Enterprise open source Toolkit

Story: Microsoft admits targeting Wine users

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First, to those IT Students and others that dislike Linux/Unix and their users. I suggest you find another course of study or occupation soon. I've now worked for between 10-20 different organizations. *Every one* of them uses UNIX for their production or mission-critical systems because the MS software is too unstable to "bet the business" on. Furthermore, everyone of them has had instances where MS updates have resulted in downtime because a required security patch "broke" a critical application that they could not find a UNIX-based version of.

Most of them have had to cut other expenses (read "salaries/personnel/projects") in order to afford desktop software icenses and updgrades after MS license adjustments (which are never in a downward direction) or at the time that M$ decides to discontinue support for their current corporate desktop standard. These costs would totally disappear were it feasible to switch to an alternative desktop. M$, however has them locked into an expensive upgrade treadmill and they are now realizing it.

One way off this treadmill is to use OpenOffice on Windows where possible. Unfortunately, years of M$-indoctrination in schools has produced generations of "computer engineers" that only know M$ software. M$'s (illegal) anti-competitive practices over time have resulted in embedded business practices that cannot be transitioned without re-write/re-design. The M$ OS on desktops is becoming a major expense for businesses of all types due to virus patching/cleaning requirements / loss of productivity.

Businesses that successfully move to Linux are lowering their expenses and theirfore can make larger profits with lower consumer prices. Most UNIX to Linux conversions seem to be resulting in higher throughput per box with lower cost (over twice the throughput at half the cost is not uncommon).

But back on-topic, I will make the following predictions:

M$ will continue with this so-called "anti-piracy" option that to many is a thinly-desguised "anti-Linux" option.

The registry key details will be published allowing Wine users to make the appropriate registry entries and bypass this artificial restriction.

Virus/Trojan/Worm authors will use this registry key to cause M$'s own update program to deny OS updates to legitimate users - updates that could close off the holes used by itself or other virues to infect the Windows boxes in the first place.

This is actually an interesting development from the security standpoint in that it is now possible for viruses to utilize this registry key to prevent the installation of SP2 or updated M$ virus policies that might actually detect/clean the virus that had already infected the Windows box. Please note that once this registry key is set to indicate a non-M$ OS, *NONE* of the OS upgrades/patches will install, providing a safe haven for viruses and requiring users to call into M$ tech support ($200/hour) to be told how to edit their registry (shudder) to reset this key in order to get updated virus protection.

Where do you want to go today ? I switched to Linux years ago for reasons very similar to this.

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