Not long back, Microsoft proposed to the courts that they should be allowed to make restitution for their decades of illegal business practices through a plan touted as an effort to benefit poor public schools (by giving them refurbished PCs loaded with the Windows OS) but one that was, quite obviously, a simple strategy to expand market share. Luckily, US District Judge Fredrick Motz didn’t buy it.
In an amusing tit-for-tat, Linux OS vendor RedHat had previously offered to “enhance” Microsoft’s proposed settlement by donating the Linux OS to every school in the country if MS would spend all of the $1billion it offered to contribute on hardware alone (as this would extend the number of schools that could be helped): “Under the Red Hat proposal, by removing Microsoft’s higher-priced software from the settlement equation, Microsoft could provide the school districts with many more computers–greatly extending the benefits Microsoft seeks to provide school districts with their proposed settlement.” Ouch! If that doesn’t call a spade a spade, I’m not shure what would, outside of writing “Your motives are transparent and we’re telling everyone” on a RedHat post-it note.