Friday, February 8, 2008

Microsoft advertises embedded windows under "Embedded Debian" !

[embedded-debian-microsoft.png] Few days ago, I was looking at my gmail mails. As usual, there was a couple of ads on the right hand side of the screen (they never really bothered me before). But that day, there was something quite different: an advertisement for Microsoft under the term "Embedded Debian" ! Well, I can understand that Microsoft wants to advertise for the keywords "Embedded Debian". After all, if they do provide good embedded OS services, that is only fair. But to do so with a title "Embedded Debian" does not really qualify as fair use of the Debian trademark !

The trouble is that this is something hard to prove, as it appears seldom and apparently randomly. When I google for the terms Embedded Debian, I come up around every second time with nearly the same ad, but taking to www.microsoftembedded-de2.com. This domain does not appear to be connected to Microsoft anyhow (see its whois entry). Some other people tried and never saw the ad, as I did when I looked from another computer (a Windows one, funnily). The www.windowsembeddedsolutions.com link which is depicted above did only show up in my gmail account so far. However, that domain is owned by Microsoft, so they can't deny this comes from them. Why, are we scaring them so much ??

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