Microsoft Continues Anti-OSS Strategy

MacDaffy writes "Microsoft's General Manager of Platform Strategy, Michael Taylor, continues Microsoft's press blitz against Open Source in general and Linux in particular in a CNET Interview. He says of Linux: 'You can build it, design it, and it will work great. The trouble begins when you want to add things to it...(due to) the brittle nature of the platform, when you do that, other things break.'"

Comments

Re:*yawn*

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a grip man.

Your counter to Gates assertion is laughable.

This is what he wants. Rather then counter his claims with facts about Linux almost every post so far has said "Yeah, well windows sucks to."

What the fuck?

Tell us why he is wrong about Linux, not why windows sucks.

I personally think he has a point. Linux is fucking hard to properly add third party applications to if they are not installed when the distro is installed.

I also agree with others that the windows registry sucks, and Windows can be just as much of a pain in the ass but that is not the topic here.

All this playground bullshit reminds me of being in grade school. It is like one kid saying "you suck" and the other simply saying "you suck worse" back. It's getting a little bit old.

I control buying on all new IT expenditures within my department, tell me why Gates is wrong and why I should go with Linux for the 12 desktops we need to replace. Why I should go with Linux and Apache for the two Intranet application servers we need to buy.

Oh please

[aztektum]

I am gonna have to call bullshit here.

A recent example: In order to get the newest Electric Sheep screensaver to work with the newest Ubuntu I had to forcibly update about 6 different dependencies (a couple of which were dependencies of a dependency) which took 2 hours. I'm not a Linux expert, but by reading and being able to understand what I was reading, it got done and I could probably do it much more quickly next time.

Since ES is such a cool screensaver, I put it on my Windows install (you know that one we keep for games. I read the articles in Playboy too.) I simply download the executable, run it, less than 5 mins, viola. And no corrupt registry and nearly no fear of breaking my system (anything's possible).

I haven't had any problems with their "brittle" registry using Win2k or XP

Typical home users aren't going to want to hear "To install this you have to download, configure and install package A thru F just to be up to date for the software you really want to run. But be careful, cuz one of those packages could F your shit up good."

I know people that can hardly grasp the concept of "double click to install". Whether they should be using a PC is for a diff. debate.

Apple has them both beat in terms of useability, but in many ways Windows can easily make Linux look like the guy who is still only an assistant manager at a Dairy Queen after 7 years.

Re:This is true...

[milimetric]

Desist Slashdot Hoarde...
No more jokes, be serious for a second. This IS true. I'm between a newb and intermediate on Linux but have been using MS since DOS. I've used Mandrake, Red Hat, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Beatrix, Knoppix, and SLAX for different purposes. My laptop is going back and forth from Ubuntu to Gentoo dual booting with Windows.

I always find myself going back to windows when I can't figure out how to do something in Linux. My latest example is how I installed Gentoo and f*ed up the user management part and ran everything under root. I then tried to install wine and discovered why (besides security wise) this is bad. So I tried to add a normal user and move all my preferences from fluxbox, mozilla, etc over to the user. I failed miserably and from chair reactions broke my install by rm -R * everything... lol. Ok, so that was my bad but the frustrations that the process led me to were the cause. I then moved to Ubuntu and have not been able to get VLC to work correctly. It keeps telling me I don't have the correct version of libc6 but I looked this up on user forums and the only way to get libc6 is to upgrade to breezy and people said all hell broke loose when they did this. SO, in grandiose conclusion... doesn't this sound like a headache compared to in windows... download, run, it works. IT JUST F*ING WORKS. I have a gazillion programs installed on it. It never crashes Windows XP SP2, it works nicely with firefox and ClamWin so it's lightweight, and it's overall hassle free. Say what you will of microsoft, but although Linux has some wonderful package management *IDEAS* the implementation and collaboration between package developers and distribution developers is poor to say the least. For example, I Love Gentoo's emerge system but every once in a while you get a messed up ebuild or some dependency can't be met and if you're not an expert you're not gonna figure it out. I'd love to hear some feedback if someone's found a nice and easy way to manage packages on Linux to get a good installation of:

Firefox,
OpenOffice,
VLC,
XMMS,
ACPI,
Fluxb ox (or Gnome)

Re:*yawn*

[man_of_mr_e]

Hint: try reading some documentation, taking your time. Also, typing the following three magic lines seems to work for me: ./configure
make
make install

Oh, give me a break. You can't seriously expect anyone to believe this bullshit, do you?

Even if the above works (and often, depending on the distro, it won't because of dependancy, file locaiton, or other issues) this isn't the end. You often have to edit config files, set up profiles, or any number of other activities.

Your argument about Debian is even worse. In order to use anything recent, you have to depend on experimental packages, which are a crapshoot at best. Debian only "just works" if you're willing to put up with 2 year old versions.