You miss the point. I never said MS is a great competitor. I meant it would gain us all if they were.
Wouldn't it be great for example if they released IE under the GPL? It's not at all likely today, but what if, in ten years, that's their only option if they want to stay competitive?
release a "bug fix" that just happens to fuck up firefox
Wouldn't that be even better than the two other options you listed? Isn't competition what we (the consumers) are looking for?
I would love seeing Microsoft getting their act together; making web development easier and forcing Mozilla, Apple, Google and the others to be even sharper.
The binary drivers are not used you say? Do you have any numbers to back that statement up? Not that I have any numbers to back this up, but: the nvidia closed source driver for example seems to be fairly popular. Can't imagine that too many nvidia card owners don't use it, and several distributions distribute it.
Because people at/. are simply much more enthusiastic about KDE4 than Vista. Hell I even bother to compile KDE4, and Vista: well I'm not even prepared to pirate it! That's by the way another explanation for peoples forgivingness: you can at any time check out the svn and try it (discovering that it's not ready for release yet). People who are enthusiastic about KDE get full insight, Vista enthusiast get/got mostly nothing.
I get the impression that the KDE devs are simply aiming at delivering the best DE possible, with no particular user group in mind. Besides, I think thats a common dominator for most FOSS, since market share is secondary to good design (maybe a bit exaggerated but still), at least when compared to the proprietary world.
Further more I would like to believe that KDE resembles OSX more than Gnome, at least from a developers point of view, with it's rich and structured dev platform. KDE is more than just a DE, it's a platform!
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You miss the point. I never said MS is a great competitor. I meant it would gain us all if they were.
Wouldn't it be great for example if they released IE under the GPL? It's not at all likely today, but what if, in ten years, that's their only option if they want to stay competitive?
release a "bug fix" that just happens to fuck up firefox
Wouldn't that be even better than the two other options you listed? Isn't competition what we (the consumers) are looking for? I would love seeing Microsoft getting their act together; making web development easier and forcing Mozilla, Apple, Google and the others to be even sharper.
I thought the exact same thing. Soon Linux will be hotter than sex, drugs and rock'n'roll!
The binary drivers are not used you say? Do you have any numbers to back that statement up? Not that I have any numbers to back this up, but: the nvidia closed source driver for example seems to be fairly popular. Can't imagine that too many nvidia card owners don't use it, and several distributions distribute it.
Because people at /. are simply much more enthusiastic about KDE4 than Vista. Hell I even bother to compile KDE4, and Vista: well I'm not even prepared to pirate it! That's by the way another explanation for peoples forgivingness: you can at any time check out the svn and try it (discovering that it's not ready for release yet). People who are enthusiastic about KDE get full insight, Vista enthusiast get/got mostly nothing.
I get the impression that the KDE devs are simply aiming at delivering the best DE possible, with no particular user group in mind. Besides, I think thats a common dominator for most FOSS, since market share is secondary to good design (maybe a bit exaggerated but still), at least when compared to the proprietary world. Further more I would like to believe that KDE resembles OSX more than Gnome, at least from a developers point of view, with it's rich and structured dev platform. KDE is more than just a DE, it's a platform!