Microsoft like Intel and Cisco need competitors. They don't want to destroy the competition or necessarily have them fail. The market needs some competition, Microsoft spent a billion dollars on lawyers and lawsuits this year. But M$ wants them to putter along and not be very significant. Companies like Google with the combination of the Chinese government backing 5000 programmers, scare the crap out of Microsoft, because they could bring something completely new to the marketplace and they can't sue them into the ground. ie. Netscape and the browser was quite a shift in computing. Software can be distributed cheaply and you can have a paradigm shift in the way people work. All of a sudden M$ becomes insignificant. Its one of the reasons M$ went into the console bussiness, you don't want to see an Nintendo box accessing the internet. That game box could become a web interface, telephone, television, and desktop plateform. You want a Microsoft computer, Microsoft phone, Microsoft console, M$ PDA, phone you get the idea.

You should be nervous if...
you are an end user who like innovation and competition, or if you are a software company that does not have 1000+ patents (open source, proprietary, or mixed source; it does not matter). Microsoft thinks they have created all the software and innovation forever, and plans to try and tax every one who is not already in the 100+ patent club. The world is just now catching onto this fact, that this announcement is a "grin screw", and a first step on this planned march by the boys of redmond. The fun part is that the world will backlash against them as they get wise to this scheme. One entity holding the IP cards for all of software is not an option.

What I cannot understand though, what exactly M$ wants money for. Someone said Samba is infringing on another site. This isn;t true. Atleast unless we ahve been lied to all these years. the last time I checked however, there is one person that can speak for Linux. Linus is the man with the original paperwork on Linux, so as far as I am concerned He speaks for me.

M$ can take a flying leap. I will continue to use any distro I please. If it is GPL'd M$ and Novell had better rethink what they are doing. Or else they will have far more lawsuits than they could possibly attend to...

I hate M$. Not very eloquent nor well reasoned, but straight to the point.

Fight the tax... buy a Mac!

I agree with the previous statement. Buy any of the new Macs with OS X. They're brilliant! Don't let Microsoft dominate the market for another 10 years.

Microsoft has gained too much monopoly in OS. And worst part is you don't learn anything out of it. If you are student or you want to self teach yourself programming (any kind), you gotta loathe microsoft. And on top of that they are the most arrogant people. Highly insecure OS, support removed every 5 years and huge upgradation charges. It is time Open Source and Google like companies to take over and bring competetion to market. Microsoft has already robbed world of too much money and learning opportunities. Now they should retire peacefully.

BOTTOM LINE: MICROSOFT IS JUST PLAIN USELESS FOR ME.

I watched with fear as Microsoft moved the Windows programming paradigm away from c & c++. Visual Basic is the face of the programming anti-christ. It's really simple. Visual Basic is a least common denominator single-sourced programming language that does nothing for program transportability. Microsoft .NET is an even more evil plot than VB. It works like this. You write programs using .NET compliant code generators that generate "safe code" This code is documented in so-called open standard published at www.ecma-international.org, a standards organzation that Microsoft is a Major member of. The standard contains intellectual property that belongs to Microsoft, so while the code is somewhat portable, the run-time that might allow it to work in another environment must contain elements of Microsoft's IP from the standards document or it won't work. Once you do that, Microsoft gets to charge you a royalty for the runtime on the alternative platform even if it isn't windows. They get a piece of every .NET pie, no matter who cooks it. The Dot GNU and Mono project people haven't caught on yet to the danger of the ECMA documents. I have emailed the FSF and told them about this and they won't listen to me.

I dispise Microsoft for what they have done and are doing to the software and computer marketplace all over the world. I am not sure what makes me sicker, this attack on Linux by Microsoft and Novell, or Oracle's outright theft of Red Hats Enterprise Linux. How is Red Hat going to sell their $1500/copy Enterprise Linux when Oracle is giving it away on their web site and selling support for $50/year. Larry came right out and said they took Red Hats product and removed the trademarks and recognizable graphics. I guess that is why Larry Ellison is successful and a survivor, but I think the whole thing stinks to high heaven.

if you want to buy a new computer please support one the the linux vendors trying to do it.

www.system76.com

and there are tons others - it just takes a little googling - buying a mac doesn't help things -

there are plenty other distos out there like mandriva, ubuntu, fedora, xandros, linspire that could well use your support and don't come with a microsoft tax like novell's suse.

novell made a huge blunder - I just hope they are around to realize it.

Time for the anti-trust boys to be having another long look at M$. If these tactics aren't outright anti-competitive, I don't know what is.

I am an IP (read "patent") attorney specializing in small entity patenting
(read "individual inventors"). The USPTO is working hard to stop the tactics
of companies/entities such as Microsoft; please make your congresspeople
know how important it is to support that effort!

There is an eery connection between the unrational Microsoft monopoly, the general dumbing down of the engineers who accept it, and the Occupation of Iraq and Executive Order 13303 where in 2003 President George W. Bush signed into law that all Iraqi petroleum, oil, and any related interests are now US Property, according to Executive Order 13303. Makes me to think of how American doctors, who are very busy, accept the cost layers of HMO management, health "insurance" companies, and exploitation of tort law and resulting required "malpractice insurance." In a phrase, what you have is corporate anarchy.

Microsoft is running scared. The monopoly that protected their software and granted them their power for so long is cracking. Without the powers of life and death over their distributors and the software companies they allow to work with their OS, they have nothing.

Linux is more versatile, but more difficult to use, OSX is reputedly easier, but needs different hardware.
These barriers are melting with the new Apples running Windows. People have a choice of Windows or OSX on one computer, which one will they choose for everyday stuff? Linux may be difficult for the average non computer literate user, but with Live CDs and Linux getting easier to use with each release of every distro, the usability gap is shrinking too. If you have any MS stock, sell!