Weekly news wrap-up: Microsoft convicted of “piracy,” Red Hat lures customers from other distros

We often think Microsoft’s licensing cops go above and beyond what’s practically necessary to stamp out software “piracy.” Witness a couple of weeks ago, when the software giant tried to tell schools that removing Windows from computers donated to them is illegal.
So it’s the mother of all ironies that Microsoft itself has been convicted of software piracy in a French court. Tina Gasperson tracked down the little-reported case from late 2001. Perhaps it’s only piracy when it’s a Microsoft product being copied? When you’re a huge monopoly, you might be tempted to think that way.

Meanwhile, Microsoft complained that proposed antitrust sanctions would let “hackers” run wild on Microsoft software, as if that wasn’t already happening.

Inching closer …

The Mozilla project leaders released an RC2 version of its leading-up-to 1.0 release this week. We tracked down project leader Mitchell Baker and asked her what’s next.

Declaration of war?

Red Hat caused a bit of a stir this week by going “all competitive” and announcing rebates to customers switching from other Linux distributions.

Newly released