The submission by Microsoft of twenty thousand lines of code to the Kernel has, predictably, caused many an eyebrow to arch. The phrase "beware Greeks bearing gifts" comes swiftly to mind.

Recently I attended a presentation given to all the major UK suppliers of ICT goods and services to schools.

Bill Gates: “They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.” Beware of the Microsoft bearing "addictive" gifts. THIS is not another post about EDGI, but it sure illustrates how Microsoft spins its "addiction" trips (see quote at the top) as something of charitable value.

eBay Australia's "We'll help you stop the scammers" page and a flash game "Dunk the scammer" depict a scammer as a geek in a shirt bearing the tux penguin!

In like a lion, out like a Snow Leopard? Apple changed its spots on Sun's ZFS fairly quickly. This week the company shutterd the ZFS Project on Mac OS Forge, and there's no hide or hair of ZFS to be found in Snow Leopard. But as with all things open source, there's a light at the end of the tunnel.

Recently Sun Microsystems announced that it would open source both the hardware and operating system for Sun SPOTs, its sensor networking product based on Java technology. CT talked with Arshan Poursohi, a staff researcher in the Sun SPOTs lab on Sun's Menlo Park, CA campus to find out how higher education institutions can incorporate Sun SPOTs in research and instruction.

One of the most interesting journeys being undertaken at the moment in computing is that of Microsoft towards open source. Here are some more steps along that path:

Tiger, Jaguar, Leopard and Snow Leopard are therefore just as much copy cats as Windows 7.

But it does go to show that copying, or sharing, can be rather productive.

Look, those nice people at Microsoft Research are saving science from its data deluge-> Project Trident: A Scientific Workflow Workbench allows scientists to easily work with large volumes of data. Basically Project Trident is more Project Trojan Horse.