[ale] OT: newsflash: Microsoft is still the devil...open source beware

[Jonathan Rickman]

On 8/1/07, Randy Ramsdell <rramsdell at livedatagroup.com> wrote:
>
> What you fail to understand and fail miserably it the fact that
> Microsoft's viral ways have caused many many problems in the computer
> industry that I work in and PJ/Others simply remember that and you
> simply want to forget and wash over it as if it didn't happen. It is
> amazing how people like to classify or judge others based upon their
> emotional level, also. Anyhoo,  do  you remember  how microsoft added
> hooks to JAVA so that anyone running a UNIX flavored OS was unable to
> run the application.



I didn't fall off the turnip truck yesterday. Transvirtual, the producer of
the first open source java virtual machine created in 1996 and GPL'ed in
1998 (Kaffe OpenVM) added the Microsoft extensions to their virtual machine
almost immediately. Microsoft actually funded the work on the extensions.
Nothing was stopping Sun from doing the same, or even including Kaffe's
extensions, as it was GPL software. Moreover, nothing was stopping YOU from
downloading and running Kaffe just as I and many others did on Linux and
various flavors of Unix. I wont get into the subtle technical errors in your
argument, other than to point out that it was not the "Microsoft version of
Java" that broke things, but rather a set of extensions they added to their
development environment that made Java apps produced there incompatible with
virtual machine implementations that did not provide support for those
extensions...primarily Sun's.

Emotion clouds judgement, and apparently alters history for some.

--
Jonathan "sell the propaganda somewhere else my friend" Rickman
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