, as well as installing the JRE. This is a direct shot at MS from Google. This is why Balmer is throwing chairs at employees. "The browser is the operating system" is becoming reality, and Microsoft is not positioned to dominate this market.

Open Office is feature rich and stacks up very well against MS Office. Since this version is web based, users will always be running the latest version. Many older machines that run MS Office slowly will benefit by running a browser based Office suite. And the macro-viruses that plague MS Office will be easier to control since Google and Sun can control their web services faster than MS can get it's users to patch their systems.

Google and Sun this week made the arguments about operating systems obsolete. With the introduction browser based Open Office, we finally are seeing the internet based application services enter the mainstream.

Windows, Linux, OSX, whatever. In a couple years the most important program you boot will be your browser, and IE isn't keeping up with the Joneses in that dept.

Massachusetts is simply an interesting footnote. Business analysts will look back at this someday as the year that Microsoft's empire began to break away.