Every time Ballmer makes these increasingly vague claims—this makes the fourth go-around in the last four years by my count—open source and legal experts jump all over him. He ignores them and life continues. Ballmer is sending two other hidden messages though. Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, Ubuntu's corporate Linux backer, pointed them out to me in a recent conversation.

It wouldn't be so bad if the person quoted [in the ad] actually still worked for his State (Illinois in this case). Nor would it be quite as bad if the person in question - Paul Campbell - weren't involved in a swirl of federal subpoenas, allegations of serious ethics violations, and general incompetence.

I can usually tell what the new Microsoft anti-Linux FUD is by reading what Rob Enderle writes. Not that I seek it out. People send it to me. He's as reliable as Old Faithful at spilling the strategies, just as he channeled SCOthink before. I found it very helpful, by the way. Thanks for being so transparent.

Microsoft security 'vulnerability scorecard' gives false impression of OS security, suggesting Windows is the most secure of all. Of course, start to look behind the pretty graphs and the ugly truth emerges that this is just more Microsoft FUD to try and derail the free software machine.

RMS will not save the world - he has just killed the FLOSS, actually. We have already started to hear about strange license lockups...

Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony observed that "some distributions have come out, claiming to be taking the 'moral high ground' by refusing to give in to 'Microsoft threats,' while openly promoting the means of circumventing proprietary software on their web sites, amounting to nothing more than high-brow software piracy

LINUS CALLS GPLv3 "A FINE CHOICE" - is a title that InformationWeek could have used for their article. It would have been very selective quoting, but that doesn't seem to be a problem for InformationWeek.
Nor does pretending that old emails are new emails, or misrepresenting people.

I've no doubt that this is the beginning of the end for GNU, and it will prove the strength of the larger free software world. The Free Software Foundation has dumped a load of restrictions on us with GPLv3 and told us that restrictions lead to freedom and that it is good for us. That's a little too Bush administration-like for me.