Bad Windows

Following the release of its Linux virtualisation drivers under the open source GPLv2 license earlier this week, at OSCON 2009 in San Jose, California, Microsoft has released a Windows Live services plug-in for Moodle. The Live Services plug-in from Microsoft’s Education Labs group is being released under the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2) and adds access to Live Services, including email, instant messenger and calendar, to Moodle. Moodle is an open source cross-platform Course Management System (CMS) and software package that can be installed on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The goal of the Moodle project is to provide educators with the tools they need to manage and promote learning for their students.

Read more at H-online

Despite what you’ve heard, the online version of Office 2010 announced by Microsoft earlier this week won’t be free to corporate users, and isn’t a threat to the likes of Google, Adobe, or even Zoho, which sells online productivity software to small and medium-sized businesses.

It’s true that Microsoft will offer consumers a free “lightweight” version of Office 2010 through their Windows Live (formerly Hotmail) accounts. But that largess doesn’t extend to business customers, who will either have to pay a subscription fee or purchase corporate access licenses (CALs) for Office in order to be given access to the online application suite. Microsoft already does this with email – the infamous Outlook Web Access (or OWA, pronounced ow!-wah! because of the painful user experience).

Read more at BNet Technology

We have mountains of antitrust exhibits to show — material that never reached any public attention because Microsoft settles quickly and buries evidence as part of the settlements. Today we deal with Comes vs. Microsoft Exhibit px07378 (2003) [PDF], from which wallclimber has managed to extract and reconstruct the main slides (high-resolution PNGs below). She could not salvage the entire text, but it was more than workable.

Internal documentation (intelligence) such as this proves truly valuable because it shows just how afraid Microsoft is of GNU/Linux, which Bill Gates calls the most potent competitor in operating systems.

Read more at Boycott Novell

THANKS to generous help from our reader wallclimber, we finally have a text version of valuable antitrust exhibits. She has more coming. Today’s exclusive leak is Exhibit px08604 (2002) [PDF], which shows Microsoft discussing the threat from GNU/Linux on the desktop and addressing this threat using FUD. This whole exhibit may as well be known as “Microsoft’s Linux FUD presentation.”

Bill Veghte and Brian Valentine (from Windows) are among the senior recipients of these instructions on how to ridicule GNU/Linux in public.

Read more at BoycottNovell

Anyone who was ever fool enough to believe that Microsoft software was good enough to be used for a mission-critical operation had their face slapped this September when the LSE (London Stock Exchange)’s Windows-based TradElect system brought the market to a standstill for almost an entire day. While the LSE denied that the collapse was TradElect’s fault, they also refused to explain what the problem really wa. Sources at the LSE tell me to this day that the problem was with TradElect.

Since then, the CEO that brought TradElect to the LSE, Clara Furse, has left without saying why she was leaving. Sources in the City-London’s equivalent of New York City’s Wall Street–tell me that TradElect’s failure was the final straw for her tenure. The new CEO, Xavier Rolet, is reported to have immediately decided to put an end to TradElect.

Read more at ComputerWorld

With nearly no explanation, Microsoft sent out an alert notifying customers that it was removing download information for 10 security patches “because Microsoft Java Virtual Machine is no longer available for distribution from Microsoft.” The revised bulletins are rated as critical and affect patches from the years 1999 through 2003.

The affected patches are: MS03-011, MS02-069, MS02-052, MS02-013, MS00-081, MS00-075, MS00-059, MS00-011, MS99-045, MS99-031.

But the timing is odd. The Microsoft Java Virtual Machine (MSJVM) was a technology included in some versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows that let Java applets run in the browser or on a Windows machine. It was the subject of a giant legal battle between Microsoft and Sun, with Sun accusing Microsoft of altering its virtual machine so that Java applets couldn’t properly function on Microsoft’s platforms (and rightly so).

Read more at NetworkWorld