The torrenza post had been sitting in que for a few days, I wanted to toss it out after TriggerTyme. But, while writing the TriggerTyme report I noticed I was creating both a "report" of the weekend and a "Why I play Paintball" entry.
So, that's now been split into two entries...
While I finish those up them, I wanted to comment on this story from Cnet:
http://news.com.com/2061-10795_3-6142793.html
Microsoft is touting that in a survey of 201 computing industry decision makers, 95% supporting the agreement. Now, back on May 8th of 1998 Illiad's Userfriendly comic strip commented on Microsoft's survey about whether or not Windows 98 should be stalled by the goverment.
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=19980508
Userfriendly commented that Microsoft had 835 directors and Vice Presidents, which would have given the required 5 to 1 ratio out of 1002 respondents. Back then, it made a nice joke, but the point of the comic strip still stands.
Microsoft does not clarify who was polled, or for which companies. All Microsoft states is that 201 computing industry decision makers. What is the metric for determining how these decision makers were polled. Was IBM polled? Was Sun Polled? Was Red Hat Polled? Was Open Office polled? Were FireFox developers Polled? Were Apache developers polled? Were the SAMBA developers polled?
The quick answer is, no. None of the developers who have made industry changing decisions in the past 10 years were polled.
So who did Microsoft poll then? Corel? SCO? SGI? Their own employees? Novell's employees?
Until Microsoft comes forward with clarification on who was polled, or agrees to run a new poll and explicitly ask the above mentioned companies and developers their stance on the Novell/Microsoft agreement, we should file this as shameless promotion and ignore it.
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