On Microsoft vs. Opera/The EU
According to ArsTechnica, the EU is still going after the Microsoft Anti-trust case. When this case first started, I largely sided with Opera. But now, not so much. What about Ubuntu? Canonical bundles Firefox with Ubuntu. True, FF is FOSS, runs on pretty much anything, and is not produced by Canonical, but what other difference is there? And what about Apple? They bundle Safari, which they themselves produce, is not open-source, but also runs on many platforms, with Mac OS X. Why shouldn’t they be forced to do the same as Microsoft? Release their operating system sans the browser.
In the past I’ve been vehemently anti-Redmond, but sometimes my concious gets in the way of being a FLOSS politico. In the days when no average-Jane even knew what a browser was, Opera may have had a point (my jury’s still out on that). But now I’m not so sure. Unfortunately, I have to side with Redmond here. It’s their product in their package that they produce. They get to decide what goes in and what doesn’t and as long as they don’t lie about those contents, nobody should be able to do anything against them. Now this case just strikes me as suing Ford because they put Ford engines in their cars and not GM engines. (and so the saying is proven true, all tech articles will have a car analogy, ATAWHACA. That’s fun to say! At-uh-Whack-uh)