The thought of moving to Microsoft Vista has put many Windows users into a panic, writes Ubuntu Linux user and IT pro Fred Marsico, the chief technology officer of Quantum Mechanics R&D in Corvallis, Ore., in this guest blog post.

In trade mags and blogs, I have read about the Vista-versus-Linux issue, and it’s now my turn to say something.

Since December, I have used Ubuntu Desktop. Aside from the fact that I have no virus warnings, no malware and no bots downloading themselves, it has been business as usual. I use Open Office and have no problems with reading and writing MS Office documents. My old Windows Me PC would not let me do that with a new version of MS Office, and of course that meant upgrading to XP as a prerequisite before installing Office. Total cost would have been about $300.

My wife has an older HP notebook running Windows XP Media Center. I chuckle as she reboots each time she gets an update or adds and removes programs. I have been running nonstop with only one required restart for a patch to the Linux kernel.

I read all of these horror stories about Vista on the blogs and comments on many sites about the same. I also see many intentionally derogatory messages posted by Windows users on the open source sites. According to them, Linux is for geeks; “normal” people don’t need to constantly tweak settings and such, as Windows is “automated.” This means that all of Windows software installs without much intervention.

In an honest comparison, it is true that Linux would greatly benefit from an Install Shield application that would make software installs and removal ubiquitous, but I also remember when Windows users complained about the same things.

Another point to ponder is that most of the back-end computers handling banking and ATMs are running Linux. And regarding security, if the banks trust Linux, we should have no problem doing so too.

With faster and multiple-core processors used today, I would have thought that Vista would have been written from the ground up with optimization in mind. With the hefty hardware requirements, it seems Vista is now the most bloated version Microsoft has rolled out to date. Just because I have 2 GB DDR RAM and a 100 GB HDD does not mean that I want my OS to hog most of them. I thought it would make having several applications running concurrently faster, and cause less hangs and crashes.

With the end of the software’s service life rapidly approaching, Windows XP users are panicked. They dread the thought of moving to Vista . Many are starting to look at the Mac OS or Linux as an alternative. Perhaps Bill Gates stepped down because he could foretell the future, and it begins to look like Microsoft is faltering.

With the state of affairs as it is, software developers should move to open source in droves. They can still write proprietary code, and can still sell it at retailers and online.

They just won’t have to pay homage to Microsoft. Monopoly software is dead; long live open source!

The success of open source software (OSS) has software giants like Microsoft running scared, OSS pioneer Bruce Perens says. Although most IT shops today use OSS such as Nagios, Samba, Apache and other programs, the open source community is still in a vulnerable spot, as software vendors use their patents to gain unfair market advantage and even take control of OSS products and standards.

I talked with Perens recently, and our topic was what IT managers need to know and do about the state of open source software. Perens says that IT managers are in the best position to lobby proprietary software vendors to protect and not attack the OSS community. IT shops are those vendors’ customers, after all, and have some clout; whereas, the large majority of open source developers — mostly self-employed or volunteers — are poorly equipped to stand up to major corporations that are trying to grab ownership of OSS.

Proprietary software vendors are both co-opting open source and, as stealthily as possible, trying to destroy OSS with software patent threats. If proprietary software vendors succeed in stymieing OSS development, technology innovation will slow down, and interoperability in heterogeneous environments will be difficult, if not impossible, to attain.

Protecting OSS will help IT organizations retain the ability “to purchase software without becoming tied to that [software vendor] for other software” to manage or complement it, Perens told me.

The protection of open standards should also be on IT pros’ agenda. Once a proprietary software vendor gets hold of rights to software standards, there are few obstacles to that vendor expanding those rights. Perens urges IT organizations to support the International Standards Organization (ISO). Established to govern the process of patent distribution, ISO working to adapt standards to the reality of the current marketplace. Most companies need interoperable software for many functions, from exchanging Microsoft Office documents to sharing databases across systems. The ISO needs the support of IT leaders in order to support the development of software interoperability amid pressure applied by proprietary vendors.

“Software patents are a problem especially for open standards, because they may prevent a standard from being usable by everyone,” Perens told me. ” If there’s a royalty or discriminatory licensing to the patent, that usually rules out open source implementations.”

With ISO/IEC 26300, Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0., the ISO did address business software interoperability in 2006. This requires all office documents to be able to be sent from one software system to a competing software system without having to be re-formatted.
In the U.S., it has been hard to stop software vendors from filing or expanding software patents that lack integrity and bankrupting OSS startups with lawsuits. U.S. “lawmakers are so in thrall to big-media lobbyists that they do not even realize that counterarguments to copyright extensions exist,” said Professor at Stanford Law School and founder of the Center for Internet and Society Lawrence Lessig.

U.S. antitrust suits have gotten few results; but, in 2007, the European Commission filed the largest antitrust suit against Microsoft yet, for withholding information that would let rival vendors defend themselves from product integration, rolling out a penalty of $1.3 billion.

But, Perens pointed out, this was merely one step forward in a larger struggle.

Last week, SearchEnterpriseLinux.com editorial director Jan Stafford mentioned that the new Microsoft Windows Server 2008, which launched on February 27, has features designed to give it a Linux feel:

Any new Microsoft OS prompts Linux users to scratch their heads and ask, “Why pay lots to upgrade from one Windows release that doesn’t work very well to another that doesn’t work well either?” Users say that a Windows Server release launch is ultimately an opportunity for any Microsoft IT shop to evaluate Linux. Even a Linux-like Windows won’t provide the stability, flexibility and migration freedom of Linux.

We received several responses, including one from Steve Dasey in the UK who asks the immortal question, to be or not to be… proprietary:

Surely that is the question
Whether it is nobler to pay for support on an open source OS or for a proprietary OS.

Are either then free ?
How viable is it to run mission critical applications on a non commercially supported OS.
Are there price differences? - of course.
Are there advantages to both? - of course.
But the TCO is about a lot more than the cost of purchasing the boxed product.

I am pro choice, pro Linux, pro open source, but commercially apples need to be likened to apples

Alas, poor Tux. I knew him, Bill Gates. I think if Hamlet were running Windows Server 2008, he might remark “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I…to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous pricing.” Server 2008 Enterprise will run $3,999 versus $0 for RHEL. The enterprise support package that Red Hat offers is still significantly less, too, at $2,500.

Got a rebuttal? Philosophize in the comment section.

When you think mono, you think tired. You think sleepy. You think shut-yourself-up-in-your-bedroom-for-two-weeks-and-snooze-like-Rip-Van-Winkle. You get the idea.

But that is not how it should be. Mono isn’t boring. Mono should excite people! I am speaking, of course, of the open source implementation of the Microsoft .NET Framework. It should make them stand up and say, “Wow! Here is one of the most interesting projects I’ve seen in a long time in the wonderful world of Linux.” And yet, this is not the case. People are taking their prescription sleep aids, turning off their cell-phones and settling down for a long winter’s nap. So why is it that one of the most ambitious projects that I have ever laid eyes on is not garnering more enthusiasm?

Misconceptions about Mono

No matter what you know or how smart you are (or think you are), it can be near impossible to change people’s perceptions. This is especially true in the software world (see Apple). And unfortunately for Mono, there are a couple misconceptions that keep it from gaining ground.

1. People think Mono is simply a derivative of the Microsoft .NET Framework.

Even though the Mono FAQ (http://www.mono-project.com/FAQ:_General) points out that this is not the case, the common perception keeps many people from using Mono to build their projects.

2. People assume that Mono is not ready for the enterprise.

One of the reasons for this is because not many enterprise projects are being built with it (I’ll get to that later.) Instead, Mono is primarily being used to construct desktop software.

The second reason for this misconception is the Mono project’s inability to stay in step with Microsoft .NET. Currently, Mono is somewhere between .NET version 1.1 and 2.0 while .NET 3.5 was just released. This is not the Mono team’s fault. Microsoft does not collaborate with them, so everything the Mono team accomplishes is through their own blood, sweat and tears. Nevertheless, this version discrepancy creates the perception that Mono is just a .NET wannabe.

How Mono can improve

I have a few ideas on how Mono can realize its potential:

Software With the exception of iFolder, Mono is not being used to develop any truly useful enterprise applications. Great desktop applications are being created, like Tomboy and Beagle, but no one has created the next great server application using Mono. Until this happens, IT administrators won’t see Mono as an equal to the other common framework, Java. My suggestion is that more effort be put behind iFolder, as it is already a very useful application. With some work, iFolder could compete with Xythos Webspace and be a poster-child for Mono in the Enterprise.

Ubiquity I cannot tell you how many IT administrators have been hesitant to use software I have written in C# for the sole purpose of being cross-OS compatible via Mono because Mono was not installed on their servers. Java is installed by default on many Linux distributions, making it an easy development choice. The Mono team needs to work more closely with Linux distributions to ensure that Mono is pre-installed, making it an easy choice to use.

Memory Leaks If you have ever used Beagle you know that it can heinously crash your system. Since it’s inception, Mono has been plagued with a random memory bug. Your system memory will go from 1% to 1000% in a matter of seconds, without warning. If the Mono developers want to make Mono more than just a desktop hobbyists language then they need to fix this bug once and for all.

Python Effect There is a huge movement in the Gnome community to make Python the standard language for Gnome development. Mono is a close second, thanks in part to the great desktop applications being written with it. However, if Python is officially adopted, there will be a backlash against Mono, or pressure on developers to adopt Python and port their once Mono applications to the official language. In order to prevent this from happening, Mono developers need to demonstrate Mono’s cross-compatibility. The Mono team needs to have Mono installed by default into Linux so that if you write an application with Mono it can run in Windows AND Linux (and even OS X).

Python is also cross-compatible, but I do not foresee Python being installed by default on Windows. Mono stands the best chance at being the first cross-compatbile language out of the box. This is Mono’s best play to fight off the Python effect.

Mono is a great framework and C# is a tremendous language. I like them both very much, but I am ready to move to Python myself if I do not see more initiative by the Mono camp to make Mono more accessible. Having a great language and product is not nearly enough. Again, Apple is a good example of this. Sure, OS X is great, but the real reason Apple resurged is because of their darn good marketing team and the iPod. From the iMac commercials to Steve’s securing of digital music distribution rights, it was a master marketing strategy. The Mono team needs to think outside the IDE and start securing Linux distribution partnerships to build some fantastic reasons to use Mono in the enterprise.

When Google launched Android earlier this month, many people assumed that because it was an open, Linux-based mobile operating system, the target was Microsoft. Throughout the relatively brief history of Linux, the first competition was with legacy Unix systems and Microsoft Windows. Closed versus open, proprietary versus open source. It’s David versus Goliath in a Tron-like world (ok, maybe not that cheesey). Add to that the fact that today many mobiles run a Microsoft operating system, and the table appeared set for another Linux vs. Windows rumble in the data center jungle.

And while we don’t typically cover mobile Linux on SearchEnterpriseLinux.com or even here on the quirky Enterprise Linux Log, I couldn’t resist a quick link to a Slate article that discussed Google’s plan to take over the world. Here’s a free Pro Tip: Microsoft is but a small rival in the overall big picture. This isn’t so much a battle between technologies as it is a battle between ideologies.

Google’s truest and most formidable foes are much older and more powerful. Today we call them Verizon and AT&T, but their real name is the Bell system. Their ideology, which today governs the cell phone world, is called “Vailism,” and it can be traced back to 1907 and the origins of AT&T’s domination of American telephony. The Bells’ philosophy, as promulgated by AT&T’s greatest president, Theodore Vail, is based on closed systems, centralized power, and as much control as possible over every part of the network. Vailism is the antithesis, in short, of everything Google stands for. It is this—conquering the business culture of the telephone, as opposed to the computer—that is Google’s great challenge.

Do no evil? You tell me. I, for one, welcome openness not only in my software, but in my Internet and my wireless as well. But that iPhone sure is tempting…

While VMware’s stock dropped another 6 points yesterday, losing about one-third of its trading value in the past two weeks, Oracle’s stock soared after investors rushed to buy following the database giant’s surprise virtualization announcement. Conveniently, traders ignored any analysis of the unpatched zero-day vulnerability (public exploit available) that the company won’t patch until Jan. 15 (link courtesy of a tip at Slashdot).

Lucky Larry, no?

And that’s just the stock news. On the tech side, Oracle’s announcement signals clearly that the future of the operating system as we know it today is again in flux. Truly, Oracle VM is Target: Red Hat AND Microsoft Windows.

Gordon Haff, a senior analyst with Nashua, N.H.-based Illuminata Inc. was, as always, in front of this issue from the beginning. He was quoted heavily in our sister site’s day one coverage of Oracle VM and then mere hours later he was posting more of his expert analysis on the Illuminata Perspectives blog on how Oracle would love for the kids to start just saying no to drugs and operating systems, thank you very much.

“There’s a nasty little war afoot over the future of the operating system.” — Gordon Haff, Illuminata

That’s Haff’s lead to a blog post titled “Oracle: Just Say No to Operating Systems,” and it’s pretty spot on, IMO.

The battle has many sides, each with many players, and every one of them has officially solidified his or her strategy for the future. You have smaller players like application vendor rPath carrying a big stick with rBuilder and pre-packaged virtual appliances; then there are the operating system vendors peddling new wares like Red Hat Appliance OS (AOS), announced last week, which seeks to create a massive Red Hat-certified channel of appliances built on an “optimized RHEL” in the first half of 2008.

And let us not forget another major operating system vendor: Viridian and Microsoft’s standalone hypervisor. Due out next year, it will officially make Microsoft the last big name vendor to get a hypervisor of its own out onto the market, but … that last point is a moot one, I think, and Haff agreed in a recent post covering the MS hypervisor’s big reveal. “Microsoft has a huge footprint in data centers — and even more in the IT installations of smaller companies. Thus, however tardy and reluctant Microsoft’s arrival to virtualization may be (Virtual Server notwithstanding), its plans and presence matter.”

But back to this operating system war. Billy Marshall, CEO of rPath, has been particularly vocal about this topic during the past year, and for good reason: This former Red Hatter has built a business around mitigating the importance of the operating system in the enterprise and couldn’t wait to lace into his former employer following the AOS announcement.

“It will be interesting to see how Red Hat manages the conflict between their legacy general-purpose operating system business and the technology requirements associated with delivering JeOS to support an application vendor-maintained virtual appliance,” Marshall said in a statement sent to SearchEnterpriseLinux.com.

He even blogged a Top 10 list, Letterman-style, to prove his anti-certification point even more:

Top Ten Responses to Certification Problems
10 – Re-install and call me back if you are still having problems.
9 – Can you send me a test case that reproduces that problem?
8 – It works for me.
7 – Have you been to any of our training classes yet?
6 – This is obviously not an application problem. Call the OS vendor.
5 – My shift is about to end and I am going to need to transfer you to someone else
4 – Did the sales guy talk to you about our consulting services?
3 – I’m going to need to escalate this one to engineering
2 – Your support contract doesn’t cover this type of issue
1 – Take a picture of your screen and email it to me because I have never seen anything like this

I half expected a flying pencil or Paul Shaffer to burst forth from my laptop after that last one. Perhaps the certification touted over and over again by Red Hat during our call last week is more Achilles Heel than Golden Fleece? We shall see.
Roger Burkhardt from Ingres gave some real world examples of why he thought rPath’s model would work best (hint: it’s because they built their BI appliance with rBuilder).

I’m in your camp, (Billy) … I’ve never bought a “kit car” myself and back in my CTO role at the NYSE I didn’t want my team building the software equivalent. I had 30 people just building development stacks for trading systems alone and - to your point - they started with certified components. The need to coordinate patches between various vendors sometimes led to substantial project delays. Now, at Ingres, we have addressed this with your team and our customers and partners are reporting enormous reductions in effort from our rpath and JasperSoft-based Ingres Icebreaker BI Appliance. A 75% reduction in effort is at the low end of the metrics reported back and the speed improvements are even greater.

And then there’s Oracle. According to Haff, the Unbreakable Linux department, from which this Xen-based Oracle VM announcement sprung yesterday, is “based on the idea that when you buy an application from Oracle you also get some bits that let the application sit on top of the hardware and perform necessary tasks like talking to disk. Oracle has been subsuming operating system functions like memory and storage management for years; subsuming the whole operating system was just the next logical step,” he said.

And I’ll let you connect the dots from here: Oracle VM is based on Xen, which is a hypervisor, which by definition is all about subverting the role of the OS. Oracle is just taking the whole thing a step further, a step roughly the size of Larry Ellison’s private yacht, to the point where they want to reduce not only the role of the OS (with Unbreakable), but also the hypervisor. Trouble is, there’s really no data available today to support the theory that IT managers are ready to accept separate silos of hypervisors from a slew of different vendors and then one dedicated to just Oracle applications.

For now, the biggest challenge Haff saw facing Oracle is similar to that facing software appliances in general. “There’s an implicit assumption that users will be willing to have one virtualization for their boxes that run Oracle and another virtualization for everything else. That the maker of the hypervisor bits doesn’t matter,” he said.

So far, there’s scant evidence that users are willing to be quite so blase about their server virtualization. Furthermore, brand preferences aside, it remains early days for standards that handle the control and movement of virtual machines across virtual infrastructures sourced from different vendors. — Gordon Haff

This is an announcement and a trend with long term implications. There’s nothing to see here in the short term and, just like Unbreakable Linux, once the original run of press stories and industry discussion dies down, it will stay pretty quiet. For now.

For some time now, Linux has been the dominant operating system in high performance computing. For everything from IBM, with its rockstar status supercomputer Blue Gene, to NEC or U.S. HPC players SGI and HP–the bulk of the leading HPC clusters today are Linux-based.

Four of the top five HPC systems in existence today are based on Linux, according to Top500 Supercomputing Sites, an independent web site that tracks the largest, fastest HPC deployments in the world. In 2005, when Top500.com started calculating which specific OS was dominating HPC, it found that Linux was used in nearly 80% of the world’s the fastest HPC systems.

The next TOP500 list will be released Nov. 13th (that’s tomorrow) during the Supercomputing Conference (SC07) in Reno, Nevada, but why wait until then for more Linux HPC goodness? UPDATE below: The list arrived early.

This morning our sister site SearchDataCenter.com broke the news that Sun Microsystems would be releasing two new systems designed to address the extreme computation, scale and storage requirements of today’s high-performance computing (HPC) customers. Called the Sun Constellation System the supercomputers are open computing environments that combine ultradense, high-performance compute, networking, storage, and software into an integrated “petascale” general-purpose system. Running Solaris, Linux and Microsoft Windows, the Sun Constellation System is designed to scale from departmental clusters to the largest supercomputer configurations, enabling customers to solve complex computational problems, the company said.

And that’s the first big Linux news of the day. Apparently, Constellation’s first user is the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), which will put the finishing touches on a 504 trillion floating-point operations per second (teraflop) compute cluster in December. This CentOS Linux Cluster, named Ranger, will have 3,936 nodes, 123 terabytes of memory and 62,976 processor cores from AMD Opteron quad-core processors. All system components will be connected via a full-Clos InfiniBand interconnect. Eighty-two compute racks will house the infrastructure, which will sit in TACC’s J.J. Pickle Research Campus in Austin, Texas. IDC seems to think Constellation will make a pretty big impact in the HPC space. We’ll have to keep an eye out for it on future Top500 lists.

But wait, there’s more! According to 451 Group analyst and CAOS Theory blogger Jay Lyman, last week supercomputer superpower Cray rolled out its super scalable XT5 supercomputer and wouldn’t you know it, the thing runs Linux. It’s apparently the company’s biggest use of Linux to date, with Cray using AMD quad-core processors in a configuration of more than 1,000 CPUs to top 40 teraflops of performance. “As far as I know this is the highest density of Opterons you can buy in a system,” said Jan Silverman, senior vice president of corporate strategy, in an interview with EFTimes.com.

But let’s not forget about Microsoft’s HPC endeavors in the midst of all this Linux HPC love. Microsoft’s Windows Computer Cluster Server (CCS) is designed for the lower end of the HPC market, and industry watchers said the technology has been well received, particularly for small computing clusters. Vendors too have jumped onto the Windows CCS bandwagon, including HP, which extended a multimillion-dollar investment agreement with Microsoft to drive HPC into the mass market. It is also selling CCS 2003 as part of its HP Unified Cluster Portfolio, and Fujitsu Computer Products of America Inc., which recently published a best-practices paper for HPC cluster deployment, is using Microsoft Windows instead of Linux. But I’m still willing to bet that Linux has a lock on the list tomorrow. Call it an educated hunch.

Like I said, the list hits tomorrow at SC07. Let the chips fall where they may (and that’s a lot of chips — lolz!)

UPDATE: Or we could just have the list today. It’s out at 2:45 p.m. EST. Blue Gene again takes the top spot, but apparently there were plenty of surprises. More below… Read more »

Over at InternetNews.com, Sean Michael Kerner picked the brains of several analysts to see which of them saw any effects, positive or negative, from the year-old partnership between Microsoft and Novell.

If you’ll remember, in November 2006 the two companies entered into a controversial partnership that — in theory — would allow interoperability between Windows and SUSE Linux as well as a patent covenant. The covenant ensured that Microsoft would not sue Novell’s SUSE Enterprise Linux Server users over alleged intellectual property infringement by open source applications.

Suffice to say, the analysts were mixed on whether or not the partnership was anything more that a temporary revenue boost for Novell (Novell noted that as of the end of the third quarter of its fiscal year, it had invoiced more than $105 million in SUSE Linux Enterprise certificates through business collaboration with Microsoft).

Our good friend Charles King, founder of Pund-IT, saw some glimmer of hope for Novell, but as one of two pro-Novell analysts (and I use that label very lightly in this case), even he wasn’t so sure. In fact, OS business gains are still very hazy for Novell, and King could only point to the firm’s 50% revenue gains in the Open Platform Group.

“This can’t be traced directly to the company’s deal with Microsoft, but the agreement may have had an impact,” King told InternetNews.com. “The financial effects for Microsoft appear negligible (or so company CEO Steve Ballmer has said), but the Novell deal arguably paved the way for the company to pursue other agreements with open source players.” (InternetNews.com)

Other analysts, including SearchEnterpriseLinux.com regular Gordon Haff, of Illuminata Inc., couldn’t identify any gains for Novell (or losses for Red Hat) that tied in directly with the Microsoft partnership.

Two corporations fire off a mean press release with 30 new customers and the opening of an interoperability lab — where’s the beef?

I realize it’s only one year in, but I think it would behoove Microsoft and Novell to flesh out what it is they mean when they talk about “interoperability frameworks” and the like. Revenue numbers from Novell for its OS business wouldn’t hurt, either.

Today at ZendCon, Zend shared details about some new integration initiatives with products from IBM, Microsoft and Oracle, as well as some enhancements to the Zend version of PHP. Topping the list of announcements was an offering for developers who want to create PHP applications using Eclipse.

First, some background: ZendCon is the largest gathering of its kind for the PHP community and for companies using PHP to build and deploy business-critical web applications.

But now to the meaty bits, the announcements:

• Zend Studio for Eclipse – The all-new commercial PHP IDE for Eclipse with immediate availability of a downloadable beta version
• Zend Core 2.5 – Immediate availability of the new version of Zend’s production grade PHP
• IBM releases the IBM Mashup Starter Kit, based on Zend Core, Zend Framework and DB2
• Single source support from Zend for DB2 and Zend Core
• Delivery by Microsoft of a new FastCGI module to improve PHP performance on Windows
• Microsoft announces a new SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP
• Zend announces support for the Server Core option in Microsoft Windows Server 2008
• Collaboration between Zend and Microsoft to deliver support for the identity management (Information Card) in Zend Framework
• Oracle Announces PHP support for Connection Pooling in Oracle Database 11g

For a break down of each of these new PHP points, check out the PHP company’s web site (that’s Zend) for more details.

UPDATE: Oracle details its contribution:

The enhanced OCI8 database driver for PHP provides new, improved integration between PHP and Oracle Database 11g, to allow a server-side connection pool shareable across web servers and languages, significantly enhancing the scalability of web-based systems. Highlights include:

Breakthrough Scalability – leveraging Oracle Database 11g’s Database Resident Connection Pool (DRCP) feature, a large number of users can be supported with significantly reduced memory consumption. Multiple web servers running on different systems can share a single database connection pool, helping to further reduce consumption of system resources;

High Availability – supports advanced Oracle Database features such as fast application notification with Oracle Real Application Clusters and Oracle Data Guard. PHP applications can benefit from reduced downtime and higher levels of availability with this feature;

Extended Compatibility – existing PHP applications can take advantage of DRCP and fast application notification without changes in application code, resulting in an immediate boost in scalability, enabling more efficient hardware utilization and lower TCO.

Can you say Schadenfreude?

Red Hat dropped me a note this morning in response to the European’s Commission’s smack down of Microsoft. I don’t know if Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik was toasting champagne while he fired off this response, but it would have totally made sense if he was.

“Today’s decision by the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg in the Microsoft matter is great news for innovation and consumer choice, both in Europe and around the world. The Court has confirmed that competition law prevents a monopolist from simply using its control of the market to lock in customers and stifle new competitors,” said Szulik, Chairman and CEO of Red Hat. “In our business, interoperability information is critically important and cannot simply be withheld to exclude all competition. Given Red Hat’s firm belief that competition, not questionable patent and trade secret claims, drives innovation and creates greater consumer value, we were pleased with the overall decision and look forward to examining the decision in greater detail. Red Hat would like to congratulate the European Commission, and particularly Commissioner Neelie Kroes and her services, for their persistence and courage in bringing this matter to a successful result.”

Schadenfreude. Look it up.