"Governor Thomas was so pleased with the construction of this stove... that he offered to give me a patent for the sole vending of them for a term of years; but I declined it from a principle that was weighed with me on such occasions, viz., That, as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously."

Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography.


New! GNUveau's latest project, the linux port to the IBM 2105 Enterprise Storage Server, known as the Shark, shown below running a 2.6.8 linux kernel. Click on the image for info about where this particular Shark came from on its way to GNUveau. Shown is a terminal connecting to the Shark's original service interface, and a whois of the IP address.

Still using proprietary Micro$oft products? Why. Micro$oft dosen't. They just make poor software to sell to you. Want proof? Here you go:
I got this entry in the logs of one of my webservers:

207.46.98.138 - - [10/Dec/2004:13:37:07 -0500] "GET /dawn/dawnpatrol.html HTTP/1.0" 200 1037 "-" "msnbot/0.3 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"

So I decided to investigate a bit. It seems as though Micro$oft was scanning my site for their search engine listings, without my requesting such. This is not a normal practice by the other search engines on the internet. One must usually request being listed. So I looked up the IP address. Here is the whois output:

OrgName: Microsoft Corp
OrgID: MSFT
Address: One Microsoft Way
City: Redmond
StateProv: WA
PostalCode: 98052
Country: US

NetRange: 207.46.0.0 - 207.46.255.255
CIDR: 207.46.0.0/16
NetName: MICROSOFT-GLOBAL-NET
NetHandle: NET-207-46-0-0-1
Parent: NET-207-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Assignment
NameServer: NS1.MSFT.NET
NameServer: NS5.MSFT.NET
NameServer: NS2.MSFT.NET
NameServer: NS3.MSFT.NET
NameServer: NS4.MSFT.NET

Scanning coming directly from Micro$oft's internal network. So I looked a bit deeper, to find out what operating system the "MSNbot" was using. Here are the results:

TCP/IP Fingerprint:
SInfo(V=3.50%P=i686-pc-linux-gnu%D=12/10%Time=41B9EC91%0=-1%C=-)

Amazing. Micro$oft is using GNU/Linux software. Why are they not using their own software? Maybe they realize that it is inferior. Maybe what they do not tell you is that their closed, proprietary software is riddles with backdoors that they put there, just to spy on you, and they don't want to be spied on themselves, so they choose software that is known to be stable and secure, open source GNU/Linux. Maybe they are stealing open source code from developers everywhere and incorporating it into their closed source operating system and applications. Nobody would know the difference. You can't look at their code, as you can with ours. I'll let you make the decision for yourself. Keep the internet free. Keep your life. Keep the truth. Ditch Big Brother. Boycott Micro$oft.