Microsoft staying in China or not will make no difference to the political situation in China. Furthermore, I wish companies would stay away from politics altogether: no contributions to parties, no statements about how good or bad is a local government. Follow the local laws, and leave politics to the country's citizens.
Just because Microsoft writes bad software and it is a monopoly, it does not mean that all it does is evil. I think that Google's move was the result of many issues that just make doing business there too hard. This includes tarnishing the Google brand by exposing itself to criticism of 'collaborating' with a totalitarian regime, but the gmail hacking was also a factor.
As someone that is employed by an open source company, I have mixed feelings about this. I am passionate about open source, I love coding for a company that is making its living out of distributing software for free. I do see open source projects struggling some times, so getting a kind of subsidy like this might be good.
But what about those companies that have to work hard to make any money and keep an open source project alive? This could be a place where the market can work, leaving those without a good business plan or strong community out, while those that have been able to attract volunteers and customers thrive.
Well, this would not be too so outrageous if it did not happen to so many people all the time: talking to a customer rep that just does not understand the problem. So I feel identified with this call. And since they can't hang up on you, they just try your stamina.
One of the open office's selling points to governments, the use of open standards, will be more difficult to fight against Microsoft. And governments seem to be a good penetrations point into the mass market. I hope this is not too hard for open office. At jbilling, we use it a lot for all our documentation and it's been great.
I am not sure how a laptop with flash memory would be any cheaper than one with a hard drive. Also, Microsoft is not going to be doing this for free, so the OS would be adding to the cost (unlike one with Linux). Last but not least, flash memory has a limited number of read/writes, and it gets slower as it approaches that limit.
I like the idea of a cheap laptop for the world masses, I just don't see how this fits the requirements.
I worked a lot with Oracle, and then joined an open source project that started using PostgreSQL. The project is a billing system, so is data intensive. What a great little database PostgreSQL is. And that was back in th 7.x version.
Actually, jBilling http://www.jbilling.com/ now runs in many databases but still PostgreSQL is holding its ground against Oracle and other heavyweights. Those extra features that Oracle says you need and charges you an arm and a leg, are really not needed in most applications.
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Microsoft staying in China or not will make no difference to the political situation in China. Furthermore, I wish companies would stay away from politics altogether: no contributions to parties, no statements about how good or bad is a local government. Follow the local laws, and leave politics to the country's citizens.
Just because Microsoft writes bad software and it is a monopoly, it does not mean that all it does is evil. I think that Google's move was the result of many issues that just make doing business there too hard. This includes tarnishing the Google brand by exposing itself to criticism of 'collaborating' with a totalitarian regime, but the gmail hacking was also a factor.
Paul Casal
jBilling Open Source Billing
As someone that is employed by an open source company, I have mixed feelings about this. I am passionate about open source, I love coding for a company that is making its living out of distributing software for free. I do see open source projects struggling some times, so getting a kind of subsidy like this might be good. But what about those companies that have to work hard to make any money and keep an open source project alive? This could be a place where the market can work, leaving those without a good business plan or strong community out, while those that have been able to attract volunteers and customers thrive.
Well, this would not be too so outrageous if it did not happen to so many people all the time: talking to a customer rep that just does not understand the problem. So I feel identified with this call. And since they can't hang up on you, they just try your stamina.
One of the open office's selling points to governments, the use of open standards, will be more difficult to fight against Microsoft. And governments seem to be a good penetrations point into the mass market. I hope this is not too hard for open office. At jbilling, we use it a lot for all our documentation and it's been great.
Cheers,
Paul C.
Sr Developer
http://www.jbilling.com/ - The open source enterprise billing system
I am not sure how a laptop with flash memory would be any cheaper than one with a hard drive. Also, Microsoft is not going to be doing this for free, so the OS would be adding to the cost (unlike one with Linux). Last but not least, flash memory has a limited number of read/writes, and it gets slower as it approaches that limit.
I like the idea of a cheap laptop for the world masses, I just don't see how this fits the requirements.
Cheers,
Paul C.
Sr Developer
http://www.jbilling.com/ - The Open Source Enterprise Billing System
I worked a lot with Oracle, and then joined an open source project that started using PostgreSQL. The project is a billing system, so is data intensive. What a great little database PostgreSQL is. And that was back in th 7.x version.
Actually, jBilling http://www.jbilling.com/ now runs in many databases but still PostgreSQL is holding its ground against Oracle and other heavyweights. Those extra features that Oracle says you need and charges you an arm and a leg, are really not needed in most applications.
Cheers,
Paul C.
Sr Developer
http://www.jbilling.com/ - The Open Source Enterprise Billing System