What, exactly, did Microsoft's CEO say about Linux and patents? Here's the transcript.

Let me talk a little bit about that. First, I think the most important -- if I was to leave you with one sort of top level, most important suggestion, is we recommend to all governments that they not get emotionally involved in preferring either software that comes from commercial companies or open source software.

We do license our source code to governments. Governments can look at that source code, see that source code. We actually think our software is far more secure than open source software. It is more secure because we stand behind it, because we fix it, because you actually know who builds it. Nobody ever knows who builds a piece of open source software, where it comes from, who did it.

Second, for any piece of software, the overall cost of having it, the acquisition costs of the license is generally a very small percentage. You have to buy the software, you've got to install it, you've got to deploy it, you've got to develop for it, you've got to manage it, you've got to create and buy applications from it, and all of those costs are probably about 90 percent of the total cost, the acquisition price is probably about 10 percent of the overall cost.

That appears to be the flag Sun Microsystems will be waving today as it officially unveils Solaris 10 (even though the OS won't actually ship until January). Sun is eliminating the fee customers have paid in the past to run Solaris x86 on Intel or AMD servers in a bid to make its software model more like that of Red Hat. In so doing, the Unix server maker hopes to regain ground lost as customers flocked to Linux boxes in the post-bubble era.

Sun manages to garner a lot of attention for new versions of Solaris and is hoping that some of those folks that went with Linux will be tempted to give Solaris another try. This mid-tier pricing model gives Intel and AMD server customers a chance to test Solaris for free.

German PC-Welt magazine reports that Microsoft used an illegal copy of SoundForge 4.5 (Google translation) for editing Wave files shipped with Windows Media Player. You can check that yourself by opening any file in the [Windows location] \Help\Tours\WindowsMediaPlayer\Audio\Wav\ folder in notepad or other editors of your choice and looking at the last line. There you will find a reference to SoundForge 4.5 and also a user called "Deepz0ne" who happen to be one of the founders of an audio software cracking group called Radium.

The last members of the original Winamp team have said goodbye to AOL and the door has all but shut on the Nullsoft era, BetaNews has learned.

Frankel and his team were accustomed to simply brainstorming ideas over coffee and bringing them to the masses without approval. So when Frankel and fellow Nullsoft developer Tom Pepper devised a decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing system, dubbed Gnutella, parent AOL was left in the dark.

However, growing displeasure reached a boiling point with Nullsoft’s unsanctioned release of WASTE -- an encrypted file-sharing network -- in June 2003. Frankel threatened to resign after AOL removed WASTE, but remained with the company long enough to finish Winamp 5.0.

But without those who poured their heart and soul into building the software, Winamp seems destined to meet a fate similar to fellow audio player Sonique, after Lycos saw the departure of its development team. Sonique has stagnated for years, and development ceased altogether last March.

Windows users said actions speak louder than words when it comes to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's promise that Microsoft will fix the various security vulnerabilities in his company's computing platform.

"Trust is not a word that I would use" in relation to Microsoft's promises on security, said Paula Dallabetta, director of product marking at CreekPath Systems Inc., a storage management software producer based in Longmont, Colo.

"People always joke that Microsoft has set the bottom bar in terms of security," she said. Dallabetta said she might begin to trust Microsoft "with the delivery of a product that actually works."

Google's Desktop represents a privacy disaster just waiting to happen, a rival has warned. David Burns, Copernic CEO, says users should know that the giant ad broker intends to mix public and private queries in the future, leveraging its key moneyspinning product: contextual advertising.

"If you lined people and said, 'Stick your hand up if you want Google to know what pictures you have, and what MP3 files you have,' I don't think many would." Burns had offered these capabilities to partners before, but received some pushback.

Google Desktop Search allows users to opt out of sending the company back detailed usage data, but it isn't possible to firewall it completely.

In January, Eric Schmidt said the company's goal was to create a "Google that knows you". With the addition of personal information, it's just taken a giant step towards that goal.

Agents for Microsoft are investigating how its forthcoming Halo 2 game was pirated and distributed on the Internet nearly a month before it hit the shops.

In a communiqué from Vole HQ, in Redmond, Microsoft said it was investigating the leak, adding that it was "aggressively pursuing the source of this illegal act".

Halo 2 is due to go on sale worldwide in the second week of November, but at the start of this week, the game's makers Bungie Studios said work on the title was complete and the game was ready to go into production.

Halo 2's code was supposed to be protected so that there would be no way to distribute it. Vole is adamant that there was no way you would be able to run the hacked version of Halo 2 without illegally modifying your X-Box and you certainly would not be able to take the game online, which is one of the best parts about it, apparently.

"It's a problem that people should have to pay for a whole OS upgrade to get a safe browser," said Michael Cherry, analyst with Directions on Microsoft in Redmond, Wash. "It does look like a certain amount of this is to encourage upgrade to XP."

Microsoft affirmed that its recent security improvements to IE would be made available only to XP users.

"We do not have plans to deliver Windows XP SP2 enhancements for Windows 2000 or other older versions of Windows," the company said in a statement. "The most secure version of Windows today is Windows XP with SP2. We recommend that customers upgrade to XP and SP2 as quickly as possible."

That 49.2 percent of Windows users are left out in the cold when it comes to significant updates to IE and other software.

The company, however, will be entering a segment of the storage market that is already crowded with such established players as Veritas Software. Analysts anticipate that Microsoft will focus on the low end of the market and later try to penetrate the high end, on which Veritas focuses.

"Customers are telling us that backing up and recovering their data is labor-intensive and complex," Bob Muglia, senior vice president of Microsoft's Windows Server Division, said in a statement. "Exponential growth of business-critical data and new government regulations are increasing the cost and complexity of backup and recovery, forcing companies to rethink their data protection planning."

Congratulations to all in the gaim team as they release for download version 1.0.0 (changelog). For those who don't know what gaim is, you could read the full answer on their site but for the lazy: 'Gaim is a multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client for Linux, BSD, MacOS X, and Windows. It is compatible with AIM (Oscar and TOC protocols), ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, and Zephyr networks.' Gaim is also the 2nd most active project on Sourceforge and the 4th most popular on Freshmeat and seemingly all round #1 Free IM client!