Microsoft Tries To Steer Asian Government Away From Linux
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According to a recent report from a research group, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer at an Asian Government Leaders Forum in Singapore claimed that Linux violates more than 228 patents.
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Microsoft has been warned by the UK's advertising watchdog about misleading Windows vs Linux adverts.
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Supporters of the free PC operating system Linux are preparing to counter a recent Microsoft Corp.  deal which established for the first time the principle of paying the software giant to use Linux.
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The communist-run Indian state of Kerala has begun another battle against multinationals, backing the Linux computer operating system over market-leading Microsoft Windows.
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sameerdesai writes &quot;Seattletimes is carying this story on Intel helping major countries like China and India to help build Linux machines as an alternative to Microsoft Windows.
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More FUD  from our friends in Seattle:  "Asian governments using Linux will be sued for IP violations, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said today in Singapore. He did not specify that Microsoft would be the company doing the suing, but it's difficult to read the claim as anything other than a declaration of IP war."  "According to a Reuters report (which we fervently hope will produce one of Ballmer's fascinating 'I was misquoted' rebuttals*), Ballmer told Microsoft's Asian Government Leaders Forum that Linux violates more than 228 patents. Come on Steve, don't hold back - what you mean 'more than 228' - 229? 230? Don't pull your punches to soften the blow to the community. "Some day," he contin ...
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Microsoft has lost a patent battle in South Korea concerning input mode technology in its Office software. The decision could force the Redmond company to halt sales of the popular productivity suite in that country, but it is fighting back.
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Novell Asia has urged the Philippine government to take a closer look at Linux, citing that adopting the open source operating system would be crucial to safeguarding the security and integrity of its computer networks.
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Experts say countries from Brazil to Russia to China are shunning Bill Gates' proprietary Windows operating system in favor of open source systems such as Linux, mounting a major challenge to Microsoft's global dominance.
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Microsoft has responded to our story yesterday about it threatening Asian governments that, if they choose Linux, they may get sued - possibly by one of the holders of the &quot;more
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Microsoft Corp finally, it seems, has something in common with Linux: the mutual threat to market share posed by pirated copies of Windows in emerging markets.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft officials deny that theÂ Department of Transportation's recent moratoriumÂ on adoption of Windows Vista is indicative of any widespread reluctance in the government sector to install the new operating system. In a report that was circulated internally within the department by DOT Chief Information Officer Daniel Mintz in late January 2007, that only surfaced publicly on March 5, the IT manager placed an indefinite halt on procurement of the software and any planned desktopÂ upgrades to Vista Among the reasons cited by Mintz in ceasing any deployment of the newest OS from Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft were questions about its compatibility with other programs, including earlier versions of Windows, and the estimated costs for moving to Vista. Despite the setback, Microsoft executives claim that Vista adoption is moving forward at a consistent pace in the government sector, and on par with similar installations among private industry. Although aware of the budgetary and scheduling conflicts that often cause the federal government to lag behind businesses in bringing onboard major new platforms, Microsoft contends that the OS is already finding a home in the space. "We're wrapping up the largest early adoption program for the windows OS ever, and over ten percent of our partners were from the federal government," said Patrick Svenburg, Windows client solution specialist with the Microsoft Federal group. "This also represented our largest partnership ever with the federal government; we worked closely with them throughout the entire development cycle to address their concerns and priorities." Svenburg said that Microsoft is planning to host senior officials from the Department of Transportation in Redmond before the end of March to address the concerns the department expects to encounter in moving to the OS. In his memo, Mintz specifically cited "lack of a compelling business case" as his rationale for temporarily banning the move to Vista, along with Microsoft Office 2007 and the Internet Explorer 7 browser. To be fair, Mintz and other DOT officials attributed some of the department's reluctance to upgrade on the agency's planned move to a new Washington headquarters later this year. The DOT technology executive didn't immediately respond to calls seeking further comment on the Vista moratorium. Microsoft representatives said that like many of its largest, Enterprise Agreement-level customers, government organizations such as the Transportation Department will need to avail themselves of the software maker's compatibility and deployment automation programs to help overcome some of the perceived challenges with Vista deployment. Some industry watchers believe, however, Â that it may still be hard for many federal agencies to make a sufficient business case for spending the time and money needed to move to the platform. Specifically, most of the major departments have invested heavily in moving their critical applications to Web-based systems, which could serve to dampen enthusiasm and demand for migration to the new OS and productivity suite, said Shawn McCarthy, a government IT analyst with IDC, based in Framingham, Mass. "A lot of government sites have been trying to migrate more applications to Web interfaces that any desktop system can access, and that's taken pressure off the organizations on the client side," McCarthy said. "The individual agencies are under a lot of pressure to make a business case anytime they want to do systems upgrades; if they can't really justify with benefit that will be seen, the upgrade either doesn't happen or migration is slower." The analyst said that despite Microsoft's claims that features such as improved security will convince government CIOs to get behind adoption of Vista, federal decision-makers will take a wait-and-see attitude toward the product and hold-off on moving over until the operating system's advantages are proven by others. Other experts said that it's too early to pass judgment on government or private-sector adoption of Vista since large organizations don't typically move to new technologies quickly. Michael Cherry, analyst with independent research firm Directions On Microsoft, based in Kirkland, Wash., said that the Transportation Department and other agencies will likely move to Vista incrementally over time. Organizations will also need to spend valuable time and money doing extensive evaluations of the OS before any installation begins, which could push back adoption further, he said. "When I read the [DOT] memo, I heard an IT department asking its people to refrain from buying ad hoc Vista licenses and machines, because they can't support that yet," said Cherry. "Something else to consider is that IT people have a lot of projects that they're already working and limited resources; Vista is not the kind of thing that merits dropping everything else to move on it quickly." Cherry said that he does believe federal agencies will begin adopting the OS at the same rate that they retire older desktop systems, although he noted that IT departments will likely give more consideration than ever before to alternatives including open source and Apple products. The first types of government users the analyst believes are likely to install Vista for functional reasons will be employees who carry sensitive data on their laptops, or view such information remotely on their PCs, he said. Those users will be seeking the onboard protection offered by the BitLocker encryption feature of Vista, according to the expert. In general he believes it's too soon for anyone to worry about adoption of the new OS. "It's way too soon to be taking individual cases or data points and trying to make a trend of them," Cherry said. "Vista might be good, but it's not so good people are going to dump their existing machines overnight just to get it."
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InfoWorld - Microsoft is enlisting Linux distributor TurboLinux to help tailor work being done to translate documents between Open XML and ODF file formats for Japanese and Chinese users.
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Microsoft Corp. is enlisting Linux distributor TurboLinux Inc. to help tailor work being done to translate documents between Open XML and ODF file formats for Japanese and Chinese users.
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Intel has launched an effort to make it easier for the company's Chinese and Indian customers to build and buy desktop computers that run Linux rather than Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Windows software.
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A REPORT said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has warned Asian governments contemplating using Linux that they risk being sued for using the operating system.
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Asian governments are pivotal to Red Hat&#39;s goal of earning 60 percent of its revenue from outside the U.S. by the end of 2009, said Matthew Szulik, the company&#39;s chairman, chief executive officer, and president, in a conference call on Thursday.Governments in the region are beginning to see open source as a boost for their economies and a way to increase technological innovation in the region, Szulik said. The governments of South Korea, Japan, Australia, and China have been &quot;positive spokespeople&quot; for the growing adoption of Linux and open source software in the region, he added.Most of the business for Red Hat in the region, as in the rest of the world, is in the transition from Unix and legacy systems to the Linux operating system. Customers are typically in the financial services, telecommunications, technology and the government sector, Szulik said.At the end of August, Red Hat&#39;s revenue for the first six months of its fiscal year was $246 million, up 34 percent from the previous year. About 85 percent of its revenue came from software subscriptions with the balance coming from services like consulting and training. The company does not break out revenue by regions.Red Hat also had $33 million in operating income for the six months period, up 48 percent from the same period in the previous year. The company has over $1.3 billion in cash on its balance sheet, said Charlie Peters, Red Hat&#39;s chief financial officer.Apart from continuing opportunities in the market for replacement of the Unix operating system with Linux, Red Hat is also seeing revenue coming in from middleware, Peters said. The company&#160;acquired JBoss, a vendor of open-source middleware, in June 2006.Red Hat plans to roll out new technologies in the coming months that will help customers build global virtualized computing infrastructure, Szulik said. The company introduced server, storage, and desktop virtualization as part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 earlier this year.An increase in availability of third-party applications around Linux helped boost demand, as Linux has been expanding its share of servers&#160;based on Intel&#39;s x86 architecture and&#160;IBM&#39;s mainframe&#160;and server environments, Szulik said. In addition, there has been an increase of technically trained staff with Linux and open-source skills, he added.