WinInsider

First Massachusetts and now Munich? Germany's "Computerwoche" is reporting that Munich's move to 14,000 Linux desktops is in trouble because of budgetary concerns and "technical issues," making the publication wonder whether the city will ever be able to complete its migration to the open-source phenomenon. Hey, no one ever said migrating to Linux was going to be easy.

Microsoft continues to engage in monopolistic actions and is violating an antitrust settlement approved by a federal judge, the attorney general of the lone U.S. state still suing Microsoft for antitrust violations said in a court brief released Friday.

A Microsoft spokeswoman called the Massachusetts complaints "unsubstantiated." "Given the vague and unsubstantiated nature of these allegations, it's difficult to respond," spokeswoman Stacy Drake said. "However, we are always willing to sit down and discuss any issues of concern."

The Massachusetts attorneys also accuse Microsoft of engaging in a "campaign against various search engines" and software for creating documents such as Adobe Acrobat. Drake said she could not comment on the individual complaints in the brief.

The U.S. Justice Department on Friday expressed concern that Microsoft has not completely lived up to its agreement to disclose Windows communications protocols, as required by a 2002 antitrust agreement. In an 18-page filing with U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the government said the Microsoft Communications Protocol Program has "fallen short" of fully satisfying the settlement and that "additional work still needs to be done."

In that settlement, designed to end seven years of antitrust litigation, Microsoft agreed to disclose each communication protocol used in Windows 2000 Professional or Windows XP and to make them available for licensing for a fee.

Microsoft is considering an expansion of a program that would allow companies to see the source code underlying its Office software and other applications. The company's Shared Source Initiative, launched nearly three years ago, allows business customers, governments, business partners and academic institutions access to the source code, or software blueprint, underlying Microsoft's Windows operating system and other products.

Currently, 20 of the company's products are available under the program, including all versions of Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. But Microsoft has yet to extend access to Office, its most profitable product, or to its server-based applications.

'Xen' programming language unites C#, XML and SQL programming languages. There are a few pieces of information on Xen floating around the Web. Some characterize Xen as "the hypothetical extension of C#." Others describe Xen as an amalgamation of Microsoft's Common Language Runtime (CLR), XML and SQL programming language.

While Microsoft will be updating C# later this year as part of its overall "Whidbey" Visual Studio update, it doesn't appear that any elements of Xen will be part of the new tool suite. Microsoft has said that the Whidbey Visual Studio release will be delivered before the end of calendar 2004.

Everybody likes to impress the boss. But when the man in charge is Bill Gates, there's a lot more pressure to make the right impact. Andrew Herbert, managing director of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, meets the chairman from Redmond several times a year to discuss his team's contribution to the software giant's development and innovation strategy.

'We show Bill our research work quite regularly. We have frequent reviews where he comes and spends an afternoon with us and we show him what's hot,' says Herbert.

A massive security hole has been found in Hewlett-Packard Co.'s (HP) Tru64 Unix operating system, leaving some to wonder how far the company is willing to go to push Linux.

"Highly critical" vulnerabilities have been found in both IPsec and SSH -- the programs designed to provide watertight security for IP data and system commands -- which may allow system access or a denial of service. In short, the sysadmin's worst fear.

The timing is somewhat inconvenient though as HP was just launching into a pro-Linux PR campaign, trying desperately hard not to be outdone by IBM in its support for the open-source OS.

Does revealing a gaping hole in its own Unix offering aid or hinder that, is what we are pondering.

Let's be real. Not every move Microsoft makes is dictated by its worries over open source. Microsoft knows there is a whole community of folks out there who are married to the Microsoft mob. For better or for worse. Whether Microsoft makes them richer or poorer. Until bankruptcy do they part.

In many markets where Microsoft competes, Linux and open source don't factor into the equation. Linux doesn't show up on Microsoft's desktop OS radar. It doesn't figure when it comes to the market for desktop office suites. Dev tools? Gaming? Open source is just a blip.

Two years after Chairman Bill Gates called on Microsoft to redouble its efforts to secure its software, the company is beginning to make progress, according to customers--but much work remains. In January 2002, Gates launched a program called "Trustworthy Computing," designed to focus Microsoft employees on building better security into products and on improving customer response. The software maker halted production to review code, delayed shipments and retooled its development process as a result.

Sun Microsystems cannot prevent 356 facts favorable to its suit against Microsoft from being contested, even though they were part of the federal government's successful antitrust case, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday. The ruling makes it moderately more difficult for Sun's antitrust lawsuit, although the appeals court did not dismiss the case or any key findings.

In a 14-page published opinion, a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a 2002 pretrial motion by U.S. District Judge Frederick W. Motz in Baltimore.