Microsoft's Ballmer Warns Asia of Linux Lawsuits (Microsoft pulls a SCO in Asia)

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. Chief Operating Officer Steve Ballmer on Thursday warned Asian governments that they could face intellectual rights-infringement lawsuits for using rival open-source operating platforms such as Linux.

Linux is open-code software that is freely available on the Internet and easily modified by users.

Its growing popularity with companies and governments around the world, and particularly in Asia, is a threat to the global dominance of Microsoft's proprietary Windows platform.

Ballmer, speaking in Singapore at Microsoft's Asian Government Leaders Forum, said that Linux violated more than 228 patents. He did not provide any detail on the alleged violations, which the Linux community disputes.

"Someday, for all countries that are entering the WTO (World Trade Organization), somebody will come and look for money owing to the rights for that intellectual property," he added.

Linux users got a scare earlier this year when software developer SCO Group Inc. sued a company for using Linux, which SCO claimed contains software code that it owns.

SCO is also embroiled in a lawsuit against IBM, claiming that the computer giant illegally built SCO's software code into Linux.

Singapore's Ministry of Defense last month switched 20,000 personal computers to run on open-source software instead of the Microsoft operating platform.

Other governments in the region are also looking to develop open-source software. China, Japan and South Korea this year agreed to jointly develop open-source software running on Microsoft's rival Linux operating platform.

The Chinese government, in particular, sees its reliance on Microsoft as a potential threat. Conspiracy buffs believe certain patches in the Windows code might give U.S. authorities the power to access Chinese networks and disable them, possibly during a war over Taiwan.

Ballmer said the security fears some governments had about using Microsoft software were overblown.

"We think our software is far more secure than open-source software. It is more secure because we stand behind it, we fixed it, because we built it. Nobody ever knows who built open-source software," he added.

The only axe I have to grind is people trying to blow sunshine up my butt about how wonderful Windows is ...

Oh, really ... show me a few posts describing "how wonderful Windows is."

You going to ask me to define the meaning of "is" as well? Criminy...you were the one claiming that XP didn't crash and was oh-so-wonderful. And when it was correctly pointed out that you were more full of s*** than a used diaper, you went off on this moronic "OS bigot" tantrum.

Hell, Microsoft's malware alone generates more security incidents than any OS has a right to...

Guess again. *nix and open source crapware dish out far more exploits than you can possibly comprehend ...

Linux Kernel
Red Hat 9
Mandrake Linux
OSX
Debian
AIX
FreeBSD

Okay, your ignorance is showing (again). First off, you're citing the Linux kernel, and then citing not one, not two, but THREE different distros of Linux (RH, Debian and Mandrake). Guess what, moron! The kernel is at the *core* of all those distros. So you're ignorantly inflating your ersatz list. Not that I expect a Redmond shill to understand something that basic.

Secondly, OSX is MacOS. That's proprietary, not "open source," you astoundingly ignorant twit.

Third, AIX is IBM's proprietary version of UNIX. It is a derivative of AT&T's System V, Release 4. It is not "open source," you positively ridiculous e-tard.

Fourth, FreeBSD isn't even Linux, jackass.

It's a river of crappy software -- and you're doggy-paddling without any concept of your own risks.

You're whistling past the graveyard, punk. Unless you're concealing a vast repository of computer security knowledge (which I find incredibly doubtful), you're doing nothing but talking out of your butt.

XP didn't crash and was oh-so-wonderful.

Whoa, troll. There's a world of difference between saying that XP doesn't crash every day to calling it "oh-so-wonderful". Buy, rent, or borrow a clue.

The kernel is at the *core* of all those distros. So you're ignorantly inflating your ersatz list. Not that I expect a Redmond shill to understand something that basic.

Check out the links, fanboy. There's clearly a lot of stuff that isn't included in the Linux kernel that *is* part of the 3 distributions that I pointed out. Methinks we're all grown up enough to pick out the duplications without erecting that as a strawman.

Secondly, OSX is MacOS. That's proprietary, not "open source," you astoundingly ignorant twit. Third, AIX is IBM's proprietary version of UNIX. It is a derivative of AT&T's System V, Release 4. It is not "open source," you positively ridiculous e-tard. Fourth, FreeBSD isn't even Linux, jackass.

We can add "can't read" to your list of accolades, fanboy. Note my statement:

"Guess again. *nix and open source crapware dish out far more exploits than you can possibly comprehend ...

Is that clear enough for you, 'tard? Or do you need a remedial primer, Prime Choice?

I mostly just use office, browser and email applications. (Word, Excel, Mozilla and Outlook).

Word, Excel=OpenOffice. Mozilla=Mozilla. Outlook=?. If you are talking about Outlook Express then =Mozilla Thunderbird. If you're talking the full Outlook then there is nothing compatible although IMHO there is no reason to run the full Outlook unless you're connecting to an Exchange server. Yea, I know, the calendar and the palm-sync but have you ever tried to share your calendar out and there is little functionality to syncing your palmtop with Outlook that I've seen.

My other main computer application is stock trading.

Go to sourceforge.net and search for "stock". Even commies that use Linux have a need for stock trading:)

can I convert it to the Linux program without any hassle?

No. you can't even convert between Word and WordPerfect under Windows without hassles. OpenOffice will import/export most major formats. One thing you don't have to worry about with OpenOffice is finding the money to upgrade all your users to the latest version when the boss gets a new computer and refuses to save his documents to a version that all the other people in his office can read.

I have one main issue with Microsoft, and that is cost.

Ahh yes, and there lies the foundations of the lividity of the open source community. It started with Unix and has bled over to Microsoft. It also explains the MS/Linux battle. Bill Gates, you either love him or hate him. He's either an icon of capitalism or a thief with good lawyers. I tend towards the later.

I am a soon-to-be-attorney, and will probably work either independently or with a small firm.

Hmm. That's a tough one. Traditionally, the legal profession has been the last holdout in the Wordperfect/Word war. Wordperfect got its start in the Unix world. Since MS levered them out of existence it has gone through several owners to finally end up in Corell's hands. Corell has quit releasing Wordperfect for Linux since MS came in and bailed them out.

It's been my experience here in Ohio that the legal profession has started to transition to .pdf and online "commerce" so...

Is that clear enough for you, 'tard?

Alright, jackwit. I'm calling you on the carpet. List the security books in which you've been a contributing author and I'll list mine. Also list what security tools you've written and I'll list mine. And while you're at it, list the security journals in which you've been published, periodicals in which you've been quoted on the subject of computer security, and white papers you've written.

Go ahead. Show us your credentials or prove yourself to be nothing but the mindless whore for Redmond that you are.

Hell, I'll even start the ball rolling and give you a minor sampling of my background in computer and network security.

Contributing author, Hack-Proofing Your Web Applications (wrote entirety of Chapter 5, "Hacking Techniques and Tools")
Creator of Early Bird, A Real-Time HTTP Worm Intrusion Intercepter (written to combat Code Red and Nimda) and Automated Qmail Installation
Keynote speaker on The Myth of Cyber-Terrorism, Why Security Through Obscurity Isn't and Public Key Cryptography and PGP.
Quoted in Time, cNet, Computer Weekly, PC World, et cetera

And that's just for starters.

Now I've put up with your asinine babbling this long, so don't start whining that credentials don't mean anything. It's time you put up or shut up, punk.

One thing you don't have to worry about with OpenOffice is finding the money to upgrade all your users to the latest version when the boss gets a new computer and refuses to save his documents to a version that all the other people in his office can read.

This isn't really a problem anymore. Microsoft Office File Formats:

For example, if a Word version 2002 document that contains a nested table is given to a knowledge worker who is using Word 97 (which doesn't support nested tables), the text in the nested table displays as indented lines.

I personally think that is a pretty good way to handle things. Adding features without breaking compatibility. Besides, you can get OpenOffice for Windows as well. And I feel the same way when a Linux user sends me a LaTeX document instead of a .doc.

I have one main issue with Microsoft, and that is cost.

Ahh yes, and there lies the foundations of the lividity of the open source community. It started with Unix and has bled over to Microsoft.

You know free doesn't necessarily equate to less cost, especially when you are dealing with a business. In fact I consider my free time pretty valuable as well. Which means that if using an open source or free program takes more than a couple hours of my time it would have been cheaper for me to buy commercial software that didn't require any extra effort on my part.

I'm not going to claim that windows always wins when looking at the total cost of ownership, but that is what you need to be arguing about, not if Bill Gates is greedy or not. If I get a quality product out of Microsoft I don't care how much he makes. I have some pretty darn smart programming friends who work at Microsoft. They do well by themselves, but not necessarily more so than programmers at other companies. MS is a publicly traded company, Bill Gates and his greed are really inconsequential.

MS is not SCO. They don't make their money with lawyers, they actually release products. In fact for a big cooperation they got into lobbying pretty late, not heavily till after the anti-trust suit started. And last I checked their soft-money contributions were 3-to-1 in the Republicans favor ;-)

Please don't get me wrong, I'm not an MS fanboy. I use whatever product gets the job done for me in the most economical fashion with respect to both my time and money. When and if MS products stop meeting that criteria for me I'll stop using them and I won't look back. I expect that won't happen in the near future because MS is pushing hard in developing new products, and I think they will beat back the security issues surrounding Windows. SP2 seems to be a step in the right direction. But in any case I have my Linux box all ready to go just in case (I'm typing this post on it).

-paridel

List the security books in which you've been a contributing author and I'll list mine. Also list what security tools you've written and I'll list mine.

Well I think that goes to show that we have access to some pretty darn smart people here on free republic. Not surprising by any means, but still nice to know.

Go ahead. Show us your credentials or prove yourself to be nothing but the mindless whore for Redmond that you are.

However if you are going to have that attitude about it... I have written 0 journal articles on security and released 0 security tools. I guess that makes me a mindless whore as well. :-(

Alright, jackwit... mindless whore... punk.

I suppose your poor editor for those articles had his work cut out for him. Anyway, the point is here on free republic you should be able to freely discuss ideas even if you aren't an expert on them. Also I at least discuss things here for fun. It isn't like at the end of the day some head of an a big IT department is going to switch operating systems because one posts here was better than another. No reason at all not to keep it civil.

I am interested in your insights on security issues as I'm sure are many other people here at FR. Please don't get me wrong, I don't have any problem with you posting you accomplishments in that field here either. I've read a couple of those already and found them very interesting.

From Early Bird: people who run vulnerable systems on the 'net either do not know or do not care that their recklessness impacts other people.

I agree with that 100%. However please don't use your accomplishments to belittle other people here, no matter how "asinine" you think their arguments are. You certainly aren't going to convince them of anything, and you aren't going to change any other minds with that type of post either.

-paridel

Since this thread has kinda ended up being a catch all OSS vs Microsoft thread I thought I'd take advantage of the situation and post a couple of thoughts / questions. Yes, I am complaining about some parts of OSS development, but not just to complain, I really do wonder if some of this is holding back OSS adoption.

A lot of work is done on things tangential to improving the situation for the end user. For example creating clones of programs that already exist and are free in all but the strict GNU sense. Examples? Even when bash was young and crappy it was the default, because tcsh, zsh, ksh, etc didn't meet with approval of the powers that be. Nano, a clone of pico, was created because pine's license was evidently too restrictive. Sometimes it isn't even the license that is a problem, it is just control. For example when Lucid pored a couple million dollars into emacs only to have Stallman reject the code cause they wouldn't / couldn't transfer all copyright to him. Leading to the Xemacs / emacs fiasco we have today. (Half the packages I use only work with gnu emacs, half with xemacs, and thanks to that my darn init file is a mess. :-/ )

I don't mind using closed ATI / nvidea drivers, but if you do mind you don't have to. But I have had situations were people will refuse to help on support forums cause I have a closed source video driver (although they will post to complain to me), even if that had nothing to do with the problem at hand. Some sense of community...

Finally one last peeve... anytime I try to debate the relative benefits of the GPL and the BSD license I get immediately accused of being a thief and trying to steal someones code. Yes, even here on free republic by at least one of the people I'm pinging here. But I'm not! I just happen to find the GPL/BSD debate interesting and lean toward BSD.

Wanting to use/produce only "free" software is perfectly valid, but why attack people who don't? An example would be the gentoo distributions developers... they take a lot of flack for including "non-free" packages in portage, even though no one forces you to install those packages, there are people who want to take that choice to install them away.

Many OSS zealots claim that it is a more productive system of development ("Cathedral and the Bazaar", etc). If you truly believe so there is no reason to attack closed source products, OSS will win in the end anyway.

In summary:
1. Many people use open source software for "freedom"
2. Others (like myself) use it when the software produced is better quality or value than closed source
3. #1 and #2 shouldn't be mutually exclusive
4. Unfortunately the complaining from group #1 reduces the amount of software for group #2. I.e. complaining about closed source drivers/programs that leads to less companies releasing any drivers or products for Linux.
5. Evidently being OK with producing/using closed source software makes me a bad person in many OSS users minds, and just admitting this fact will get you attacked. Not a good way to win friends...

However, maybe I'm just hanging out at the wrong forums, and the OSS zealotry really isn't as bad elsewhere. In other words perhaps I should stop flipping over rocks and complaining about the ants I find? This has really been my experience on-line and at user groups. Most Linux users are very nice, but a small group will be vicious if you show any acceptance of closed source at all, and unfortunately the majority that are nice will often not step in to heal their more passionate friends. By the way, not attacking me! I keep my mouth shut at Linux user group meetings I've been to on campus (sometime just cause the free pizza ;-) ) unless I'm helping someone with a technical problem (or in the rare case getting help with one.)

Anyway, I honestly see this as something that could hold Linux adoption back, and am honestly curious as to whether I'm just way off on my observations.

-paridel

You know free doesn't necessarily equate to less cost, especially when you are dealing with a business. In fact I consider my free time pretty valuable as well. Which means that if using an open source or free program takes more than a couple hours of my time it would have been cheaper for me to buy commercial software that didn't require any extra effort on my part. I'm not going to claim that windows always wins when looking at the total cost of ownership, but that is what you need to be arguing about, not if Bill Gates is greedy or not.

Agreed. But some of the folks on this thread have bought into the notion that all software needs to be free -- or anyone trying to make a buck selling it is eeeeeeeeeeeeevil. Damn that Bill Gates. Trying to enrich his shareholders. I'm shocked that anyone would try something so bold...

This isn't really a problem anymore.

If it wasn't a problem anymore then why would MS post an article about how to get around it? I went to a Microsoft Symposium back in about 1995 (just before they won the WordPerfect/Word war) where they swore to us that the next release of Office would have pluggable filters (buy Office 97 and you will be able to add filters to import/export to Office?). Seems it wasn't a priority once the market was cornered. Guess it would get in the way of upgrades.

You know free doesn't necessarily equate to less cost

No argument there. Nor will I argue that open source should equate to free. One should be paid for his efforts.

If I get a quality product out of Microsoft I don't care how much he makes.

I don't care how much Bill Gates makes. I care about how much I have to pay for his products. MS has used "what the market will bear" to produce profits that allow him to buy or destroy the competition and maintain an inflated value of his products. This is why open source is so dangerous to him. It's something that he can't control and will drive what the market will bear to a realistic figure.

I have some pretty darn smart programming friends who work at Microsoft.

There's no question that MS is chocked full of talent.

MS is not SCO. They don't make their money with lawyers, they actually release products.

Yes they release products, but whose products are they? Because a judge decided that IBM didn't present a strong enough case that MS sold them exclusive rights to DOS doesn't mean that they didn't (well, it does legally but not morally). Also, no rational man can conclude that a company that has lost so many antitrust lawsuits and paid so little in restitution hasn't used it's legal resources to its fullest extent.

If it wasn't a problem anymore then why would MS post an article about how to get around it?

The article doesn't talk about how to get around it. It simply states that you don't need to get around it... if you are using Office 97 on up.

I care about how much I have to pay for his products. MS has used "what the market will bear" to produce profits that allow him to buy or destroy the competition and maintain an inflated value of his products.

I completely agree. And I definitely welcome any competition Open Source or anyone else that matter can give Microsoft.

Yes they release products, but whose products are they? Because a judge decided that IBM didn't present a strong enough case that MS sold them exclusive rights to DOS doesn't mean that they didn't (well, it does legally but not morally).

Oh, come on now, that was dos, nothing to do with the rights to Windows. ;-) Although you do bring up an interesting point, and that is that perhaps the MS monopoly can be at least partially blamed on the government screwing up. Not that an IBM monopoly would have necessarily been better or course...

Anyway, the important point is that MS is finally hitting some pretty rough competition, and that is certainly a good thing for us users.

-paridel

Perhaps I should clear that up a bit... I completely agree with:

I care about how much I have to pay for his products.

I didn't mean to imply that I necessarily agree with:

MS has used "what the market will bear" to produce profits that allow him to buy or destroy the competition and maintain an inflated value of his products.

I'm actually not too upset with how much I pay for MS products. Probably because some of the other software I have had need to purchase is fairly comparable in price, and when compared to support costs in the (admittedly very large) companies I've seen isn't that big of an impact. Home users can get pretty good discounts, for example the MS Office educational package (I believe good for any households with kids k-12 and up to three computers) for ~ $150 at my local Fry's). Seems fair enough to me.

Maybe some of their prices are still too high, but I honestly don't really know enough about MS corporate pricing schemes, etc to make that judgment either way. All I will say is that personally I'm OK with the price I've had to pay.

Anyway, I apologize for being sloppy with my quoting. (Must be too much end of the semester stress! I was hoping grad school would be like my undergraduate experience, but it turns out to be quite a bit more work ;-) )

-paridel

sigh...

Knitebane in post #65 :
Does Ballmer still call you by that pet name?... Monica?

Prime Choice in post #70 :
whoring for Microsoft

Prime Choice in post#105:
mindless whore for Redmond

And finally your post:
allright knee padder

Congratulations everyone, you have mastered the art of applying sexual innuendos to insults. Pretty impressive, the last time I heard it used that well... well lets just say I was hanging out with a bunch of 12 year olds. Yes, certainly an excellent way to prove your point. I only mention this because it was worse on the last big Linux thread I read here , and I'm afraid that some DUer might stumble across one of our threads and mistake it for home.

I'm not really offended by it, I mean this is certainly extremely mild compared to the typical conversation going on next to you on the subway. I'm just a little confused about what it is supposed to accomplish.

Wait... I understand! Well shoot, I certainly don't want to be donning Knee Pads for Bill Gates... yeah, that does it; I'm formatting my window's system's hard drive. I'm going to install Gentoo... I'll catch you all in about 3 days when it's done compiling.

-paridel

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