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." "

Comments

Re:No such thing as a free lunch

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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.