Linux, Open Source, & anti Microsoft news

Microsoft and Adobe have teamed up to deliver more than 70 patches with this month’s Patch Tuesday batch released today. Microsoft contributed the bulk of the fixes emitted this month, kicking out updates for 60 CVE-listed vulnerabilities in its products. These should be installed as soon as you’re able to test and deploy them.

Microsoft on Friday indicated that Windows clusters running Service Fabric were adversely affected by July 10 Windows Server updates, but that patches are now available to address the problems.  Microsoft also disclosed on Friday that fixes to address problems with .NET Framework applications have been released. The .NET Framework was perhaps the last of Microsoft’s solutions to get updated to address software regressions introduced by Microsoft’s July 10 updates.

Microsoft plans to raise the price of its perpetually-licensed Office suite by 10% in October. The increases are part of a larger strategy, said Wes Miller, an analyst and licensing expert with Directions on Microsoft. “If you add all of these motions up, and look at other lightly-announced price increases, it clearly points towards encouraging customers that have avoided licensing Office 365, or now Microsoft 365, to…look again,” Miller tweeted.

Microsoft will introduce “price adjustments” to a range of on-premise and cloud products in October, the vendor has confirmed in a blog post. The changes include a 10 per cent increase in Office 2019 commercial prices, while the price of Windows 10 Enterprise will also be raised.

Running Windows 10 in the enterprise? Took the advice of Microsoft when it said the April 2018 Update was ready for the big leagues? You probably want to install last night’s “quality improvements”. In what is starting to feel a little more frequent than it should, Microsoft pushed out a raft of fixes for the 1803 incarnation of Windows 10 (aka the April 2018 Update), marking the third such update in July and taking the build number to 17134.191.

A remote code execution vulnerability in the Windows VBScript engine was left open for exploitation for two months after it was supposedly patched. In fact, the fix made things even worse by introducing another remotely exploitable bug in VBScript.

Microsoft acknowledged that some organizations were adversely affected by the .NET Framework monthly updates that were released almost two weeks ago on “update Tuesday” (July 10).

Canonical has released a new cut of Ubuntu it recommends for use in the cloud and containers. “Minimal Ubuntu” is based on either Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or 18.04 LTS. A Docker image of the latter weighs in at positively paltry 29MB, making it a highly efficient starting point for developers needing to rapidly shovel out containerised applications.

Microsoft owns the desktop with Windows — it is undeniable. You know what? That’s fine. But the success of Windows is not a failure for Linux. What I mean to say is, the open source kernel is omnipresent, whether you know it or not.

It’s impossible to know exactly how the world would look if Microsoft’s power had not been curtailed, but we do know that today people have a buffet of browsers to choose from when using Windows. The companies that were able to grow in a more competitive tech ecosystem have created jobs and pushed the industry forward. And Microsoft, though not the dominant force it once was, is still the third-most valuable company in the world.