Loxosceles

Microsoft finished writing Vista today. This reminded me of what Eben Moglen said at the 2005 FSF associate member meeting. To quote from my notes:

Microsoft, he said, is "one failed upgrade away from serious trouble". It's possible that Longhorn will be that upgrade. A 3-GHz chip is required to run its kernel. So, Microsoft has committed for a RTM (release to manufacturer) date of May 2006, so that machines with Longhorn installed can be sold for Christmas 2006. It's not clear that they will be able to make that deadline. According to plan, the consumer version is hitting the market before the server version, which may be a mistake. Longhorn's server version is supposed to be out in mid-2007, which will probably be more like early 2008. IBM isn't worried - they say they'll have everybody running free software on their servers by then. "Some of the largest and most powerful businesses" share our opinion of what software the majority of servers should be running in 2008.

Just a little bit of optimism for today.