This didn't take long... The headlines today show that the Bobby Knight of the software world - Steve Ballmer - is at it again. Taking a page out of the, "If you sue, they'll disappear," playbook (as Dr. Phil would say, though, how's that workin' out for ya, Darl?), Ballmer has been rumbling about possible use of Microsoft code in Red Hat distros. He wants the company to be compensated for this theft. (As a side note, I wonder if the sluggardly miasma that is Vista has led to a decrease in illegal copies of the OS... after all, no one wants to go around licking doorknobs...).

My question is, who in Microsoft will compensate me for nearly an hour of work time they stole from me this very morning because, once again, Microsoft ignored users' wishes and automatically installed an update. (Can I send my invoice to Redmond? If I called their support and took up their time they'd send me a bill for $25 or so - actually there's no billing to it - no money first, no service!) This time, though they did supply one of those annoying little yellow thought bubbles at the corner to let me know unnecessarily that they'd shut my system down and done something, then turned it back on for me to deal with, their update failed to check to see if anything important was running, say, SCRIPTS THAT ARE LOADING DATA! Not to mention the issue that their own updates harmed their own Outlook folders by immediately terminating the program, rather than shutting it down properly, so that the standard 15-minute re-boot cycle they forced my machine into ( n.B. Office 2007 is wholly unnecessary unless you have a monstrous machine, as well as a monstrous need to consume all resources you come across!) stretched out quite a bit longer due to having to repair the files they broke.

I don't work with RedHat, but I do work with SUSE on a different server, and I can safely say I've never seen it do something of this magnitude. I don't think Ballmer can rant his way into proof when their code doesn't work well and Linux does. There is only so much code out there in any language - a variable declaration, for example, is something it's hard to do in a new and non-repetitive way. The layman looks at computer code and says, "Gosh, these 1,000 lines are just about the same," evaluating code with the same set of criteria that one would evaluate a book for copyright infringement. You don't need to code much to know that it is not the specific commands you use, but the ARRANGEMENT of the commands into a holistic system that is the master stroke, to which intellectual property rights should apply.

As an example, let me display the first program that many of us learned:

10 PRINT HELLO
20 GOTO 10
30 END

(That's in BASIC, kiddies) If the above is able to be copyrighted, then I might as well claim that, and every one of you who typed that into an Amstrad at Sears or a TRS-80 at Radio Shack now owes me $5. I didn't invent the code or the language itself, but if Microsoft's argument holds true, then I should be able to claim it. Isn't that a ridiculous point, especially since there's really only one efficient way to do something like issue a BASIC print statement.

Some might say, "Well, there must be something there, otherwise he couldn't say he was thinking about suing." The fact of the matter is that anyone can sue anyone else at any point in time for anything. Lawsuits with more face merit than this claim are dismissed routinely by courts all across the country, for logical and reasonable causes. I can sue my neighbor's cat for ruining our lilac bush (it did do that, actually... anyone want to do some free legal work in exchange for some degree of notoriety?), but that would summarily be dismissed, because... it's a cat. I could sue my neighbor and possibly get all the way to court over a $10 bush, but you get the point.

We live in an increasingly digital world, where the lines of the electronic and the tangible are continually blurred (Second Life, anyone?), and attention needs to be paid to this issue. What Microsoft did is tantamount to trespassing, especially because they did not ask first to enter. An acquaintance had a high-speed DSL line installed, and the installers drilled through an electrical cord and started a fire. That company had to repair the damage they did, writing some checks to resolve the issue. If digital endeavors and works are indeed considered to be property, as sanctioned by common sense and legal precedent, then forced updates, especially those that 'break' things, MUST be considered the same.

Just a parting thought - if you came out of your house and saw a guy wrenching on your car to replace a spark plug that he says might foul up, then Mr. Goodwrench jumpsuit or not, the police will be called and he'll be going for a ride, because it is up to the owner of the car to maintain it, not the dealer from whom he purchased it. Trespassing is trespassing, and the Machiavellian in me has to wonder if Ballmer's ranting is nothing more than a smokescreen to draw attention away from the latest update issue.

Apologies to Steven Tyler and the rest of the guys in Aerosmith, but... I'm back in the saddle again! I have been increasingly involved with some additional projects, and have neglected my blog for far too long, so I'm going to try this once again.

In addition to occasional commentary, I'm going to try to examine the impact of technology upon an entire lifetime, though some observations in the life of my soon to arrive son or daughter (October 23 is the due date, and we don't know the gender thanks to a genetic anomaly called the 'Stubbornness gene' - from my side of course).

I welcome debate for anything I post, and I try to be as unopinionated and objective as feasible, but we have to remember that some opinion is at the foundation of progress, else we'd never standardize on anything.