It's no hoax: “They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.” -Bill Gates. WELL, what can we say? Like most such deals, it smacks of collusion or dumping, sometimes even bribes like Live@Edu, public looting, or even addiction techniques like the *Spark programmes.

Bill Gates said he would get China addicted to Windows and then "collect sometime in the next decade." Now they are indeed coming to collect, but thanks to Linux their plan could backfire, badly.

Although I certainly respect Bill and Melinda Gates for what they do (how many billionaires do you see doing the charitable works they have been doing?), they and Microsoft are not the only ones working towards this goal.

The submission by Microsoft of twenty thousand lines of code to the Kernel has, predictably, caused many an eyebrow to arch. The phrase "beware Greeks bearing gifts" comes swiftly to mind.

Microsoft's chart for EDGI, the anti-GNU/Linux or Free software annihilation fund

One of the most interesting journeys being undertaken at the moment in computing is that of Microsoft towards open source. Here are some more steps along that path:

Bill Gates' Searete is looking to make money from natural disasters. IT HAS been a long time since we last wrote about Searete, which is Bill Gates'; very own patent-trolling firm [1, 2, 3]. As the Gates-backed Intellectual Ventures demonstrates, these sleeping giant trolls sooner or later go offensive and proceed to extortion.

LAST YEAR we mentioned Microsoft's "Jihad" talk (the term it uses a lot internally, even Bill Gates). The Microsoft ecosystem is said to be working very closely together and some call it "the Microsoft movement" (a term which is usually used in private conversations). Others even call it a/the "Microsoft religion", so the following new post hit a certain nerve.

Microsoft is beset with competition from all sides, unlike any it has seen in decades, and Bill Gates, who co-founded the company 32 years ago, still intends to step away next year as planned. But so far, Mr. Gates, Microsoft’s 51-year-old chairman, shows no sign of fading away.