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Analyzing Palladium
apeir0 writes "The Register has a story which proposes an ulterior motive to Microsoft's new Palladium: a GPL-killer. 'It's the very fact that this appears insoluble to me that helps me realize that MS has put tremendous, careful thought into it. To make the commons Linux-hostile, MS is taking dramatic steps to make it GPL-hostile. Very clever and admirably diabolical.' Is this a valid point or just paranoia?" Ross Anderson has been writing about this recently; we covered his paper a few days ago, and he's now got a Palladium FAQ up. Another submitter sent in this interview with the Microsoft manager in charge of Palladium. The Washington Post has a column. Update: 06/27 22:43 GMT by T : Bob Cringely also has a column on Palladium up, in which he says that several of his fears have been realized by it.
Yes, microsoft rips us off of for marketing information, and yeah, most people do.
... let 40,000 people rather die than our privacy taken away.
... go right ahead and flame this, since it is incomplete. But yeah, in the end... the part of this that I know I'm not wrong on,
My mother is who microsoft thinks of when she is busy using here computer at home. Microsoft is trying to prevent her from accidently running virusses, milicious code and things like that. I think that's great. And if she didnt like that she probably would be running linux.
Microsoft gives everything an average user needs. Ofcourse, yes, they steal some private information on the side to see what you are searching for and, who knows what else, but for my mother's computer being protected that is brilliant. I think this new idea of microsoft is wonderfull.
Everyone is so worried about privacy of information, but ofcourse
Anyways
is that my opinion... Microsoft is making a good choice. Slashdot readers are a minority.
We are an MS shop. We had a manager come in and tell us we were going opensource and gpl. We switched, all 1190 desktops and 180 servers. Our expenses doubled, our hardware costs to buy OLDER and more compatible hardware for one year was sickening, and the companie lost ten million in productivity. We could not get hardware to run the almighty linux os, couldn't get people to learn more than the basics needed to run the OS, couldn't find enough tech support for our systems who were competent, couldn't keep our website up for more than 5 days in a row thanks to the EXTREME vunerabilty of Apache, and in general lost over 38 million dollars.
Needless to say, I am no longer a fan of GPL and OpenSource software. There is no reliable support, no decent install base to consult with, no long term planning, poorly written and executed code, and a community that just laughs when you have a serious question. It is far more vunerable to security problems thanks to the common knowledge of it's code base, harder to maintain, harder to use for the average joe, and the few decent apps available are not free. On the desktop it's no faster either... not when you consider a gui and all of the addons needed to make it at least semi-functional, and then there is the question of being forced to use older hardware or changing hardware thanks to driver instability or unavailability.
Thank god for MS and proprietary systems. You pay more up front, but you pay far less down the road.