http://www.euronet.nl/users/frankvw/IhateMS.html

That article paints a pretty grim picture of the future under Microshaft,
particularly given the implications of the .Net strategy (search for
"dot-net") and Palladium. Very bleak, very Orwellian. I'm seriously
fucking glad I use Linux, which is a perfectly viable alternative for the
desktop...at least for now. Which leads me to my question: Is desktop
Linux safe from Micro$oft's evil schemes? Is there any serious possibility
of M$ 'killing' Linux as a viable desktop alternative?

--
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Registered Linux user 337927 - http://counter.li.org/

john wrote:

I would see them buying up some defunct Unix company and using them to
spread fear in the customer base :]

john blithely blithered
Any good user of computers who knows anything about software is going to
use linux. Linux has an extremely loyal user base (myself included), and
will probably die when the sun explodes. Good software is a great thing!

However, MS isn't going anywhere either. They drive the economy and put
food on plates, crappy software or not. Well, more *because* it's crappy
software. Our company pulls in a goodish revenue stream just stomping on
viruses and adware and making their pooters boot. A steady paycheque is
a great thing!

Besides, several years of sales experience in the field have convinced
me that most people *want* crappy software. Fine, but yer gonna have to
pay me to do it.

--
HUG A REVOLUTIONARY

john wrote:
: http://www.euronet.nl/users/frankvw/IhateMS.html
:
: That article paints a pretty grim picture of the future under
: Microshaft, particularly given the implications of the .Net strategy
: (search for "dot-net") and Palladium. Very bleak, very Orwellian. I'm
: seriously fucking glad I use Linux, which is a perfectly viable
: alternative for the desktop...at least for now. Which leads me to my
: question: Is desktop Linux safe from Micro$oft's evil schemes? Is
: there any serious possibility of M$ 'killing' Linux as a viable
: desktop alternative?



If the Corporate world and the court systems allow M$ to destroy Linux don't
you think that will show how corrupt those systems are?
Linux desktop wont be killed off. M$ will try, but not succeed because
right now it is the most secure system there is. There are too many top
Governments using it too. As long as the Corporate world and Governments
use it I believe the Linux desktop will have a chance.
--

-----
I can see the furture in your @ss and its full of shit.

I think there's a strong parallel between sales of gasoline and sales
of Microsoft software in this country. Both are more deep into our
economy than the lubricating oil that's in a car's gearbox. This is
the first of two things that make change difficult.

The second is, Microsoft's large cashbox warchest. The OS market is
presently spelled, for most ignorant people, 'microsoft'. Reading
Microsoft publications, I think I see how very very far Microsoft goes
to keep *make* people ignorant so as to keep it that way. For this
reason, there is no open market for OS products, and Microsoft seems
full of their knowledgeable people to keep it that way. Where the
usual PR fails, they have recourse to their war chest. What is that?
$80 billion? Which can buy immense amounts of legal process to slow
corrections from decades to *generations*.

So if things look good for Linux, that suits me fine. But I think
reality is like we're walking west on the Great Plains and out there
on the horizon there we see the Rocky Mountains to get over. Key
point, let's not confuse the one kind of territory with the other.

Cheers -- Martha Adams

Martha H Adams wrote:

Last I heard it was 45-50 bil. Seems there "savings" is dropping.

On Wed, 03 Mar 2004 10:40:46 -0500, Daeron wrote:

How about just bankrolling some defunct Unix company and getting them to
claim that Linux contains Unix IP. That might be worth a try

Ian

On Wed, Mar 03, 2004 at 04:06:44PM +0000, Handover Phist wrote:
And any savvy technical manager or government procurement officer knows
that there is *no* way micros~1 can ever be trusted. So if GNU/Linux
went away tomorrow, nobody would switch back to windows.

--
GNU/Linux revenues last quarter: $1 Billion.
micros~1 revenues last quarter: $4 Billion.
It's no longer a question of windows or GNU, it's a question of *Unix* or GNU.

On Wed, Mar 03, 2004 at 03:37:36PM +0000, john wrote:
Piece of cake. All micros~1 has to do is get all the corporations and
governments that have finally rid themselves of windows, and they'll be
all set to take over the world.

--
GNU/Linux revenues last quarter: $1 Billion.
micros~1 revenues last quarter: $4 Billion.
It's no longer a question of windows or GNU, it's a question of *Unix* or GNU.

On Wed, Mar 03, 2004 at 04:17:24PM +0000, pc wrote:
But of course. If two companies are competitors, of equal size, with
one using micros~1 and the other using Free Software, which one will
survive?

No company can hope to compete with those that use Free Software. There
is simply no way to recover the lost profits from paying the licensing
fees.

--
GNU/Linux revenues last quarter: $1 Billion.
micros~1 revenues last quarter: $4 Billion.
It's no longer a question of windows or GNU, it's a question of *Unix* or GNU.

john wrote:
I think Linux is a much bigger threat to Microsoft than Microsoft is to
Linux. Microsoft isn't badmouthing Linux for no reason. Linux keeps
getting better, easier to use, and more well known. The only thing
Windows keeps increasing is its price and the number of its security
flaws.

Additionally, Linux is decentralized. There are many excellent distros,
and even the loss of any one person doing kernel development would not
stop Linux.

If Microsoft is the Borg, Linux is the Borg's Borg. Resistance is futile,
MS will fall to Linux. :-)

--
Tony Sivori

In article <pan.2004.03.04.01.36.54.773713@yahoo.com>, on Wed, 03 Mar 2004
20:36:57 -0500, Tony Sivori wrote:

Microsoft has only one viable threat against Linux (and all Free
Software): software patents.

--
ITB: How worried are you about the number of attacks on Microsoft software?
BG: Actually in a sense it's very good to have this maturity ...
-- IT Business interview with Bill Gates, Chairman, Microsoft. 10/29/2003
http://www.itbusiness.ca/index.asp?t...n=61&sid=53897

On Wed, 03 Mar 2004 15:37:36 +0000, john wrote:

Of course the bits about MS's dotnet strategy are missing one tiny little
detail. MS doesn't provide dotnet services themselves. They briefly toyed
with the concept (known as hailstorm) but decided there was no money in it
and abandoned it.

Now, considering how this tiny flaw in this guys theory completely
invalidates much of his argument, you're kind of foolish to believe it too,
aren't you?

on 2004-03-04, in <pan.2004.03.04.01.36.54.773713@yahoo.com>,
these words of wisdom from Tony Sivori did appear:
Kwibbian-kwibbian-kel!

Erik Funkenbusch wrote:

Maybe in this instance, but given M$'s trackrecord, it's all too easy to
believe they're capable of any evil money-grubbing scheme imaginable.
Besides, that wasn't the only argument. We also have to worry about M$'s
proprietary document formats and protocols, DRM, vendor blackmail and the
hundred other monopoly abuses, which is all part of their masterplan to
lock in their victims (ahem, I mean 'customers'). M$ dependence is *the*
threat to Linux on the desktop. And you couldn't possibly be dishonest
enough to claim this dependence is a result of the superiority of M$
products.

--
Powered by Mandrake Linux
Registered Linux user 337927 - http://counter.li.org/

<lol>any chance? linux was never alive</lol>

thank you for the joke, i really needed a good laugh!

leenouchs who?

-----
twenty years from now the world will still be enjoying
microsoft windows, word, excel, powerpoint and access
.... so throw away your stupid linux and stop being an
idiot ... catch the trade winds in your sails ...
wake up ... dream ... moderate.

-----begin cola signature-----
version: microsoft v5.0.1

id48fuck98youau2aj96pu6ssy/q0wmqnx5you+asshole98xx8b=

-----end cola signature-----

cola_moderator wrote:

Hahah, thats implying people 'enjoy' them now dumbass.

Erik Funkenbusch wrote:

Whatever draws your conclusion this way? In the Seattle Times there was
an ad for programmers a couple of months ago for the new Palladium
project. Not sure if this ties in with .NET or not, but the fact of
severely restraining what goes on ones computer is enough for M$ to
shoot themselves seriously in the foot if they do push this on the
market shelves.

On Wed, 03 Mar 2004 15:37:36 +0000, john wrote:

I don't think Linux is too susceptible to MS's evil schemes. If it were,
MS would have already used them. What I think may happen is that MS may
try something new in its history; it may abandon dirty tricks and focus
completely on beating Linux on technology.

Technology is Linux's Achilles heel. It seems to have a relatively weak
development process; it's technology is weak and it develops very slowly.
If we're talking about the desktop here, it's especially glaring. Gnome
has been under development for 7 years, Gtk 10 years. These are flawed,
awkward, limited technologies, nowhere near a match for Microsoft's
counterparts. On the other hand, time is on Linux's side. It's
like the tortoise chasing the hare. Microsoft, the hare, can't take a
nap, because sooner or later the tortoise will catch up. So Microsoft has
to keep finding new places to go. It's clear that MS has been struggling
since the mid 1990's to find places to go with Office. OpenOffice is
pretty bad right now, but sooner or later it'll get good enough to
compete.

MS will also systematically erase any purported advantage Linux has.
There was once a time not too long ago when Linux's chief advantage was
its stability (compared to Win9x). I remember the dread Linux advocates
felt at the prospect of losing that crucial advantage. However, the
nightmare is here; MS is pretty successfully moving its base to XP and
the Win2000 line, which are both stable enough to make the stability
argument obsolete.

I predict another even bigger nightmare is on the way, namely
losing the security battle. I predict security will eventually go from
being an MS liability to an MS advantage. There's no question that MS is
getting deservedly clobbered on this point right now, and no doubt to fix
their problems will take some major retooling. But there's also no
doubt that MS is finally taking security seriously, and no doubt that
when you've got as many billions as MS, major retooling is an option.

Now, what about Linux? The way I see it, it's getting a free ride at the
moment. There's a false sense of security because you don't have the
brain dead easy, high profile attacks like email viruses. But the truth
is, there's nothing all that secure about a typical Linux installation.
Plenty of security holes turn up in Linux and its attendent software, and
in practice these don't usually get plugged that fast because people are
lazy and there's no universal system update mechanism. And what is the
Linux community doing to move toward better security? Nothing. Just
shooting spitballs at MS and resting complacently.

So what if, come 2008, MS actually delivers a highly secure OS to the
masses, just as it delivered a stable one a few years ago? How will
Linux, with its totally disorganized development process,
deal with it? I don't think they'll be able to. Unless somebody
starts planning for that now, unless the Linux community adopts a new
engineering discipline now, or a new magic bullet security technology,
the Linux community will look like a bunch of stooges.

And what if on top of that, MS actually comes up with some appealing new
software -- not an ever more bloated version of Office, but something
genuinely useful? What if from the vapors and confusion of .Net,
something useful condenses? What if, after 20 years of trying, they get
some really cool new kind of UI, or some halfway decent AI, or a
breakthrough in speech recognition, or a combination of things? It's at
least possible. And in that case, not many are going to stick around,
wrestling with this clunky junk heap of an OS, and getting owned by every
script kiddie on the net. In that case, I think Linux is dead.

Can MS do it? I don't know. Over the years, they've done a lot of
screwy things in terms of technology, but they've outmaneuvered the world
in business. So, I just don't know.

Now, finally, what do you really mean by "killing" Linux as a viable
desktop alternative? What's there to kill? As it stands, it's not all
that successful on the desktop. I can only think of 2 plausible senses in
which MS might successfully kill Linux.

1) MS keeps Linux from ever breaking into the mainstream market (Joe
Sixpack and friends)?
2) Interest in Linux wanes to the point where the linux
:\------------

hacker community
is too small and receives too little support to be able to maintain Linux.
(e.g. they can't keep up with hardware changes, drivers, and new software
technologies enough to keep Linux viable.)

I consider both of these scenarios possible, but while I think the
first is fairly likely, the second seems unlikely in the near term.

Finally, there's also the reverse possibility that Linux will kill
Microsoft: the reasons not to use Linux vanish and Linux marketshare
rapidly goes from near 0 to near 100% (as sometimes happens in markets),
China and India and most of the third world go totally Linux, Europe
follows, Microsoft's entire business model goes into a spiral and
collapses. This too could happen. Not the most likely possibility, but
possible nonetheless.

In article <pan.2004.03.06.18.40.08.311393@no.spam> (Sat, 06 Mar 2004
11:40:08 -0700), RMM wrote:

Nonsense. Software patents are the only threat to Free Software.

The kernel is improved -- in performance, reliability, and features --
with every release, often substantially. There is no increase in security
vulnerabilities. Linux' "development process" has continually shown, by
its product, that it is not only not "relatively weak" but
quite strong.

This claim is so vague as to be meaningless. It's a fool who makes it.

GTK is not Linux. Qt is not Linux. Your claim is inapplicable.

Your theorem is meaningless; a false premise may be used to justify any
conclusion whatsoever.

Only Microsoft bashers (myself included) care at all about "killing"
Microsoft.

The one and only thing that really matters is that Linux, GNU,
and other Free Software project succeed.

--
"Ironically, Microsoft's efforts to deny interoperability of Windows with
legitimate non-Microsoft applications have created an environment in which
Microsoft's programs interoperate efficiently only with Internet viruses."
-- Daniel Geer.