[ale] "What's So Bad About Microsoft?"

[Dow Hurst]

You just don't get much anymore from closed source without paying thru the 
nose compared to the offerings of open source.  We know that MS is security 
wise much less secure and with constant large dangerous holes being found. 
That will not end for a long time.  The source is available under Linux while 
costs thru the nose for closed source.  The motives of closed source companies 
tend to be selfish while open source projects are selfless or "less selfish" 
in nature.  Software installation is much more advanced in the open source 
world over closed source.  So those are reasonable facts to use and not very 
subjective.  Closed source has focused useability while open source tends to 
have more options and ways to combine the software with other open source or 
closed source software.  Disrupting standards is a classic MS ploy.  Take 
TCP/IP as an example and show how Samba recovered the world from MS's poor 
implementation of it.

The past treatment of companies joining in agreements with MicroSoft in the 
past would be good to note.  The MS sharky attitude has destroyed many 
companies with promising futures who thought they were getting a break by 
working with MS instead of competing.  After MS got control, they were 
compromised or broken up.  Specifically, I remember some company with a 
product for color matching or some kind of publishing control software that 
had an agreement that MS would pay a license for their software.  Within a 
year of the deal, MS had gotten enough info to create their own in house 
version and destroyed the original company.  It's too long ago for me to 
remember the company name or product.  Oh well, MS has had a long history of 
being Borg like.
Dow


Jeff Hubbs wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-03-15 at 05:50, Geoffrey wrote:
> 
> 
>>I would suggest providing facts such as when they tampered with 
>>evidence.  For example, when they attempted to demonstrate that removing 
>>IE from Windows slowed it down dramatically, the did so with a video. 
>>During this presentation, it was noted that the before and after videos 
>>were tainted in that they were presented from different computers.
> 
> 
> Falsifying evidence at trial was one of the things I had thought of, but
> that's really secondary to the main point that I would want to make,
> which centers on their being illegal monopolists.  I can't really hit on
> little specific differences because my likely audience won't really have
> an appreciation.
> 
> One thing that I sometimes say, at risk of sounding arrogant, is that I
> actually promoted and pioneered the use of WinNT at two places of work
> but that after working with Linux for so long, Windows just seems quaint
> to me now.  And, it does.  All I've seen in the past year or two of
> Windows machines makes me wonder, why would anyone want this?  Where's
> GIMP, GhostView, ImageMagick, cdrecord, Octave?  Where are my compilers
> and interpreters?
> 
> - Jeff
> 
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> 

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Dow Hurst                  Office: 770-499-3428            *
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