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Linux & Microsoft as a Cold War?
I confirm writes "The BBC's Bill Thompson summarises the GNU/Linux vs. Microsoft struggle as a "cold war", and in one choice quote says:"It is rather ironic that Microsoft and other closed model companies rather resemble the Stalinist or Maoist model of a command economy with complete centralised control."
I'm not sure I accept Thompson's conclusions, however: "So now would be a good time to start thinking about how we persuade governments that market in software may eventually need to be regulated, just as the market in electricity, water and food is, and that that regulation may well include a statutory duty to disclose source code and allow it to be used elsewhere." "
WordPerfect was the premier word processor for lawyers until early 1993 when Attorney General Janet Reno declared all Justice Dept computers will use MS Word and no other.
In exchange, Bill Clinton supported a woman's obligation to choose abortion, in case one of you greasy palmed MS employees/geeks ever mates with something better than a dog.
And that's how our gov't standardized on MS Office. Don't like it? Tuff, the truth hurts.
See this is one of the problems Ive always thought about the whole open source community. Looking at sites like Freshmeat, Sourceforge and so many others, too many developers come out with some really neat tools that make it into the production environment, they become detrimental to some point and a developer drops patches, fixes. Sure it should be the responsibility of the end user, but what happens when you've built a company around using these tools because you "wanted to support to OSS movement"? Your comment reeks of the same "controlling", gestapoish tactics as those of non OSS developers. At least with a company whether its IBM, MS, Redhat, Sun, you pay for the support behind it which is why I can't see Sun, IBM, or MS going anywhere or even *Nix becoming the "de-facto" standard in the near future. For all the arguments of "nix taking over the desktop market, server market, developers should take a quick second look at thoughts like these and see how counterproductive they are. The entire world isn't filled with geeks ready to open up emacs, vi, notepads to code fixes, patches, etc.
MoFscker
The BBCs Bill Thompson is suspected of being RMS
You know what you're absolutely right you should not be liable for anything you create. If holes come out down the line, whether security related, or it's just broken I would know never to use your program again. I hope other OSS developers don't think like this, what you're telling me you don't care what gets thrown out. Hey if it works it does if it doesn't who gives a rats ass. If you're a company using this, you're on your own because me as a developer I don't give a shit. This is what I'm seeing too much of not saying you in general, but take a good look at what you posted. Why should any company want to move away from some company no matter how bad their code sucks. Eventually they know that a patch is coming out regardless if it comes out late, it still is coming.
Too many developers don't take this into consideration. Imagine if the Apache team decided to just call it a day and not release any fixes, more releases, etc., and other OSS httpd developers decided to follow suit. All because "hey it's been fun" how responsible would that be. Do you see the dual standard via way of control.
MoFscker
They claim to be "objective", but most of the time they put their own spin on things when they're not just making up the news.