Daily Archives: November 22, 2006

Reviewing BBC business coverage

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From today’s Guardian…

Sir Alan Budd, the former Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee member, will chair the BBC’s review of the impartiality of its business coverage.

Instigated by the corporation’s governors as part of a series of reviews, BBC staff, licence fee payers, unions and other interested parties will be invited to give their views to Sir Alan’s six-strong panel.

The other members are: Stephen Jukes, head of Bournemouth University’s media school; Chris Bones of Henley Management College; John Naughton, Open University professor and Observer columnist; Oxfam director Barbara Stocking; and Paralympic athlete Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson.

That Vista licensing agreement you were thinking of accepting

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Mark Rasch, an IT lawyer, has a wonderful essay on the problems raised by the Vista EULA. The nub of it is this:

The terms of the Vista EULA, like the current EULA related to the “Windows Genuine Advantage,” allows Microsoft to unilaterally decide that you have breached the terms of the agreement, and they can essentially disable the software, and possibly deny you access to critical files on your computer without benefit of proof, hearing, testimony or judicial intervention. In fact, if Microsoft is wrong, and your software is, in fact, properly licensed, you probably will be forced to buy a license to another copy of the operating system from Microsoft just to be able to get access to your files, and then you can sue Microsoft for the original license fee. Even then, you wont be able to get any damages from Microsoft, and may not even be able to get the cost of the first license back…

Worth reading in full. Many thanks to Chris Walker for the link.

The benefits of hindsight

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Google stock passed the $500 a share barrier yesterday. (It was $85 on launch day.) Ah! — isn’t hindsight a wonderful thing? Meanwhile, the NYT comments:

Google now has a market value of $156 billion, exceeding all but 13 American companies — icons of commerce like Exxon Mobil, Johnson & Johnson and Wal-Mart. It is worth more than any media company and all the technology companies except Microsoft, whose software empire it increasingly threatens, and Cisco Systems.

Google’s success has made its founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the 12th- and 13th-richest people in the United States, according to Forbes — and, at 33, the youngest in the top 400. Their shareholdings are worth more than $15 billion each, on top of the more than $2 billion in cash that each has received for selling some shares…

Novell’s Faustian bargain

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Very good openDemocracy piece by Felix Cohen and Becky Hogge on the implications of the deal between Microsoft and Novell (memorably summarised by Dana Gardner at ZDNet in the headline “Fox marries chicken, both move into henhouse”)…

On 2 November, Novell and Microsoft announced a “broad collaboration on Windows and Linux interoperability and support”. The main aim was to provide reassurance and support to companies that required Linux and Windows to operate on the same hardware, in so-called “virtualisation” environments. But the small print revealed a patent licensing agreement and mutual covenant not to sue over patent infringements. This, many feared, would give Microsoft vital fresh ammunition for its steady fire of unsubstantiated claims that Linux infringes Microsoft’s patents. In effect, Microsoft had asked Novell the classic loaded question “when did you stop beating your wife?”, and Novell had unwisely attempted an answer…