You are all criminals

Somehow a post I made on slashdot.org wasn't posted. Maybe the moderators misunderstood it. What I essentially did was the following:

You are all criminals. You are all guilty of theft. Every one of you.

I'm not going to tell you why you are criminals nor what you are guilty of, just suffice it to say that you are.

Then I went on to say that no, I wasn't really claiming everyone is a criminal. I was just writing it that way to demonstrate what Microsoft is claiming.

This is like claiming you have stolen something without claiming what it is. It is about saying you belong in jail for doing so but never proving in a court that you actually stole something or even stating what you stole.

This is the impact of Microsoft's claims. Anyone using Linux has stolen from Microsoft. Microsoft won't tell us what part we have stolen nor what can be done to remedy the issue. They just want you to pay them some money. You can't evaluate what the value of that is you just have to give what they tell you.

In most areas of law to publicly state and to allow something to be printed such as this makes this slanderous. To make such a comment and allow it to be printed and to not correct it makes it libel.

From my reading on the web about this issue everyone appears to agree that this is just FUD meant to influence decision makers. One particularly important decision maker right now is Dell Computers. They are releasing a line of new computers that have Ubuntu (ubuntu.com) installed for the home user. According to Michael Dell's blog he uses Linux on his home computer and Ubuntu is his distro of choice. There are other sizable issues involved here such as the GNU GPL v.3. This document attempts to undo the exploit of a loop hole in the GPL v.2. It even attempts to make it retroactive to the GPL v.2.