The Invisible Library

Fortune Magazine:

Free software is great, and corporate America [And real people] loves it. It’s often high-quality stuff that can be downloaded free off the Internet and then copied at will. It’s versatile - it can be customized to perform almost any large-scale computing task - and it’s blessedly crash-resistant.A broad community of developers,from individuals to large companies like IBM, is constantly working

toimprove it and introduce new features. No wonder the business world has embraced it so enthusiastically: More than half the companies in the Fortune 500 are thought to be using the free operating system Linux in their data centers. But now there’s a shadow hanging over Linux and other free software, and it’s being cast by Microsoft (Charts, Fortune 500).The Redmond behemoth asserts that one reason free software is of such high quality is that it violates more than 200 of Microsoft’s patents. And as a mature company facing unfavorable market trends and fearsomecompetitors like Google (Charts, Fortune 500), Microsoft is pulling no punches: It wants royalties. If the company gets its way, free software won’t be free anymore. [emphasis added]

Anyone who has used Microsoft for any great length of time knows that this is an absurd claim. Open Source software works better than Microsoft, across the board, not because the developers are hacking Microsoft’s patents but because they’re taking Microsoft’s half baked ideas and making them work.

Here’s a better idea: Microsoft subsidizes Linux and Mozilla, ensuring that they get their name associated with products that work. They won’t make any more money off the top, but they’ll at least build up good will among users, who for once, will see Microsoft’s name on a piece of software that functions as advertised. I know, I might as well have suggested that Microsoft subsidize research into creating flying monkeys.

Daylight Savings Time is three weeks earlier this year and Microsoft doesn’t much care:

For three weeks this March and April, Microsoft Corp. warns that users of its calendar programs “should view any appointments as suspect until they communicate with all meeting invitees.”Wow, that’s sort of jarring — is something treacherous afoot?

Actually, it’s a potential problem in any software that was programmed before a 2005 law decreed that daylight-saving time would start three weeks earlier and end one week later, beginning this year. Congress decided that more early evening daylight would translate into energy savings.

Software created earlier is set to automatically advance its timekeeping by one hour on the first Sunday in April, not the second Sunday in March (that’s March 11 this year).

How simple would it be to coble up a patch for this and offer it for download? Apple fixed it six months ago. I didn’t even know I had already downloaded the fix because they put it in a free security upgrade. And that right there is why Microsoft isn’t doing jack: They can’t find a way to make people pay for a minor computer glitch everyone else fixed for free. So, anyone on a Windows platform will just have to suck it up or run an hour late for most of March.

Everyone out there who got on my case for being a Firefox evangelist, take note. This is why IE7 is a piece of shit. Microsoft is counting on it’s users being too dumb to realize that IEs supposed innovations, like tabs and RSS and a functioning Web 2.0 interface, aren’t actually bonuses you have to pay for. They are free as is every other browser out there, and were available years before Microsoft bothered to throw out some half-assed piece of shit with a wildly inflated price tag on it.

Microsoft wants your money. Once they have it, you’re on your own.