I have had a few problems installing the shiny new O.S. from Microsoft, you know, I’m not a computer geek.
Lucky enough I’ve found this video that showed me how to install it, step by step. It’s a must-watch, enjoy it!
And thanks to Guido Serra for blogging about it ;)
As you should know, a couple of months ago Novell and Microsoft signed an agreement with the public aim of making GNU/Linux and Windows work together more easily.
From the free software community, many smelled another “Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish” implementation, the typical Microsoft tactic when it comes to be too difficult to defeat an enemy.
Now the Free Software Foundation, copyright holder of many key parts of the GNU/Linux operating system (gcc, just to give you an example), is considering to ban Novell from selling Foundation’s softwares.
The FSF will give an official announcement within two weeks.
Linux is 5% of the total annual revenue of Novell (that is almost one billion dollars). The agreement with Microsoft brought to Novell’s cash 350 million dollars. If the FSF will ban Novell, they will need to rewrite most of the code they can no longer use, eventually wasting all the money gathered from Microsoft.
And we’ll eventually hear a very loud “Ouch!” coming from the other side of the Atlantic ocean.
UPDATE
This is a story being hyped by the Reuters guy who wrote it.
L’Associazione Software Libero ha ricevuto dal TAR parere positivo sulla possibilità di impugnare un bando di gara, emesso all’inizio dello scorso anno, che prevedeva l’accesso solo a quei rivenditori Microsoft riconosciuti (da Microsoft) come Large Account Reseller.
E’ una prima sentenza molto importante, come scrive il presidente dell’associazione nel comunicato stampa,
in quanto ci viene riconosciuto il diritto legittimo di lottare per l’adozione del Software Libero e dei formati liberi nella Pubblica Amministrazione
Il testo integrale della sentenza si può leggere sul sito dell’associazione o sul sito istituzionale giustizia-amministrativa.it.
Oltre alla gioia per la sentenza (che non è LA vittoria, ma è UNA vittoria), mi fa piacere sapere di aver dato economicamente una mano rispondendo all’appello “Ricorri anche tu!“.
Magari fateci una pensata anche voi :)
Receiving and forwarding the latest email from BadVista.org
Most store owners might frown on stickering products on their shelves, but Amazon.com encourages customers to leave labels using their tagging system.
You can help advertise the unadvertised restrictions included in Vista by participating in this action:
DefectiveByDesign.org successfully campaigned to add tags to DRM-laden products being sold via Amazon. You can now find over 775 crippled products tagged with “defectivebydesign”.
Unsurprisingly, the various versions of Windows Vista are already on that list. 14 people have gotten the ball rolling by tagging “Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium” with “defectivebydesign”.
How about we get some more up there? Take a minute to visit the page for each of the Vista versions and leave tags that express your opinion about the software, so that other potential users will have a chance to learn about the unadvertised Vista “features” that lock you out of your own computer.
(Read more at http://badvista.fsf.org/blog/tagging-vista-at-amazon.com, and digg it to help get the word out at http://digg.com/software/BadVista_org_Tagging_Vista_at_Amazon_com.)
Also, thanks to everyone who sent feedback to Microsoft about their exclusion of BadVista.org from search results at live.com! We’re making progress there—a search for “BadVista” does now finally turn up results from the site.
Have you tagged it?
Just seen on Punto-Informatico: Genuine Fact Files is the new Microsoft campaign against counterfeit software. Well, actually they are talking about counterfeit Microsoft software.
You have to see the video for yourself (use VLC to play it).
I completely agree with them, but would like to add a note: you don’t need to be a pirate when you use free (as in freedom) software. Call it opensource, if you prefer.
First: who is Jeremy Allison? He is the lead developer of Samba, the glue between M$ and non-M$ systems, used by every gnu/linux distros and by MacOS.
Second: what’s the M$-Novell agreement? Ok, you have lived under a stone for a couple of months. Look for info about it with you favorite search engine or read the article on Groklaw.
So: Jeremy was working at Novell. When Novell agreed with the evil, the Samba team publicly asked them to reconsider the agreement.
After a couple of weeks, Jeremy resigned from Novell, and joined Google!
I haven’t read all the papers: I’m not a Suse user and I will never become one, so I was not interested in such another EEE implementation.
I had not a clear position about the agreement. I still don’t have one, but surely Jeremy’s departure clears the way for a total embrace of the BoycottNovell cause.
“Gli utenti Windows si dividono in due: quelli che saltano la EULA cliccando automaticamente su “Accetto”, e quelli che saltano la EULA cliccando automaticamente su “Accetto” incrociando le dita.”
No, I’m not talking about a new release of that good movie but about a new release of its last 10 minutes.
Small introduction, skip if you are in a hurry
If you haven’t seen it, Pirates of Silicon Valley is a movie about the very first years of Apple and Microsoft. You will see how Apple has built its first computer and how Microsoft has sold the DOS to IBM. You will also see how this two new bigs has fought. At the end of that war (and the movie) you see Steve Jobs talking to an audience with Bill Gates displayed of the wall right behind him. Jobs says something like “This is Bill Gates. He’s our friend. Microsoft is our friend“.
And so..
The history says that Microsoft has won the war against Apple.
Only recently Apple has taken back some market share point, thanks to its FreeBSD operating system and to the cool design of the UI and of the computers.
But today I came in contact with Bootcamp, an Apple application that, starting from a Microsoft Windows XP cdrom, burns another one with Windows and all the required drivers to install it on a Mac, even adding a very cool bootloader. But Apple does not give support to Windows (that means to me: “I give you my hand, please don’t take the whole arm“).
I have already seen this, I have seen it in a movie.
I expect Apple to announce a new agreement with Microsoft, and Jobs saying again “They are our friends, again“. And I expect Apple to loose market shares, again.
But I know this will be just a goodbye, as it was some years ago.