A lot has been happening in the last few days. For one thing HP has created what they think will replace the transistor and revolutionize the entire chip industry. Microsoft appear to have taken a leaf out of Mozilla’s XUL platform (the basis for Firefox, Thunderbird with their extensions, NVU and Sunbird), and is touting the benefits of developing for the MS Office “platform”. Be wary though, as the anti-virus and anti-spyware companies are just finding out now, and many other companies found out earlier, if you come up with anything innovative, you will eventually find yourself competing with Microsoft themselves. In other Microsoft news, MSN search is out, using their own kit for once, and they are marketing it for all it is worth. They are also suddenly co-operating with governments on the issue of security, meaning that they will now share with governments information about exploits and patches that they have previously kept to themselves. Don’t get all warm as fuzzy about it though, it looks like they are only doing it because governments around the world have been doing some hard looking at Linux and Open Source, and Microsoft is looking increasingly bad in comparison. This is an apparent effort to try and stem that tide. Good luck to them, even with this they still look bad, so I doubt it will alter anything.
There is a new Open Source organization called “The Software Freedom Law Center” who’s task is to help Open Source programmers defend their rights, and they are getting support and money from many sources in the OSS world. Their task will be to stop corporations from using potentially invalid patents and copyright cases from putting OSS developers out of business just because they have deeper pockets then their targets. Read more here.
In other news, it has been reported that every spyware infected machine on the Internet earns the crackers about $3 dollars, and that it is an industry worth over a billion dollars. Since the vast majority of that spyware uses Internet Explorer to get onto peoples machines, the guys doing this must really hate Firefox which blocks pretty much all of it.
