FOSS smashed one Microsoft monopoly. After 20 years of failure, it's time to smash another
After 20 years of failure, it's time to smash another Word up Rupert Goodwins Rupert Goodwins Register columnist Published mon 27 Jul 2026 // 09:30 UTC OPINION The best way to bust out of jail is not to get locked up in the first place. There are options once you're inside, legal and illegal, and all are complicated, time-consuming, and probably won't work. Microsoft Office users have been banged up since 1990, a 36-year stretch normally reserved for the most horrendous crimes.
- ▪After 20 years of failure, it's time to smash another Word up Rupert Goodwins Rupert Goodwins Register columnist Published mon 27 Jul 2026 // 09:30 UTC OPINION The best way to bust out of jail is not to get locked up in the first place.
- ▪There are options once you're inside, legal and illegal, and all are complicated, time-consuming, and probably won't work.
- ▪Microsoft Office users have been banged up since 1990, a 36-year stretch normally reserved for the most horrendous crimes.
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Record
| Original publisher | The Register |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theregister.com/columnists/2026/07/27/foss-smashed-one-microsoft-monopoly-after-20-years-of-failure-its-time-to-smash-another/5278040 |
| Publication time | Mon, 27 Jul 2026 10:30:00 +0200 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-27T08:31:05.455Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-27T08:31:05.455Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | z7fcZeWGMzEA · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
(function() { let windowUrl = window.location.href; windowUrl = windowUrl.substring(windowUrl.indexOf('?') + 1); let messageElement = document.querySelector('.shareableMessage'); if (windowUrl && windowUrl.includes('code') && windowUrl.includes('expires')) { messageElement.style.display = 'block'; } })(); columnists FOSS smashed one Microsoft monopoly. After 20 years of failure, it's time to smash another Word up Rupert Goodwins Rupert Goodwins Register columnist Published mon 27 Jul 2026 // 09:30 UTC OPINION The best way to bust out of jail is not to get locked up in the first place. There are options once you're inside, legal and illegal, and all are complicated, time-consuming, and probably won't work.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Register.
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