Ed Leafe wrote an article for Linux Journal magazine’s website, and it was published today. He tells me that he has sent in an addendum that covers the Microsoft “clarification” and the John T. Mitchell article; this should be added sometime later today. Here’s the link:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6869
Mary Jo: Microsoft’s Got Blogging On the Brain. Link from Scripting News
Longing for Longhorn? You’ll have to wait till ’05. Microsoft’s successor to Windows XP will hit the market after a prebeta release late this year for developers and two beta versions in 2004. from Computerworld News
Don’t you hate it when a machine tells you you’re wrong? Wordy error notices of death.
“I just went to register a product at the Creative site, and got this:
Microsoft VBScript runtime error ‘800a01a8’
Object required: ‘cmdl’
/register/OCXnp.asp, line 212And just yesterday I failed to buy a product at Buy.com because it insisted that my zip code was an error, and offered a popout menu with ten other nearby zip codes, all wrong. So I failed to make the buy. Smooth, huh?”
from The Doc Searls Weblog
“Microsoft Risks Copyright Impotence” is the title of an article by John T. Mitchell, a practicing attorney in Washington, D.C. on the FoxPro EULA issue.
Livingston sees Microsoft bringing the imprimatur of legitimacy to RSS in his monthly column. It’s a bit ironic to see Microsoft coming around at this point. It was originally a Netscape standard. It might have become more popular sooner if their air supply hadn’t been cut off.
Ed Foster wrote many seminal columns in his Gripe Line column at InfoWorld over the past 11 years. Now, he’s off on his own, creating a new website/blog/web publication at http://www.gripe2ed.com. One of his first columns is on the Visual (not Virtual, Ed, at least not yet!) FoxPro End User License controversies.
While he focuses on the primary problem of Visual FoxPro runtimes being tied to the Windows platforms, the other issues of restricting distribution to Microsoft’s new Installer technologies, and the slipstreamed requirements for upgraders to remove previous versions of the application (both summarized and linked here) are not discussed.
It’s enlightening reading and listening to people who aren’t invested in one side of the argument or the other explain what they are hearing in the controversy over Visual FoxPro’s End User License restrictions on developing and deploying solutions on Linux and other non-Microsoft platforms. Dan Shafer shares his view in “Microsoft Trying to Kill Wine on Linux?.” Interesting point of view.
The Register is outrageous, but good writing. Writing history with Microsoft’s Office lock-in. No XML please, we’re arbitrary.