Poland’s Office for Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK) claims that selling laptops with obligatorily preinstalled Microsoft's Windows operating system constitutes a monopolistic practice and is restrictive to competition.

There's a CS/informatics competition for high school students being held this weekend in Cluj and it is combined with educational software presentations from software companies for informatics professors.

LOCAL IT developers are being stifled by the dominance of US software companies that hold on to government business through "vendor lock-in", industry observers say.

When it comes down to identity management, the Windows and Linux operating systems fail to play by the same tune. But at the same time, Windows Server can be leveraged in order to manage both platforms. This is the promise of a whitepaper authored by Chris Travers, the owner of Metatron Technology Consulting and Contributing Author to the Microsoft Open Source Software Lab. Travers revealed that Windows Server 2003 R2 was effectively a turning point for the streamlining of the implementation Windows-based identity management solutions tailored for Linux.

The recent interview with Linus Torvalds cemented a number of things I've believed about Linux for a while now. Linux isn't an OS, or even a kernel: it's an embodiment of a design philosophy. One aspect of that philosophy could be described as "ignore the competition."

It's been at least a week since the last bout of Microsoft FUD hit the wires, so I guess it was time for a new wave. Today's FUD comes from an article Microsoft released on how its security compares with that of Linux. It should come as no surprise that Windows comes off as the Second Coming while Linux is left on the wrong side of Acheron.

I'm a wee bit tired by patent FUD and other substitutes for real competition from Microsoft. Microsoft has built a great business on comparatively good products. Yet in its old age, it seems incapable of competing on customer value and instead keeps fetishing its patent portfolio, as if anyone but its lawyers care about those.

"THE VOLE is submitting its Shared Source licences to the Open Souce Initiative for certification, as announced in a keynote speech by Bill Hilf, Microsoft General Manager of Platform Strategy, on July 26 at the OSCON Open Source Convention held last week in Portland, Oregon."