The problem is not necessarily censoring porn, but in the loose definition of "harmful to minors" that Congress keeps using. This is a very vague standard, and many people fear that it will be used to block useful information that certain groups don't like - information about birth control and sex education, for example. And the libraries will have to censor this information for everybody, not just minors.
If Congress would just spell out exactly what it is that they don't like, then one of these laws might actually end up being constitutional. Unfortunately (for them) they can't agree on exactly what is "harmful" or "obscene", so they keep trying the same thing over and over again.
So you don't like their spouses, but apparently you have no problems with their news coverage because I didn't hear you give any concrete examples of bias (pro-Democrat or anti-Republican) on NPR. In the last couple weeks I've heard several good pieces on the Republican primary elections, including some coverage of Elizabeth Dole which really changed my mind about her in a positive way. If you have specific examples of bias or inaccurate reporting on NPR, then let's hear it.
We are having a free exchange of ideas and ideals - right this very minute. No one is forcing you to look at pornography, even if those packets are mixing with my words right now. Sure, there are bad parts of the 'net, but there are also a lot of really useful parts. And you only get to the bad stuff out there if you decide to go there. I'm sorry that some parts of the 'net don't meet your high standards for free speech, but I think you have to take the positive as well as the negative consequences of free speech.
I agree that the folks opposing the dissemination of porn aren't just uptight prudes who don't "get" the Internet. Some of them are intelligent people with a lot of integrity and strong convictions, and I respect them for that. But the fact remains that I don't want anyone else to decide what information I can receive, no matter how well-intentioned they are. As soon as you let one person control your access to information, then you really can't trust what you know at all, can you? The bottom line is that I don't trust anyone else to form my perceptions of the world for me.
So religious beliefs aren't a good reason to ban something, but your community's beliefs on pornography are? Many people's judgements about pornography come directly from their religious convictions. Many communities try to ban literature which is erotic but also has literary merit as well. Where do you draw the line? And before you say that pornography is against the law in some cases, consider that the the Satanic Verses is against the law also (in Iran, at least). It's not that I'm particularly in favor of pornography, I just don't think that the line between repressing religion and repressing pornography is as clear as you think.
2.4 been released by now, either. Nor has Win2k. What you say is likely true, but my point was that the article compared a released product with an unreleased product. The least they could have done was compared vaporware with vaporware and talked about 2.4's journaled file system and enhanced scheduling. (no, I don't know those things for certain, those are just two current hot topics).
I couldn't agree more with you. Of course, many people (DOJ attorney David Boies is one of them) believe that Microsoft's actions are breaking the law. So either way they're bad.
I'll admit that some of these technologies are a little dated, but removing all user-accessible slots means that a whole lot of old but functional hardware is going to be useless. Doesn't Intel realize that the interchangeable nature of PC parts led to the commodity market for them in the first place? Intel wouldn't be half the size it is today if IBM had just made all PCs with no user-accessible slots.
It's disappointing to see the current proven functionality of Linux 2.2 compared against Windows 2000 in this article. I'm sure many admins are deciding whether to upgrade to Win2K or to Linux, and they would like to see this sort of comparison. But if we're going to compare a product which has been released and thoroughly used for months with a product which may not be available for months (unless you're a beta site) then we might as well compare against a future Linux release as well.
PCmag would have done better to compare the current Linux 2.2 kernel with the current NT4 release and Service Packs available in stores for the bulk of the article. Then at the end they could state that Win2K promises these additional features, and Linux 2.4 will have this other list of additional features over 2.2. That would be a little more honest of a comparison.
I think the definition of AI is a moving target, and what normally gets defined is what AI is not. For example, an intelligence which could understand its environment, act in it, and report on changes to it was a goal for a long time, until SHRDLU came along and did just that. Once that happened, the bar was raised - people said "well, that's pretty simple really, surely that isn't AI." Likewise for other steps forward in AI - as soon as researchers make an advance, then the goals of AI move away a little farther.
After all, if somebody has implemented a particular aspect of cognition then we know that there must be more to AI, because we can still tell the difference between the latest advance in AI and our own intelligence. We may not know exactly how our minds are constructed, but we still can tell the difference between a real intelligence and a simulation. Or at least we think we can.
They already have 741984 domains registered? I didn't think that they had been around long enough for that. Have they pre-registered a bunch of likely names and will then pass them on to the visitors to their site? That would be domain name squatting on their part.
Or is the 741984 value the total number of domain names registered on the entire 'net, including those registered by NSI? In that case, they really shouldn't have that number on their page. I mean, I could start a hamburger stand and put up a sign saying "Billions and Billions sold", but that doesn't mean that I did the selling of them.
I agree with you that a business should aim to be so good that no one else can compete. However, I don't see how AT&T forcing subscribers to buy from @Home only is really doing that. If @Home is so great, AT&T should allow subscribers to pick any ISP that they want, and @Home will end up with all the business. It seems to me that AT&T wants to build a monopoly the wrong way - not by providing better products, but by restricting consumer choice. There are good monopolies and bad monopolies, and it seems that AT&T would like to become a bad one.
My impression was that they were drawing a parallel between a colony of ants working together for the common good, and collection of Debian developers worldwide working together on Debian. Each one just does a little bit, but something larger than themselves is created.
Of course, I didn't understand the ants either until it was explained this way in the last Slashdot article about the logo contest. The swirl was really the only good alternative, although I prefer their old penguin to the new swirl. The Gnu looking at the penguin was pretty cool too, although I think it was too big for a/. logo or letterhead.
I'm not really sure where you're coming from here. Encryption is considered a munition by the U.S. government, true, but that doesn't make it so. Encryption is a munition as much as your hands are - you can use both of them for war, but you don't have to. I have no problems with the Boy Scouts or anyone else using crypto - just sending encrypted packets around isn't hurting anyone. Of course, if the information was gained or created in an illegal manner, then those things are of course illegal, but the harm is caused by the actual child pornography or nuclear weapon secrets, not the encryption used to hide that information.
It seems to me that the government of Germany has a much higher confidence in its citizens than the government of the U.S., as demonstrated by this policy announcement. I would worry more about governments of less open countries repeating the actions of 1930s Germany than about Germany repeating those mistakes.
Unfortunately, the public would probably take a dim view of any transport of radioactive material into space, no matter how safe. Remember the arguments about the Cassini space probe which contained a couple of grams of plutonium? Our nuclear waste is probably here to stay.
It is not inherently illegal to become a monopoly. For example, the electric company is almost always a monopoly - how many companies can you buy power from? Utilities and so forth are monopolies for a good reason - the capital costs of building a generating facility and a distribution network are too high for more than one company to be in a particular market. However, such monopolies are generally regulated by the government until there is enough competition in their field that the monopoly is no longer a threat to consumers.
It isn't necessarily illegal to become a monopoly, as long as you do it legally. If you can create such an improvement in your product that your competition can't keep up, then you may end up a monopoly. It's only illegal to become a monopoly this way if you followed illegal procedures to do this.
It is illegal to use monopoly power to act in restraint of trade in another market. Thus, you can't use a monopoly in the OS market to try to create a monopoly in the browser market - this is an illegal use of monopoly power. This is really what Micros~1 is in court over.
Re:I wouldn't find it very inconvenient at all.
on
IBM & Microsoft Rift
·
· Score: 1
When he is asked to prove that he has not engaged in "anticompetitive practices," what is he supposed to say? That's his JOB--to outcompete the other companies in his field. So obviously he is engaging in "anticompetitive" practices. That's how you succeed, by doing better than your competition.
Anticompetitive actions are the opposite of out-competing those other companies. A company who is competing with other companies will work hard to bring a better product to market faster than their competition, and sell it for a little cheaper. An anticompetitive company doesn't make a better or cheaper product, they just use marketing and sales tactics to destroy the other companies, so that the consumer doesn't have a choice of products any more.
As another poster mentioned, you can legally gain a monopoly by out-competing your competitors - if your products are that much better, your competition can't stay in business. But if you gain your monopoly not through better products but instead through actions which restrict consumer choice, then you had better watch out for anti-trust law. Yes, trust laws are vague, but any company which focuses more on destroying its competition and their products, rather than improving its own, would do well to be careful.
My bicycle makes me happy, and my steady, fairly interesting job keeps my family happy, which is all I care about. I guess we can tell what you care about...
I'll agree that there are network effects associated with OS choice, but we don't have to be considering only incompatible OSs. For example, DR-DOS was compatible with MS-DOS and also included many improvements that users couldn't get from Microsoft. Many people liked DR-DOS much better, but Microsoft's deals with the OEMs prevented the widespread adoption of what was considered to be a superior product. DR-DOS spurred some innovations out of Microsoft at the time, but once the threat was gone, the innovation level at Microsoft dropped again.
Another point to consider is that most people buy computers for the applications, rather than some knee-jerk loyalty to an OS (present company excluded?;). If the public could get all the applications they like with any OS, then they will end up choosing the best OS based on technical merit and price. In a perfect world, consumers would have these kinds of choices and compatibility wouldn't be the problem that it is now. This is not, however, a perfect world precisely because companies like Microsoft (although they're not the only ones) have a huge stake in both the OS and application markets. Microsoft won't produce applications for other OSs, or does so only in a substandard manner, in order to reinforce its hold on the OS market. System interfaces and file formats are kept as a moving target in order to prevent competitors from providing better alternatives to MS applications on non-Windows platforms, or better alternatives to Windows which will work with MS applications. It seems to me that compatibility issues are greatly magnified by those who don't want competition on a level playing field.
You are correct about regulation of free markets - I didn't mean to imply that a few companies breaking the law should bring down the heavy regulatory hand of the government on the whole industry. I do think the PC software industry may have been edging closer to being unfree, at least until the most recent DOJ trials started and Linux hit the big time. Hopefully these will help bring more competition back into the industry.
I wouldn't find it very inconvenient at all.
on
IBM & Microsoft Rift
·
· Score: 5
An operating system is not a public utility - maybe twenty years this was closer to the truth, but certainly not today. Utilities are regulated because they have high capital costs (physical infrastructure, like laying phone lines) when they are created. It's difficult for more than one utility to make money serving a particular market, because of these startup costs. Since this makes them de facto monopolies, they are regulated by the government.
Software is different. There is a capital cost to create it, but the current means of distribution (the Internet, computer stores, etc.) are widely available, so software companies can try to get into any market they feel like. There is no need to regulate a free market for software unless some companies break the law.
This is what the government is alleging in its lawsuit. A computer operating system isn't a natural, unavoidable monopoly like the phone company. Microsoft constructed their artificial monopoly by a number of unethical and possibly illegal marketing, sales, and distribution agreements, many of which are only now coming to light. It may be a temporary inconvenience for the public to have to deal with three or four "Baby Bills", but that is a small price to pay to encourage fair business practices and discourage monopoly-building in the software industry.
Go to www.gb.nrao.edu and click on "Quiet Zone". I used to work at NRAO (about 50 miles away), although I didn't know the Navy had an Echelon site down the road at the time. They have a van that drives around and tracks down stray emissions like old faulty microwave ovens or ham radio operators. The NRQZ was apparently established in 1958, so this has been around for a while. I don't know if the Echelon site or the radio observatory came first.
And hopefully, none of these smart spies would have an interest in displaying some bits of my private life in public.
I think that's a big assumption - this system confers almost absolute power (through information) on some government groups. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. I don't see any reason to trust these agencies.
I'm not doing anything illegal either (or at least if I was, I wouldn't talk about it in the clear on the Internet). But it's a slippery slope to say that only those with something to hide should be worried. Laws change, and what is perfectly acceptable today could be held against you tomorrow, or ten years from now. I'm not sure of the feasibility of scanning and storing terabytes of sigint daily, but the idea of governments that think they have a license to attempt this sort of thing really bothers me.
Why don't you ban AC's by setting your threshold to 1, and the rest of us won't miss out on that one good post? You have the means at your disposal to solve your problems, but you'd rather complain. Most people wouldn't even have known about the AC situation with this article if you hadn't brought it up and been the highest ranked article for a while. I normally wade through all the -1's, but you don't have to if you don't want to. If you set your threshold low, you have to take the good with the bad.
Of course, an AC could create a login but not provide any public contact information in their user info if they are posting from work. This is what I have done. Only Rob (and my hairdresser) knows for sure...
Why shouldn't bandwidth costs be paid per bytes transferred? It seems pretty logical to me - bandwidth is the quantity that is scarce (assuming you are already connected somehow), it costs more money to provide more bandwidth, therefore those who require more bandwidth should pay more for it. If you spread the costs of X user's bandwidth across X bills, I may end up subsidizing someone elses IP telephone (or some other high-bandwidth app), when all I want to do is run lynx (or some other low-bandwidth app). Granted, the charge per a unit of bandwidth would have to be fairly low and there will be the hassle of billing, but these things haven't stopped the long-distance companies, have they?
I guess there could be lots of answers to this question. The first one that pops into my mind is that maybe it really isn't the fact that Linux is open-sourced that is creating its success, but instead the fact that Linux just isn't a MS product.
It depends (shades of the Gates testimony here) on how you define "success". If success is the fact that Linux has been known and continues to be known as a powerful, stable OS with an exciting development model, then Linux is a success with many people who aren't anti-MS but are just pro-"whatever works best". On the other hand, if success means that there is viable competitor to Microsoft that distracts Microsoft from embracing and extending your software company and its products, then the anti-MS motivation is certainly more clear. Linux probably owes something to both groups, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is not necessarily censoring porn, but in the loose definition of "harmful to minors" that Congress keeps using. This is a very vague standard, and many people fear that it will be used to block useful information that certain groups don't like - information about birth control and sex education, for example. And the libraries will have to censor this information for everybody, not just minors.
If Congress would just spell out exactly what it is that they don't like, then one of these laws might actually end up being constitutional. Unfortunately (for them) they can't agree on exactly what is "harmful" or "obscene", so they keep trying the same thing over and over again.
So you don't like their spouses, but apparently you have no problems with their news coverage because I didn't hear you give any concrete examples of bias (pro-Democrat or anti-Republican) on NPR. In the last couple weeks I've heard several good pieces on the Republican primary elections, including some coverage of Elizabeth Dole which really changed my mind about her in a positive way. If you have specific examples of bias or inaccurate reporting on NPR, then let's hear it.
And what does Waco have to do with NPR?
We are having a free exchange of ideas and ideals - right this very minute. No one is forcing you to look at pornography, even if those packets are mixing with my words right now. Sure, there are bad parts of the 'net, but there are also a lot of really useful parts. And you only get to the bad stuff out there if you decide to go there. I'm sorry that some parts of the 'net don't meet your high standards for free speech, but I think you have to take the positive as well as the negative consequences of free speech.
I agree that the folks opposing the dissemination of porn aren't just uptight prudes who don't "get" the Internet. Some of them are intelligent people with a lot of integrity and strong convictions, and I respect them for that. But the fact remains that I don't want anyone else to decide what information I can receive, no matter how well-intentioned they are. As soon as you let one person control your access to information, then you really can't trust what you know at all, can you? The bottom line is that I don't trust anyone else to form my perceptions of the world for me.
So religious beliefs aren't a good reason to ban something, but your community's beliefs on pornography are? Many people's judgements about pornography come directly from their religious convictions. Many communities try to ban literature which is erotic but also has literary merit as well. Where do you draw the line? And before you say that pornography is against the law in some cases, consider that the the Satanic Verses is against the law also (in Iran, at least). It's not that I'm particularly in favor of pornography, I just don't think that the line between repressing religion and repressing pornography is as clear as you think.
2.4 been released by now, either. Nor has Win2k. What you say is likely true, but my point was that the article compared a released product with an unreleased product. The least they could have done was compared vaporware with vaporware and talked about 2.4's journaled file system and enhanced scheduling. (no, I don't know those things for certain, those are just two current hot topics).
I couldn't agree more with you. Of course, many people (DOJ attorney David Boies is one of them) believe that Microsoft's actions are breaking the law. So either way they're bad.
Their roadmap to remove "Legacy Technology":
I'll admit that some of these technologies are a little dated, but removing all user-accessible slots means that a whole lot of old but functional hardware is going to be useless. Doesn't Intel realize that the interchangeable nature of PC parts led to the commodity market for them in the first place? Intel wouldn't be half the size it is today if IBM had just made all PCs with no user-accessible slots.
It's disappointing to see the current proven functionality of Linux 2.2 compared against Windows 2000 in this article. I'm sure many admins are deciding whether to upgrade to Win2K or to Linux, and they would like to see this sort of comparison. But if we're going to compare a product which has been released and thoroughly used for months with a product which may not be available for months (unless you're a beta site) then we might as well compare against a future Linux release as well.
PCmag would have done better to compare the current Linux 2.2 kernel with the current NT4 release and Service Packs available in stores for the bulk of the article. Then at the end they could state that Win2K promises these additional features, and Linux 2.4 will have this other list of additional features over 2.2. That would be a little more honest of a comparison.
I think the definition of AI is a moving target, and what normally gets defined is what AI is not. For example, an intelligence which could understand its environment, act in it, and report on changes to it was a goal for a long time, until SHRDLU came along and did just that. Once that happened, the bar was raised - people said "well, that's pretty simple really, surely that isn't AI." Likewise for other steps forward in AI - as soon as researchers make an advance, then the goals of AI move away a little farther.
After all, if somebody has implemented a particular aspect of cognition then we know that there must be more to AI, because we can still tell the difference between the latest advance in AI and our own intelligence. We may not know exactly how our minds are constructed, but we still can tell the difference between a real intelligence and a simulation. Or at least we think we can.
They already have 741984 domains registered? I didn't think that they had been around long enough for that. Have they pre-registered a bunch of likely names and will then pass them on to the visitors to their site? That would be domain name squatting on their part.
Or is the 741984 value the total number of domain names registered on the entire 'net, including those registered by NSI? In that case, they really shouldn't have that number on their page. I mean, I could start a hamburger stand and put up a sign saying "Billions and Billions sold", but that doesn't mean that I did the selling of them.
I agree with you that a business should aim to be so good that no one else can compete. However, I don't see how AT&T forcing subscribers to buy from @Home only is really doing that. If @Home is so great, AT&T should allow subscribers to pick any ISP that they want, and @Home will end up with all the business. It seems to me that AT&T wants to build a monopoly the wrong way - not by providing better products, but by restricting consumer choice. There are good monopolies and bad monopolies, and it seems that AT&T would like to become a bad one.
My impression was that they were drawing a parallel between a colony of ants working together for the common good, and collection of Debian developers worldwide working together on Debian. Each one just does a little bit, but something larger than themselves is created.
Of course, I didn't understand the ants either until it was explained this way in the last Slashdot article about the logo contest. The swirl was really the only good alternative, although I prefer their old penguin to the new swirl. The Gnu looking at the penguin was pretty cool too, although I think it was too big for a /. logo or letterhead.
I'm not really sure where you're coming from here. Encryption is considered a munition by the U.S. government, true, but that doesn't make it so. Encryption is a munition as much as your hands are - you can use both of them for war, but you don't have to. I have no problems with the Boy Scouts or anyone else using crypto - just sending encrypted packets around isn't hurting anyone. Of course, if the information was gained or created in an illegal manner, then those things are of course illegal, but the harm is caused by the actual child pornography or nuclear weapon secrets, not the encryption used to hide that information.
It seems to me that the government of Germany has a much higher confidence in its citizens than the government of the U.S., as demonstrated by this policy announcement. I would worry more about governments of less open countries repeating the actions of 1930s Germany than about Germany repeating those mistakes.
Unfortunately, the public would probably take a dim view of any transport of radioactive material into space, no matter how safe. Remember the arguments about the Cassini space probe which contained a couple of grams of plutonium? Our nuclear waste is probably here to stay.
Several points:
Thanks, it's fixed:
Anticompetitive actions are the opposite of out-competing those other companies. A company who is competing with other companies will work hard to bring a better product to market faster than their competition, and sell it for a little cheaper. An anticompetitive company doesn't make a better or cheaper product, they just use marketing and sales tactics to destroy the other companies, so that the consumer doesn't have a choice of products any more.
As another poster mentioned, you can legally gain a monopoly by out-competing your competitors - if your products are that much better, your competition can't stay in business. But if you gain your monopoly not through better products but instead through actions which restrict consumer choice, then you had better watch out for anti-trust law. Yes, trust laws are vague, but any company which focuses more on destroying its competition and their products, rather than improving its own, would do well to be careful.
My bicycle makes me happy, and my steady, fairly interesting job keeps my family happy, which is all I care about. I guess we can tell what you care about...
I'll agree that there are network effects associated with OS choice, but we don't have to be considering only incompatible OSs. For example, DR-DOS was compatible with MS-DOS and also included many improvements that users couldn't get from Microsoft. Many people liked DR-DOS much better, but Microsoft's deals with the OEMs prevented the widespread adoption of what was considered to be a superior product. DR-DOS spurred some innovations out of Microsoft at the time, but once the threat was gone, the innovation level at Microsoft dropped again.
Another point to consider is that most people buy computers for the applications, rather than some knee-jerk loyalty to an OS (present company excluded? ;). If the public could get all the applications they like with any OS, then they will end up choosing the best OS based on technical merit and price. In a perfect world, consumers would have these kinds of choices and compatibility wouldn't be the problem that it is now. This is not, however, a perfect world precisely because companies like Microsoft (although they're not the only ones) have a huge stake in both the OS and application markets. Microsoft won't produce applications for other OSs, or does so only in a substandard manner, in order to reinforce its hold on the OS market. System interfaces and file formats are kept as a moving target in order to prevent competitors from providing better alternatives to MS applications on non-Windows platforms, or better alternatives to Windows which will work with MS applications. It seems to me that compatibility issues are greatly magnified by those who don't want competition on a level playing field.
You are correct about regulation of free markets - I didn't mean to imply that a few companies breaking the law should bring down the heavy regulatory hand of the government on the whole industry. I do think the PC software industry may have been edging closer to being unfree, at least until the most recent DOJ trials started and Linux hit the big time. Hopefully these will help bring more competition back into the industry.
An operating system is not a public utility - maybe twenty years this was closer to the truth, but certainly not today. Utilities are regulated because they have high capital costs (physical infrastructure, like laying phone lines) when they are created. It's difficult for more than one utility to make money serving a particular market, because of these startup costs. Since this makes them de facto monopolies, they are regulated by the government.
Software is different. There is a capital cost to create it, but the current means of distribution (the Internet, computer stores, etc.) are widely available, so software companies can try to get into any market they feel like. There is no need to regulate a free market for software unless some companies break the law.
This is what the government is alleging in its lawsuit. A computer operating system isn't a natural, unavoidable monopoly like the phone company. Microsoft constructed their artificial monopoly by a number of unethical and possibly illegal marketing, sales, and distribution agreements, many of which are only now coming to light. It may be a temporary inconvenience for the public to have to deal with three or four "Baby Bills", but that is a small price to pay to encourage fair business practices and discourage monopoly-building in the software industry.
Go to www.gb.nrao.edu and click on "Quiet Zone". I used to work at NRAO (about 50 miles away), although I didn't know the Navy had an Echelon site down the road at the time. They have a van that drives around and tracks down stray emissions like old faulty microwave ovens or ham radio operators. The NRQZ was apparently established in 1958, so this has been around for a while. I don't know if the Echelon site or the radio observatory came first.
I think that's a big assumption - this system confers almost absolute power (through information) on some government groups. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. I don't see any reason to trust these agencies.
I'm not doing anything illegal either (or at least if I was, I wouldn't talk about it in the clear on the Internet). But it's a slippery slope to say that only those with something to hide should be worried. Laws change, and what is perfectly acceptable today could be held against you tomorrow, or ten years from now. I'm not sure of the feasibility of scanning and storing terabytes of sigint daily, but the idea of governments that think they have a license to attempt this sort of thing really bothers me.
Why don't you ban AC's by setting your threshold to 1, and the rest of us won't miss out on that one good post? You have the means at your disposal to solve your problems, but you'd rather complain. Most people wouldn't even have known about the AC situation with this article if you hadn't brought it up and been the highest ranked article for a while. I normally wade through all the -1's, but you don't have to if you don't want to. If you set your threshold low, you have to take the good with the bad.
Of course, an AC could create a login but not provide any public contact information in their user info if they are posting from work. This is what I have done. Only Rob (and my hairdresser) knows for sure...
Why shouldn't bandwidth costs be paid per bytes transferred? It seems pretty logical to me - bandwidth is the quantity that is scarce (assuming you are already connected somehow), it costs more money to provide more bandwidth, therefore those who require more bandwidth should pay more for it. If you spread the costs of X user's bandwidth across X bills, I may end up subsidizing someone elses IP telephone (or some other high-bandwidth app), when all I want to do is run lynx (or some other low-bandwidth app). Granted, the charge per a unit of bandwidth would have to be fairly low and there will be the hassle of billing, but these things haven't stopped the long-distance companies, have they?
It depends (shades of the Gates testimony here) on how you define "success". If success is the fact that Linux has been known and continues to be known as a powerful, stable OS with an exciting development model, then Linux is a success with many people who aren't anti-MS but are just pro-"whatever works best". On the other hand, if success means that there is viable competitor to Microsoft that distracts Microsoft from embracing and extending your software company and its products, then the anti-MS motivation is certainly more clear. Linux probably owes something to both groups, which is not necessarily a bad thing.