Even Microsoft has realized that open-source cannot be ignored. For years, Microsoft’s open-source strategy has basically been to destroy or ignore open-source software, and it seems like they have not gotten much smarter. Microsoft’s “Director of Platform Technology Strategy and the company’s Open Source Software Lab” recently explained the company’s open-source strategy to ZDNet. If this is really the strategy Microsoft intends to follow, it is almost comical.

As far as I can tell, the theory is this: let open-source people port their applications to Windows and hand them a piece of rope so they can tie themselves to all of Microsoft’s proprietary products and cannot leave. (And if you need Linux, use Microsoft’s virtualization technology to run it on Windows.) As you can see, this is not going to work.

Perhaps this strategy would work if Microsoft had an absolute monopoly on the OS market, but if that is what they are thinking, I have bad news for them, once they catch up to the 21st century.

If anyone can figure out what Microsoft is thinking, please let me know. I sure can’t figure it out. Unless.. I know! This is how Balmer will make everyone port their applications to Windows!

Once every couple of months someone claims that product x is better than product y based on absolutely no legitimate evidence and every time the argument is the same. This time around, Jeff Jones, a security expert who works for Microsoft, is claiming on his blog that Windows Vista is the most secure operating system of all the modern operating systems (which, by the way, does include Linux, specifically a version of both Red Hat and Ubuntu.) The headline is great, but the argument does not stand up to, well, anything.

In this comparison, the metric for security is the number of reported bugs. It does not matter if they have been fixed or not, it does not matter what the level of severity is, and there is no adjustment for the fact that Microsoft or Apple might not report all the bugs that exist, while in open-source software, almost any bug that anyone finds is reported. Do I even need to say any more?

I am sure that by now everyone is aware of the problems people have been having with Vista and the reluctance of businesses and home users alike to move from XP to Vista. Microsoft has already given XP another 6 months to live before it will no longer be avaliable for purchase and people will be forced to move to Vista, but people still want more. With the end of life for XP coming up soon, even with the delay, InfoWorld has started a petition to “Save XP.” Who knows how much success this petition will have, but I will be very surprised if Microsoft agrees to continue to sell XP forever, essentially admitting Vista was a flop. The effort that goes into this petition and other requests to “Save XP” might get the death of XP delayed for another few months, but not another five years, or however long it takes Microsoft to come out with the next version of Windows. It looks like everyone is stuck moving to Vista - or open-source software, where this problem could not possibly exist.

Take Ubuntu or any other open-source project, you can still get every version they ever released. For that matter, you can probably get every single beta they ever released. No one had to petition them to do that, that’s just how open-source software works. Better yet, if you do, for some strange reason, decide you want to use the very first version they ever made (or any version,) you are free to do anything to the code you want, so you can keep issuing security updates if you need to support a big business. If you wanted to use an old version of Windows, you would basically be stuck using an un-patched operating system. I am sure someone is saying right now, “but there aren’t any viruses for old versions of Windows anymore.” Actually, stories of old viruses popping up again are quite common. I remember recently a virus that was designed to spread on floppy disks got put on a bunch of computers and infected them.

When there is just one dominant closed-source vendor, users are at the mercy of a single corporate entity. If you don’t like what that entity is doing, tough luck. With open-source, you can modify and use the code however you want, whenever you want, no matter what.

While I was looking through the Linux news, I read a Linux.com article that criticized CNR, a website that lets you download a small file that can be installed with one click for both open-source and commercial applications on multiple distros. The article cites a number of bugs and missing features as reasons why CNR is still a “work in progress.” Some of these issues are big (no way to uninstall software with the CNR client) and some are small (old version of some applications.) While it is true that CNR is not perfect, I am convinced that CNR or a similar piece of software is the future of application installation on Linux and possibly on other operating systems too.

On a regular basis I see both complements and complains about how software installation is handled under Linux. On one hand, a lot of people (myself included) like how everything is in one place and can be installed with a few clicks. On the other hand, though, many people find that parts of the installation process such as selecting the package name or knowing which file to download (.rpm, .tar.gz, .deb, you get the point) can be difficult and confusing. This is why I believe that one-click installation systems like CNR are the future of Linux installation. All the applications are still in the same place, but there is only one type of file to download, not many.

Of course, this does not fix the problem for applications that are not part of this one-click install system. Ideally, these applications would be able to make their own small file that could be installed just like the files from the official one-click install website, with a warning about them not be tested, of course.

Despite any bugs that may exist in current implementations, CNR and similar systems are the future.

Urgent notice to all Windows users: Due to the security problems of Windows, you now need to purchase a Linux computer in order to keep the viruses and spyware off your existing Windows PC.

Yes, its true, a security company called Yoggie just announced a USB device that plugs into a Windows computer to keep it safe from viruses. The device, which looks like a big USB flash drive is really an entire computer that runs Linux. The idea is that you plug this thing in to your computer and its 13 applications will keep your computer safe without using up the resources of your current computer. The problem is, when an operating system gets to the point where you need another computer running a more secure operating system to keep the original computer from getting stuffed with viruses and spyware, it might be a good idea to think about just using that more secure operating system, in this case Linux.

Seriously, there has to come a point when Windows users are going to look at the resources they are throwing away and the viruses they are getting and say this is enough! At that point, Linux must be ready to provide an easy-to-use, secure, bloat-free desktop. Luckily, Linux already has all that.

Since there appears to be no news today, I decided to share something that happened to me today. I accompanied a friend on a trip to Office Depot to get a new power cord for a laptop (not mine.) My friend asked the sales person who found the power cord if it would be better just to get a new laptop, since the cord was so expensive. He turned the computer over, saw the XP license sticker, and replied that at least this laptop had XP, not Vista. Needless to say, I was quite surprised to hear a sales person implying that one should prefer XP to Vista. Of course, as we all know, there’s a better solution to this problem.

Microsoft’s operating systems keep needing more and more resources, but consumers keep wanting cheaper and more portable hardware, hardware for which Vista is not well suited. This creates an opening for Linux, because it does not demand as many resources and is costs nothing.

Windows Vista has evolved from a less than perfect foundation dating back to MS-DOS. Now, it comes in four (or eleven) versions. The high end versions are capable, but expensive and very resource demanding. At the low end, Vista Home Basic is not particularly resource-demanding, but if you ask any tech reporter about it, they will tell you that there is no point in buying it, because it includes almost none of the new features of Vista. Although Linux has been around as least as long as Windows, it has managed to avoid the bloat and code confusion that plagues Windows. (It would be interesting to get someone involved in the kernel project to comment on how this happened.)

If you have been following the technology news for the past year or so, you may have noticed two hardware trends. Consumers want cheap hardware and they want portable hardware. We have seen this trend with the $200 gPC sold at Wal-Mart and Asus’s $400 Eee PC, both of which run Linux. The gPC is a very cheap desktop computer. Even if the hardware in it could run Windows Vista, adding a copy of Windows Vista Home Premium would more than double its cost at retail prices. The Eee PC, in addition to being very cheap, is also very portable and ideal for users who want to go everywhere with their PCs. In a laptop this small, it is simply not possible to fit the hardware required to run even the most basic versions of Vista.

Vista faces problems here. Cheap hardware becomes impossible if the operating system itself costs hundreds of dollars, and you just can’t fit much hardware into a highly mobile device. Linux solves both these problems. Linux has low requirements. Linux is free.

Following Ubuntu and Red Hat, Mandriva has said they will not pay money to Microsoft to be protected from unnamed patents, reports Linux Insider. Starting with Novell, Microsoft has convinced a number of companies to pay in exchange for an agreement that Microsoft will not sue them over certain patents.

Microsoft will not revel which patents they believe Linux is infringing on, which has lead many companies, such as Mandriva, and individuals to doubt that there is any real infringement on Microsoft patents. Because most Linux users believe that Microsoft does not really have a case against Linux, Novell and other companies (Xandros, Linspire, and even Samsung) that have paid Microsoft are frequently criticized, which could be another factor in Mandriva’s decision to decline the deal.

Dell just seems to keep coming back to the Linux/open-source news these days. After testing the waters with Ubuntu, they have recently expanded their Linux offerings to other countries and other distributions. It really seems clear that they believe in open-source. Just today, there are two new Dell stories, both about them planning to offer another open-source product.

Although Ubuntu is very prominent on the desktop side of Linux, they are not widely used on the server side. Recently, they have been trying to change that and it looks like they are succeeding. The Linux News reported that Dell is close to certifying Ubuntu for its servers. In further proof that Dell cares about open-source, Linux Insider reported that Dell would also be offering Sun’s OpenSolaris and Solaris 10, again of its servers, soon.

According to a story by Linux Insider, Mozilla is working on creating a new application to take any web applications without re-coding and make the user experience more like that of a regular application.

For Linux, as well as other non-Windows operating systems, these kinds of applications and the move to web applications could greatly speed adoption. One of the main issues with changing your main operating system is the applications that you use everyday or need for your job, and if you could use those effortlessly on any operating system it would not only speed the adoption of operating systems such as Linux, but also increase competition in the operating system market for all operating systems, because it would be easy to switch to whatever operating system you want.