[GRLUG] "Microsoft Hated is a Disease"

[Michael Mol]

On Sat, Aug 1, 2009 at 12:49 AM, <peyeps at iserv.net> wrote:
>> Is the operating system not a program, then?  You're taking your
>> hatred of the monopoly at the operating system level and advocating
>> that everyone one One True Program for each thing you do at the
>> desktop level.  Would you advocate that everyone run Firefox?  Or that
>> everyone run a particular window manager?  Or that everyone use KDE
>> over GNOME?
>
> You are correct, the operating system is a program.
>
> Perhaps I should have said the experience of the user should be
> independent of the operating system being used.

Absolutely.  I believe that's a significant factor driving the
proliferation of AJAX java apps.

>>
>> Technically, patents are already "open source."  The idea behind the
>> patent system is to publicly document a design in such a way that it's
>> freely usable after the period of exclusivity is up.
>>
>> If you meant "indemnify", well, that's a tricky thing; As far as I
>> know, there's no way to provide a legally binding guarantee that you
>> won't sue someone for violating your patent without signing a contract
>> with them.  That's called a "license", regardless of the terms of the
>> contract and any compensation identified.
>>
>> The crux of the matter is that in order to grant a license to "open
>> source", you would have to sign a contract between you and "open
>> source", which requires "open source"* to be legally authorized to
>> represent all open source developers.  Which requires those developers
>> to be have signed a contract with "open source" to grant that
>> authorization.
>>
>> Except that Open Source is not a legal entity so much as a concept,
>> and you still have the problem of getting the developers to sign a
>> legally binding contract with that entity, anyway.
>>
>
> I was thinking of the Open Invention Network.

A middleman with a synchronous license agreement.  Looks nice.

>
>> When you mandate that Something be done some Particular Way, you
>> create an environment where everything subsequently developed that
>> depends on being able to have Something done is constrained by the
>> limitations of that Particular Way, and the results aren't going to be
>> as clever, useful or innovative as they could be otherwise.
>
> Chrome is an innovation.  But it is not available to everyone.  I know,
> they are working on it, so perhaps that's a bit unfair.
>
> Silverlight is only available for Mac and Windows.  Flash is available for
> all three.  Moonlight is supposedly the independently developed
> alternative to Silverlight for Linux, but only until Microsoft lowers the
> boom.

Flash releases for Linux lag behind releases for Windows by weeks or
months.  Sometimes years.  And there are plenty of decent kernels and
operating systems that haven't and will never see a release.

The scary thing is that Java is the most "open" option available.  And
as an applet option, it honestly sucks...

> They will because they will be trying to force people off Linux.

They're always trying to get people off of Linux.  They always have.
They always will.  Linux is a competing operating system.

> Why else would they say Linux infringes two hundred patents, but won't
> tell us what they are?

Marketing and scare tactics?  Sounds to me like it worked; Lots of
folk now see Microsoft code as as great a threat to Linux as
proprietary software developers used to see any code labeled "open
source" to their own code bases. (For fear of viral licenses, not so
much direct competition.)

-- 
:wq