I recently came across a Yahoo Finance arti­cle about Intel’s $1.45 Bil­lion fine in Europe. In it was this:

“The fine against the world’s biggest chip maker rep­re­sents a huge vic­tory for Intel’s Sil­i­con Val­ley rival, Advanced Micro Devices Inc., or AMD, the No. 2 sup­plier of micro­proces­sors to PC makers.”

Let’s con­tem­plate what this “vic­tory” really means.

Intel invests its resources into some of the best and bright­est minds in the world. Intel applies itself, and as Cap­i­tal­ism Mag­a­zine rec­og­nizes “a mar­ket for com­puter chips would not exist at all if Intel did not invent, develop, and con­stantly inno­vate the chips that become the brains of com­put­ers.” Any­one in the indus­try can rec­og­nize the effect Intel has had on the land­scape. To my mind AMD should be thank­ing Intel for the amaz­ing mar­ket­place, and oppor­tu­nity, that their pio­neer­ing efforts have created.

Instead AMD sub­mits Intel to the loot­ing Euro­pean Union by suing Intel and lob­by­ing reg­u­la­tors for the past 5 years. The result: the EU is steal­ing $1.45 bil­lion from Intel. Money that Intel won by sell­ing it’s inno­va­tions to con­sumers who freely paid for them.

Why is all this hap­pen­ing? Neelie Kroes, the EU Com­pe­ti­tion Com­mis­sioner, said “Intel did not com­pete fairly, frus­trat­ing inno­va­tion and reduc­ing con­sumer wel­fare in the process.” These “unfair” tac­tics include offer­ing rebates to big cus­tomers, a com­mon prac­tice of any busi­ness wish­ing to entice more. The EU requests of Intel were so vague that they left Intel “mys­ti­fied” about what it should change.

But the real kicker in all of this is what AMD has done to itself and to all who value free­dom. Instead of fight­ing the loot­ers along­side Intel, as it should have done, it feed them to lions. AMD has helped to usher in a dystopian Atlas Shrugged style world in which the best and bright­est among us must work for free so the loot­ing masses can feast on their efforts.

I won­der, what will Dirk Meyer, AMD’s Chief Exec­u­tive who said this deci­sion was “an impor­tant step toward estab­lish­ing a truly com­pet­i­tive mar­ket,” be say­ing when the loot­ers come after him?

• Yahoo Finance: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Record-euro106-billion-EU-apf-15225753.html
• Cap­i­tal­ism Mag­a­zine: http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=5564

Here is a great arti­cle describ­ing how the French Police saved money with Ubuntu. It starts out by saying

“France’s Gen­darmerie Nationale, the country’s national police force, says it has saved mil­lions of dol­lars by migrat­ing its desk­top soft­ware infra­struc­ture away from Microsoft Win­dows and replac­ing it with the Ubuntu Linux distribution.”

“…has saved up to €50 mil­lion on licens­ing and main­te­nance costs as a result of the migra­tion strategy”

“The Gen­darmerie migra­tion also demon­strates the sig­nif­i­cant cost sav­ings that gov­ern­ments can get from adopt­ing open source soft­ware. As the global finan­cial down­turn con­tin­ues to put pres­sure on bud­gets, gov­ern­ments are going to increas­ingly look to open source soft­ware as a way to cut IT costs. We have recently seen moves in this direc­tion from Canada and the UK.”

I found it inter­est­ing that they state the biggest dif­fer­ence between Ubuntu and Win­dows, from their point of view, was the icons

“Mov­ing from XP to Ubuntu, how­ever, proved very easy. The two biggest dif­fer­ences are the icons and the games. Games are not our priority.”

I am also very encour­aged that they’re con­cerned about open stan­dards. I wish more busi­nesses and insti­tu­tions though this way and I hope the Gendarmerie’s exam­ple pro­mul­gate open standards.

“[The Gendarmerie] has found that open source soft­ware is bet­ter at han­dling open standards.”