On Tue, 30 Jan 2007, T.J. Duchene wrote: > Just my two cents for the discussion... > > While I dislike Microsoft's business practices, its mentality of "we are > the sole innovator", and most specifically, its very poor operating > system design, it is here to stay. Do people believe that Microsoft is innovative? They really are not innovative. In fact, they are one of the least innovative software companies I can think of. Most of their better ideas come from outside the company, but they don't have much that looks original to me. > We use Windows when it is the best tool for a particular job, and there > is no shame in that. Maybe shame isn't the right word, but there must be some disappointment in finding out that you don't have a better option. > The sad part of the entire mess is that a lot of people, and indeed the > general public, have the perception that FOSS and Microsoft are bitter > enemies. We aren't enemies at all, as there is plenty of FOSS software > for the Windows OS. We simply disagree as to philosophy of licensing > and standardization. A number of very charasmatic people, like Richard > Stallman and Bruce Perens, have elevated this disagreement to the > stature of a jihad - with Microsoft as the primary target. There is good reason to be concerned about Microsoft. For example, have you read this?: A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html > Let's be honest, at the very least. Microsoft erased 50 different > standards for supremely incompatible operating systems in the 80's. > Microsoft was one of the original signatories to POSIX. If Microsoft > had never existed, we would live in a very different world today, and > not necessarily a better one. Not *necessarily* a better one, but *probably* a better one. > I think that while a confrontational style of debate is valuable, I do > not believe that it will bring about the change that is so desperately > desired. I personally believe that if open source is to succeed in > changing the world of software, it must continue on its current path of > solid technical and operational achievement. In other words, "talk is > cheap". Wasting precious energy chewing old bones is the sport of the > reporters and the news media. We have better things to do. The best > stance for FOSS to take in my opinion, is similar to Ghandi's philosophy > of passive civil disobedience - change through action but not through > confrontation. We make software, we do it well, and we have the best > licenses based on responsibility to the public. Complaining about Microsoft is a good way to get attention for the important issue of software licensing. We need all the attention we can get. That's why Stallman does things like this: http://badvista.fsf.org/ > I find that either FreeBSD or Linux are very solid OS's and perfect for > servers. Sure. I mostly use Linux because it's easy to access it. All of our newer supercomputers are running it. All the software I find will compile on Linux with gcc (maybe it will compile on FreeBSD, but I haven't tried it). Some software comes in binaries for Linux but not for FreeBSD. For better or worse, Linux has become the de facto standard OS in scientific computing, at least in my fields (mostly stats and genetics). I really can't see FreeBSD overtaking Linux, so I'm going to stick with Linux. I have nothing really against FreeBSD, but I do think the GPL is better than the Berkeley license because the GPL does not allow binary-only distributions that hijack the code into being proprietary (though free, but only as in beer). Mike