Some commenters think I was unfair to IBM in my last post. There I took Big Blue to task for its announcement that it intends to wage war against Microsoft in the world’s standards bodies

As part of a plan to increase the digital literacy in Venezuela by distributing computers to schools, Venezuela made an agreement with Portugal to buy one million Classmate laptops. The agreement includes the creation of a factory in Venezuela to build the computers.

Guess what? It turns out that 158 boxes of documents from the Caldera v. Microsoft litigation still exist, and Microsoft is trying to get them. This drama is playing out in the Novell v. Microsoft antitrust lawsuit, and Canopy has been drawn into it too.

Shortly after the implosion of Standard Norway, Microsoft announces a new initiative

Everyone needs to back up their computers, but when you have machines running on different platforms and different operating systems, it can be annoying to have to learn several interfaces.

Maintaining filesystems can be a real administration burden. Over time you might start getting multiple copies of the same file, soft links that point to files that no longer exist, temporary files that have been hanging around longer than they should, and binaries that have been installed and not had their debugging information stripped out.

In light of the systematic abuse and the demise of ISO, which IBM loudly protested against [1, 2], we shall no longer let this process remain secretive. We finally have complete copies of the documents which the shenanigans keep behind passwords (unlike ODF which they attack).

Iconv makes character set conversion easy. Remembering all of your character sets can still be hard.