Great!
Best Wishes.

I think that MS is wondering how to kill the up and coming linux community. Although, how does one that is business savvy kill something that is not related to business. Linux is a child of a lifestyle chosen by brilliant minds. They all have one thing in their minds, hearts, and soul. FREEDOM!!!!

I thank the linux community for setting me free this year, 2004. I was an avid Microsoft evangelist up to the beginning of 2004. Now I never use MS.

To all of you that contributed to it's success to this point, I personally thank you. I will know play my part to free others and contribute to the code!

Sincerely
Jason

For Microsoft, it can be a cheap way of getting
anything that supports Linux off the market. Security
is a big word at MS these days.

This is really systematic. When MS purchased the Virtual PC emulator for Mac, out went emulation of Linux, which was
also supported. Linux companies are probably fairly cheap
for MS these days, compared to marketing costs. Do you
know the price of these multipage color adverts we are
seeing?

By the way, has anyone noticed that Byte magazine went off
the market just after it released it's first articles
critical of Windows?

I am sure that one could go on and on like this!

Just got this message after subscribing to the RAV newsletter. Why would Microsoft purchase a Linux anti-virus product?

Dear RAV User,

Thank you for downloading RAV AntiVirus Desktop for Linux from RAV
AntiVirus Website.

Important note
---------------------------
Due to the acquisition of RAV's IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) by
Microsoft Corp., GeCAD Software SRL is currently engaged in a strategic
reorganization of its operations, which includes scaling down and
discontinuation of its anti-virus related business. More details at:
http://www.ravantivirus.com/pages/shownews.php?i=153 .

As part of this process please be informed that RAV AntiVirus online
and
direct sales ceased September 3rd, 2003.

I agree with Mathew on his comment. Linux apps should come out as suit, comaptibility, export and integraty related issues should be given attention, so we can serve with the best.

Must keep in mind when supplier the system/prioduct (***helpful***):
- Good supporting
- Take care users's actual need
- Let user more easy to control their system

Linux is spreading. I feel this is due to a variety of reasons: Low cost, more available application software, ease-of-use and a pretty look & feel, better reliability [no blue screens of death] and speed performance improvements.

Issues that if addressed would speed up the spread of Linux, in my estimation, are: Unfamiliarity of end-users with Linux who don't see it in stores like Gateway, CompUSA, etc., the end-user's legacy perception/assumption that Linux is mainly for programmers and geeks, and the fact that most of the software you see in stores or being advertised is for Windows or Apple platforms.

Microsoft's marketing extends way beyond the boarders of the Microsoft organization. All the vendors that jumped on the bandwagon and push their products because they want to reach the widest market, which happens to be Windows, all this deluges the end-users and decision makers in companies.

If it's one thing that executives in companies try to avoid, it's problems, upset end-users and disasters from making the wrong choices. For years, the easy route was to go with IBM Big Blue products. You couldn't get fired for that. Nowadays, there are other choices that must be carefully weighted.

Cost is a huge driving factor.

Budgetary pressure forces companies and governments to look for savings wherever they can find them. OpenOffice 1.1 is something that can replace MS Office. This may not mean much to a small company, but the larger ones pay a per seat cost....and when they have thousands or tens of thousands of employees, this adds up quickly. I saw something recently for one organization that estimated they could save something like $32 million in license fees by going to open source and Linux. That's pretty tough to argue against!

End-users quickly adapt to new software if there is a lot of similarity in the look/feel and way the controls work. If most of their existing software can run on Linux (under WINE, or ???), then that's an advantage.

I AGREE M/S IS GETTING VERY AFRAID AND WILL SOON START TO PANIC WHEN WE CHANGE TO LINUX, CAUSE THAT WILL HAPPEN IF M/S DON'T PULL THERE FINGER OUT ,AND I KNOW FOR A FACT THAT PEOPLE ARE CHANGING TO SOME THING STRONGER AND WITH LESS PROBLEMS, YES ?? LINUX ,I AM,

Everyone need survey. Microsoft not only want to survey and monopoly in the world. Microsoft need market share.

Microsoft pull down Netscape. And want to pull down RealPlayer, Adobe PDF, Google, Sony PS2, ..... Microsoft's monopoly hurt others. That's why we have Linux, KDE... open source to break this monopoly. Microsoft and Bill Gate afraid Linux. They are action now. Although you don't like to listen, the truth is "one side want to break monopoly and get the freedom, and other side want to monopoly in the world". What will happen next. Microsoft need to pull down Linux and open source that make him suitible to continue monopoly, such as he do for Netscape before

IMO there is nothing wrong with MS ads. Integration between Unix/Linux and Windows is a topic that needs coverage, and accidentally, they have a good product for that cause. In the real world, you cannot expect to replace all NT/W2K/W2K3 boxes with Linux instantly. They will co-exist for a while, probably for a long time. I aggree with Peter Rasmussen, in that we should not care too much about MS and should not treat them like the big enemy.

@Vijay Ratjo (about M$ advertisements):

I'm not sure whether these ads are such a terribly bad thing.
For one thing, most Linux users interested in these kinds of sites will know to ignore such boring ads.
Second, this will bring much-needed advertising dollars to fund further Linux information articles, and that from a company which everyone would like to see lose some serious money. Isn't that what we all want? :)

OTOH such advertisements might turn away potential Linux users. So while they might not be as attracting as on Windows-only sites, they might be sufficiently harmful.

In other words: I'm still undecided on that one...

I volunteered some at the LTSP booth at Comdex. I also visited a lot with the X.org, OpenOffice, Apache, and Mozilla... I saw Plone and others but didn't even see KDE.

Maybe I was totally oblivious... But then again, the Open Source tables were small and poorly stated on the floor.

Regardless, these booths did generate a lot of traffic...especially OpenOffice, Apache, and LTSP. The Java version of OpenOffice impressed me--it has perfectly acceptible performance. We had Microsoft employees come down and I gave them lots of in-depth technical descriptions of a few areas where I have knowledge.

Then again, I also visited them at the Microsoft Pavilion and talked in depth on many of their products. Visual Studio hasn't advanced much in terms of visual development...they still don't even have automatic layouts or scaling features like QT's spacers or GTK's Java-like layouts.

Their CRM application scared me a lot. It integrates seemlessly with Outlook at provides access of all your customer data to Visual Basic scripts...via email.

Their POS (Point of Sale) application is very rudimentary--which is not good for a market requiring so much customizability. But in the future, when they get better Visual Basic support for it, it might have real potential.

What worried me a lot was that for GNU/Linux, we have no integrated suite like these.. Microsoft Great Plains and these other applications provide billing/accounting, CRM, POS, and various other features required for small to medium sized businesses and they work seemlessly together. We, in the Free and Open Source communities, are far behind in this respect.

Matthew

First, excuese me for not being childish enough to write 'M$'.

Then, I wouldn't go as far as to say that Microsoft is afraid, because they are too big and too self concentrated to be afraid.

They just haven't yet found a way to nail the Jello to the tree and are still searching.

So, I would think that they are concerned about this odd competition that they can't seem to get hold of, but with share prices still holding up and sales going as strong as ever, Microsoft is not afraid.

But then, people backing software in the Free Software/Open Source camp shouldn't really care about Microsoft. This is no war and Microsoft is not an enemy. This is software development and sometimes even very interesting types of research.

At most Microsoft is annoying because of the exclusive contracts they make with OEMs so we can't get hold of all technical information in an orderly manner, but otherwise:

Microsoft doesn't matter!

If they have some good UI components then by all means let's include them, or rather, let the people that are concerned and interested and skilled enough to do something about it do something about it.

I have no interest in their kind of GUI and finds it very unbalanced and very clunky, but it doesn't mean I won't let others use it, MS products based or Linux software based people.

As long as I can use and make my own software.

Ergo, let MS employees look at and copy whatever they want from KDE, Gnome or whoever, it doesn't matter because they aren't by that (and just that) action taking anything from anyone, and they may actually end up give something back by combining it in ways that the regular KDE/Gnome developers hadn't thought of.

Of course, they, and everyone else should abide by regular copyright laws, but it doesn't mean they shouldn't be able to use other peoples ideas. And I am no believer in software patents so copying of general ideas by anyone is OK by me.

M$ is looking for innovation.
Hee Hee

Wouldnt it be nice if they would share with us.

Don't take it too serious. If MS wants to investigate the current state of KDE, they can download a copy of Mandrake and test it in their labs. I think they are more interested in the kind of people that make/support/are interested in KDE than in KDE itself. They want to know: Is this a geek-only assembly? Or are there any businessmen around?

M$ do the same thing before. When Lotus 123 are so ggod in market. M$ Excel as a beginner. M$ engineer has come to Lotus discussion party and rasie some questions to learn Lotus technology. M$ engineer so smart. As a result, M$ Excel be improved greatly and do good in market. Lotus lost its' market leader in spreedsheet and let M$ office become monopoly in the world. Now, don't know what M$ really want but becareful.

Dear editor,
While posting advts on site pls chk out which companies are being shown down here. Its really embarassing that linux ppl has to see microsoft product campaign on a linux site.. We cant tolarate this nuse. Plz take action
regds
rathi

M$ do the same thing before. When Lotus 123 are so ggod in market. M$ Excel as a beginner. M$ engineer has come to Lotus discussion party and rasie some questions to learn Lotus technology. M$ engineer so smart. As a result, M$ Excel be improved greatly and do good in market. Lotus lost its' market leader in spreedsheet and let M$ office become monopoly in the world. Now, don't know what M$ really want but becareful.

Their interest sound very familiar to what they did to Apple or KDE should get ready for litigation as they are probably gearing up to say KDE stole their IP. It is war to them and if any lesson can be taken from the past MS does not play fair.

M$ is action now. You see, so many advertising in Linux/Technology news web sites. M$ marketing is started already and push NT4 users to Win2003 and hope to frozen M$ customer.

In the past, Novell's netware customer is lost and jump into M$'s NT4.

Now, Linux is strong enough to replace NT4, 2000, 2003. So, they push all NT4 customer to jump into Win2003. M$ decrease win2003 SMB pricing to keep small business customers. I think they may afraid and action to defence Linux.

Well, so interesting. It is the good time to replace NT4 by Linux now. NT4 is no support after end of 2003. It is good time. Linux Desktop to replace win98/winme... Linux's office is strong enough to replace expensive M$ office. So M$ raising so many new technical terms to attract coporeate/smb's customer to buy M$ idea. M$ new terms is so attractive. It is good time to replace M$ product

M$ is band name. Mr. Gate also is band name. You see Mr. Gate always come and say something to attract customer.

The last thing, I must stayed that M$ marketing is good and strong. It must be overcome.