Linux, Open Source, & anti Microsoft news

GNOME has had its ups and downs, but today one of the major Linux/Unix interfaces has turned 20.

While the recipient of the gift of 64 million Microsoft shares wasn’t specified, Gates has made the majority of his donations to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the charity he and his wife use to direct their philanthropic efforts.

India is a research and development hot-bed for large tech companies like Microsoft for several reasons: It has an increasingly middle-class young population and it has significant challenges present in society that can be solved using advanced technology.

Microsoft has come out publicly against Consumer Reports, stating that it disagrees with the publication’s Surface reliability findings. But it doesn’t offer much in the way of evidence.  Ultimately, what we’re left with here is Microsoft doing what it must do, which is defending Surface. But this is also Microsoft offering no hard evidence that Consumer Reports was wrong to drop its recommendation of Surface.

Consumer Reports is pulling its recommendation of four Microsoft laptops after one of its surveys found that users were complaining about problems with the devices. The consumer advocacy group said Thursday that it can no longer recommend Microsoft laptops or tablets because of poor reliability compared to other brands.

Microsoft is launching a new subscription program for buying Surface computers and tablets in much the same way that many people now purchase smartphones, with no-interest financing for two years and the ability to upgrade to a new device before the term is up.  The push to boost Surface adoption comes amid declining sales of Microsoft hardware for the past three quarters.

In its final quarter of its fiscal 2017, Microsoft more than doubled its profits, saw massive cloud growth, and managed to get a rebate from US taxpayers at the same time.

Microsoft’s long, gentle embrace of Linux continues with the first release candidate of SQL Server 2017.

While Windows 10 is arguably successful from a market share perspective, it is still failing in one big way — the user experience. Windows 8.x was an absolute disaster, and Microsoft’s latest is certainly better than that, but it is still not an enjoyable experience. Quite frankly, the people clutching to Windows 7 aren’t so crazy.

The Apache Foundation has declared that none of its new software projects can include Facebook’s booby-trapped BSD-licensed code.