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Jonathan Schwartz: Last week, we signed a deal with Microsoft. Remain calm. The good news is everyone paid attention. The bad news is it spawned a lot of questions - which I thought I'd answer here.
his morning Sun Microsystems announced that it was purchasing MySQL AB for $1 billion, $800 million of which is supposed to be paid in cash. This is a huge deal in the open source community. Two minutes after I heard the news, I begged an invitation to the "no press" MySQL company meeting at which the announcement had been made, drove two hours to Orlando, and sat down for lunch with Sun vice president (and Java creator) James Gosling and MySQL AB cofounder David Axmark. After lunch I corraled MySQL CTO (and original MySQL creator) Michael "Monty" Widenius and MySQL chief database architect Brian Aker, and got their opinions about how the acquisition might work out and what it means for both companies.
A news aggregator is software which collect news, weblog posts, and other information from the web so that they can be read in a single location for easy viewing. With the range of news sources available on the internet, news aggregators play an essential role in helping users to quickly locate breaking news.
Late last night I was surfing the web and reading the news on CNN.com, where upon I noticed their search bar at the top of the page. I decided to place the keyword "linux" into the search box; I clicked the search button to see if there was any Linux-related news that I might have missed. What I found in the paid search really shocked me and upset me. In the number one position, it said the following: "Compare Windows to Linux www.Microsoft.com Making a Server Platform Decision? Read About Windows Server vs. Linux". The site in question: http://www.microsoft.com/
"Skype fought the GPL and the GPL won. The OLPC XO project abandons free software just as RMS switches to an XO; RMS not happy. New monthly newsletters from the FSF and FSFE. GNOME and KDE want to have a joint development conference in 2009. GNOME and GCC conferences coming up later this year. Plus all the usual news: more GPL v3 conversions, HURD news, GNOME news, GCC news, and more..."
A lot of Microsoft news can paint a grim picture. The following accumulation of news from the past week will hopefully shed light on the problems Microsoft as a whole is facing. It is well deserved.
