... of course, that was in the sweat-drenched febrile mononucleotic whiskey fantasy I experienced a year and a half ago after a particularly nasty go-round with the business end of a chilinduced projectile fecal cannon attached to an eighteen month old boy with far too great a sense of curiousity and far too little a sense of gastric self-preservation, followed by an afternoon in the hot sun sucking down chili dogs, pickled jalapeño peppers, expensive Québecois white beer, and cheap Canadian rye whiskey.

Outside that brief hallucinogenic evening (largely passed in the close company of a cool, damp, porcelain receptacle, pondering which end would need to be inserted next) I guess I would have to say that it sucks. Large excremental chili dogs, in fact.

Ok, on to specifics... it appears that the main thing that is motivating this decision is the lies, not the acts themselves... hence the light regulatory burden they will be bearing.

The fact that the oversight committee will not be able to be existing or former employees has some interest value... though in real life probably not a great deal of value. It's not like they're going to have a hard time finding like minded business people to stick into its chairs.

No, this pretty much sucks.

You do realise that this settlement stands to do terrible damage to the North American software industry in relation to the rest of the world, don't you? We're going to get pounded over the course of the next five years by places like India, Taiwan, and the like because nobody's going to be willing to actually risk money in something new as it will get firmly fisted into the ground once it shows any signs of life.

The only time things will look up is when investors wake up to the day that they realise that nobody but nobody in the rest of the world is willing to buy US made software anymore... because all of that software is designed to bleed their money into a small number of American pockets. It's already starting... I expect that it will play itself out over the next ten years or so. Unfortunately, a lot of people are going to get a lot poorer because of it.

Cell technology has passed the US by... it looks like that, in the long run, software technology will pass them by too.

Who knows... perhaps a new burst of arrogance out of Redmond will cause even more people to start rethinking how they handle their software... the linux system I installed at a friend's business network is a direct result of that thinking... I estimate they saved their business a thousand or so dollars up front, and may in fact save a few thousand more over the coming years in licensing costs alone as their business grows by having that system in place. They're already blow away by its reliability and perfect functioning in comparison to the Windows based system that it replaces, and the price is looking very right to them indeed... coupled with the fact that they can have no fear whatsoever about having it messed with due to a license audit or the like. I anticipate that I'm going to end up installing a "data dump" system (prolly stick it in postgres or something) for them sometime next year for them to put all their business critical data into. Putting it in an old cheap PII (these guys are not rich) and pasting a decent front end on it will mean that they will be able to do what they need to for some years to come, and that they won't have to worry about it disappearing out the door in some stupid license audit or something. It also means that it will move their office away from one vendor dependence... and one step closer to being able to choose their platform instead of having their platform choose their tools for them.

They're also interested in an alternative client in the longer run... as they put it to me, "I can see the value proposition... it's just that I can't exploit it right now because some of the stuff we have to have means that we have to have Windows."

Another way to put it is when they get themselves to a point where a more formal licensing situation becomes more important (they are only three people, four including me) then I bet I will be able to kill on price and features compared to MSFT... and the day when they will have to more formally legitimise their software will come within the next year or two. I've already pointed the owners at some of the more interesting features found in the fine print... I can but hope that they will actually read it.