More than half of Windows machines are INFECTED with malware

[Odd]

Michael Haney wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 2:56 AM, Nils Kassube <kassube at gmx.net> wrote:
>> Samuel Thurston, III wrote:
>>> (except
>>> Microsoft of course. everyone knows MS is evil.)
>> Come on - you know that isn't true any longer. After all, Microsoft
>> contributed 20000 lines of code to the Linux kernel [1]. It would be
>> interesting to know where on the evil scale Greg K-H would put Microsoft
>> in comparison to Google and Canonical, considering [2].
>>
> 
> It comes down to trust.  And everyone knows that Micro$oft has not
> demonstrated very well in the past that its a company that can be
> trusted.  Thus there is a great deal of fear and distrust in the FOSS
> community over the company's contributions.
> 
> Think about it, on the one hand Steve Balmer calls Linux "a cancer",
> while at the same time contributing source code to the GPL.  Balmer
> continues to assert that Linux violates Micro$oft's patents (and as
> far as I knew so far he hasn't presented any proof), yet at the same
> time they have this "Promise" not to exercise their legal patent
> rights against Linux developers who use their contributed source code.
> 
> They're sending mixed messages, so of course people aren't going to
> trust them.  If the company were a person I'd say they had multiple
> personality disorder.

No, not at all. Microsoft only does what's in its own interest.
They still consider Linux a 'cancer', but have realized it won't
go away. They have realized that customers running Windows
in many cases also are running Linux. So, they've decided
to 'play ball' but only to the extent that they won't alienate
their own customers. Ballmer must have been close to having
a cardiac arrest when he realized what they had to do.

This one small thing makes it easier to run Linux as a guest
on top of Windows. But make no mistake, Microsoft will not
end their quest to try to minimise the 'cancer'. But they will
probably do it in the shadows, like when they financed SCO,
rather than have a full confrontation that would upset their own
customers.

-- 
Odd