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_______________MICROSOFT HAS YOUR NUMBER BY ANDREW LEONARD (01/27/99)
	I'm hardly a fan of Microsoft: I have a Mac at home; I used to support people with PCs running Windows and hate the OS; and I work at Sun Microsystems. But I have to point out that registration of software to run on individual computers is hardly anything new; it's fairly standard in the UNIX world. When I worked for UC-Berkeley, I won a free copy of Adobe Illustrator for UNIX. When I installed it on my Sun server (about four or five years ago), I had to send Adobe the hostid (a unique string of characters) of my server and wait for them to send me a password with which to install the software. I've installed other kinds of software on Sun systems in the same way. Better to go after Microsoft for its triumph in showing that masterful marketing can help inferior software to win out over much better software than for implementing something which is already standard on competing platforms. -- Steve Goldfield, Ph.D. Microsoft's John Duncan says that piracy "ultimately ... will halt innovation in this industry." While I'm no proponent of rampant piracy, Duncan's argument flies in the face of the emerging open source software movement, which Salon has covered so well, a movement that demonstrates that innovation is not linked solely to profit incentive. Sure, shareware programmers want some reimbursement, but it's not the sole focus of their being, unlike Bill Gates. Microsoft has admitted as much in the infamous Halloween documents. Microsoft claims the registration process will be easy. Then again, they said Plug-and-Play would work. Microsoft's conduct long ago crossed the line; the company clearly has no shame and doesn't care that anything it does will have any real effect on its position. -- Scott McKim SALON | Jan. 29, 1999

R E C E N T L Y+| UNEQUAL RIGHTS FOR HATERS BY ISHMAEL REED

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