One man man 
I am not a friend of Microsoft, really not. But that is really hard cinema!
In the last 12 weeks i tried a bunch of different Linux version, most of them did not really work properly. Some were really bad and some were well ... Anyhow "usable". Speedwise they were all better than Windows Vista on my test laptop. The worst were Freespire, followed from Ubuntu 7.04 and then Mandriva. Funny, that on Mandriva it was the only bootloader which did not break the Vista booting. But other than that it was not really well done and slow. The best one in the end what Ubuntu Studio 7.1 with Gnome, it works really well so far on this machine here.
Now what is to say about Mandriva? the CEO wrote in Open Letter to Steve Ballmer. Both are working in a software company and doing business to make money and not just for fun (at least this is my personal impression). Well the story is more or less written in the Open Letter from Francois.
Here just my opinion about the letter itself:
- Hey, if you write an open letter, let it do by one who know better how to do it than you
- Pan if you do business do not get scared if you get into a competition, thats how business works
- If you get into the competition when it comes to an OS vendor you hould not be surprise that someone like Microsoft thus wants to be a part of it, thats how business works
- If you have to make things cheap enough to sell them, well again This is how business works
All in all i must admit that this open letter was a stupid thing in my opinion. You should not waste your time in writing things like this, you should concentrate on your OS and make it as good as possible and then start a real competition. And Honestly: You are in the OS and that marked beside a lot of other Linux distributions, you should know it better.
As usual ... my 2 cents 
