Does anyone else wonder why Microsoft was in such an awful hurry to line up partnership deals with Linux vendors before the final release of GPL 3? They surely must have known that the patent promise aspect of these deals were going to be rendered moot if Linux were licensed under GPL 3.

The story is not over yet and with various ongoing investigations, antitrust concerns and enormous scrutiny, this battle won’t be an easy one for Microsoft. Over at Groklaw, it’s even stated that OOXML “sits on hold”.

It is reassuring to find that Microsoft’s over-the-line and above-the-law actions may have all been in vain. High-profile countries across Europe are seemingly apathetic at the sight of Microsoft buying a rubber stamp by collapsing entire committees, lying, bullying and involving personal favours with heads of nations.

We've been debating the merits of a possible IBM-Sun deal for a while now, and even Sun itself seemed to be in the dark as to if it would be a good idea to be bought by IBM. These debates are now all moot: in a suprise move (at least, I didn't see any speculation about it) ORacle has bought Sun Microsystems, at USD 9.50 a share, which equates to a total of 7.4 billion USD.

I am increasingly convinced all of the arguments between Linux distributions are going to become moot very soon. If they aren't there already...I think the distributions are becoming so similar in their construction, and the differences between them so subtle, the whole notion of distribution superiority is completely moot.

In short, we are in an adversarial situation. Microsoft does not want us to succeed. Thus we cannot trust Microsoft, even if we'd like to, and must consider Mono based upon the question "What is the worst thing MS can reasonably do?". We can only trust Mono if we are convinced Microsoft doesn't have weasel room. The current situation appears, to me, to have lots of weasel room.

We all know what a rubber ball is. Don't we? The harder you throw a rubber ball at something the harder it bounces back.

Now that the final version of the GNU General Public Licence version 3 has been released, the in-depth analysis of its implications can begin. Two of the first commentaries to be published have come from the legal world, and there are doubtless many more being prepared for purely internal use within software companies wondering whether to adopt the new licence.

Last month author did a presentation on the concept of redundancy in a human factor related seminar at university. As most participants were non-IT people and using Windows he felt like promoting Free Software without making it ``too loud''. So he came up with the idea of putting a rubber stamp ``Created with Free Software'' onto the front slide.