This week I was troubleshooting a Windows 7 issue I was having: on a fresh install, it seemed I was unable to install new software from my network, though installing from a DVD or file downloaded and saved on the local machine was working just fine. After the requisite amount of cursing flung in the direction of Redmond, I eventually found a message thread that described a problem very close to what I was seeing, with a resolution. The poster’s PC was crashing randomly, mine was only when executing a file from a Samba share — I could copy files to or from the Samba share, but not execute a file (e.g., execute the Firefox or OpenOffice.org install programs).
Turns out that if you set “security = share” in your smb.conf, you will cause Windows 7 to crash most ungracefully with a BSOD memory dump that disappears quite quickly on you. Change the line in smb.conf to “security = user” and Windows 7 starts behaving again.
Kinda sad that a single setting on a remote machine would so easily cause a BSOD in Windows 7. Worst part is that it’s not an unusual setting (it was the default until not too long ago). One would expect at least a “normal” Windows error message rather than a full system crash.
Today Microsoft released some GPL driver code for Linux for some hardware. Why? Well, so that the hardware could be better virtualized in a VM running Linux on a Windows host. Yippee. Well I’m sure this will help some people. It does mean that FLOSS is influencing them, and that is a good thing.
In contrast, the FSF made a press release last Thursday, quoted below in its entirety. So Microsoft is trying to win people over, whether it’s with really useful stuff or not, it is Free this time… and the FSF is just yelling at people. Who’s going to make more friends here?
Last week, Microsoft extended the terms of their Community Promise to implementations of the ECMA 334 and 335 standards. You might think this means it’s safe to write your software in C#. However, this promise is full of loopholes, and it’s nowhere near enough to make C# safe.
### Why Worry About C#? ###
Since we published Richard’s article about Mono[1] last week, some people have been asking us why we’re expressing special concern about free software developers relying on C# and Mono, instead of other languages. Sun probably has patents that cover Java. Maybe IBM has patents that cover C compilers. “Shouldn’t we discourage the use of these too?” they ask.
iTWire claims their list of Top 10 reasons why Steve Ballmer should be certified insane is offered tongue-in-cheek, but it is vaguely possible that some people might take it more seriously than that. The list counts down, clocking in #5 as: “Ballmer can get a little quirky when Linux is mentioned. ‘Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.’ Doesn’t sound completely sane to me.
