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Mozilla Chairman Speaks on Open Source/Microsoft
ChrisMDP writes "Tom's Hardware has an interesting interview with Mitch Kapor, the chairman of the Mozilla Foundation. They discuss, amongst other things, what it's like competing with Microsoft, and Firefox as an operating system." From the interview: "Pragmatically, I think we have to distinguish between a base set of extensions and everything else. It gets progressively more difficult to create seamless solutions when there are nearly infinite possibilities for customization and tweaking of settings. There's a basic tension in principle that can never be completely resolved."
The chairman of the Mozilla foundation is Mitchell Baker, not Mitch Kapor.
from Securityfocus.com: as of January 2005, SecurityFocus readers using Firefox (46%) eclipsed Internet Explorer users (44%) in our traffic logs for the first time ever. I just can't wait for similar numbers hitting msn.com -- I must be a zealot for bashing microsoft.
No really, they have. They sacrifice proper quality to get 'first to market' time and again. Then they build on that with marketing or freebies till they are the de facto standard. That's called lock in, and it doesn't benefit consumers at all.
Have you ever used a MS product that didn't piss you off in some subtle way? Apart from the MS keyboard, which is a lovely piece of kit.
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
MS is deemed evil because of practices deemed illegal. Those practices were deemed illegal because they went counter to the accepted ideals of our society.
/.'s is more the unfairness than anything else. If MS had reached its position legally, through hard work, and had "innovated" or "invented" anything worth a crap, I bet they would have a different opinion of MS.
One of those ideals is that if you build something, people should be able to select it over competing products. MS violated that ideal numerous times, by manipulating the market with one product to encroach in another.
What annoys
They were convicted in the EU, dude. Sentenced too.
convict Pronunciation Key (kn-vkt)
v. convicted, convicting, convicts
v. tr.
1. Law. To find or prove (someone) guilty of an offense or crime, especially by the verdict of a court: The jury convicted the defendant of manslaughter.
2. To show or declare to be blameworthy; condemn: His remarks convicted him of a lack of sensitivity.
3. To make aware of one's sinfulness or guilt.
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"The ruling is the climax of a trial that began just over a year ago in which the Justice Department accused Microsoft of bullying competitors in an attempt to control the personal computer software market.
"Microsoft has demonstrated it will use its prodigious market power and immense profits to harm any firm that insists on pursuing initiatives that could intensify competition against one of Microsoft's core products," Jackson wrote.
"Microsoft enjoys so much power in the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems that if it wished to exercise this power solely in terms of price, it could charge a price for Windows substantially above that which could be charged in a competitive market.
"Moreover, it could do so for a significant period of time without losing an unacceptable amount of business to competitors," he added. "In other words, Microsoft enjoys monopoly power in the relevant market.""
SAP http://www.sap.com/ also makes programs that seem to only fully work with IE and not with any version of Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox that I have tried.
Religion and science are both 90% crap..but that doesn't negate the other 10%.
XUL ides. Ok not much, but it's a start. Personally I feel Mozilla should also start some development projects. Mozilla is no longer working on the composer, that is now being sponsored by Linspire. I think a push from Mozilla to build a XUL ide is a very good idea.
Have you ever used a MS product that didn't piss you off in some subtle way?
I think the same can be said about mostly any computer software on the market.
Just to avoid wild speculation here, Navigator 2.0 final came in at 3.19 MB.
Your point, however, stands.
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
Microsoft was convicted of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act in the year 2000.
The penalty imposed was overturned, but the conviction upheld, and the DoJ under a new AG (John A$$croft) settled the case with a slap on the wrist, rather than seeking a real penalty.