…there’s something interesting to learn

An open letter to Steve Ballmer from Mandriva’s blog.

UPDATE: maybe things are getting repaired.

IP Innovation LLC sued Red Hat and Novell (yes, Novell) for patent infringement about multiple workspaces (you’re right, this is unbelievable).

Is there Microsoft hand? We can’t say that but we know that IP Innovation LLC has just recruited some Microsoft executives…

Please read the complete article on Groklaw.

hey, my Windows is not working, can you fix it with your Ubuntu?

That sentence still makes me smile :)

Many bloggers talked about the Liberation fonts released by Red Hat but when I read the press release I thought “why none thought about that before?”

i hear people say “Linux doesn’t work, I open a Word document and it’s all broken”.

It’s the “90-10″ rule, 10% of a system causes 90% problems.

Our Linux boxes have really nice fonts, really nice UI and everything else but we need a massive users migration and TRUST to fix bug #1, inexperienced users take a livecd, boot, open one of their document and… ops it’s not as I did it!

Red Hat started to solve the problem, Liberation fonts will make documents on Linux pretty the same as you would see them on your Windows/Office machine.

New users will be pleased about that thus… Ubuntu and other distros, integrate those fonts ASAP!

Taken from this article on businessweek:

Dell Inc. has agreed to work with Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc. under an alliance the rival software makers formed last year to make it easier for the Windows operating system and the increasingly popular Linux system to work together

Dell surely have its own reasons to choose Ubuntu for the desktop and Novell for the server but… could it be that Microsoft was not too happy for the Dell/Ubuntu partnership [...]?

Talking about web we have many open standards, actually we also have an open standard for documents (opendocument). Till now animations were only done by Macromedia Flash, now is going out Microsoft Silverlight, both with obviously different “protocols”.

We (Linux users) had some difficulties with flash player in the past, some guys are working on free/open flash players, what will happen with this new technology?

Could we think about creating an open standard for web animation format? Should Macromedia/Adobe open his specs?

This post is nothing more than a reminder to me, ruby.NET is out today, Microsoft is working with Zend to build PHP.NET, is bigM trying to catch developers working with open languages? This surely mean that these languages gained (with python) so much audience and respectability that no one should ignore them.

No no, that’s not what you’re thinking, I’m just talking about the development cycle…

It seems to me that bigM is reacting the right way to the free software challenge, between ie6 and ie7 we had to wait for something like 5 years, not they’re already talking about new forthcoming features. I hope the challenge will get harder for everyone, the result will only be better software.

Citing a little sentence from this post on ie blog:

There were many lessons learned, and I’ll talk about how we’ll take those lessons forward into future releases of Internet Explorer

This is interesting, everyone should learn lessons and don’t even sits down on achived results (ok you got me, I’m talking about firefox).

Maybe Microsoft will release more often? Maybe they’ll get closer to standards? I’ll keep an eye on that in the next months.

Actually I’m hoping to see a gtk-webcore browser for my gnome, I use gnome since 6 years and I’m a bit upset to see firefox working better on windows (UI/system integration, speed, crashes) than on my beautiful gnome.