Ethical business practice, my ass. I've since long found out that most of the salesdroids I encounter are lying thieves, burnt on making a quick buck with as little to do for it as possible.
Oh, I see. Well, then, I guess that makes it okay.
It seems to me all of this hubbub created by Linspire is only creating a bad rap for Linux by inviting constant litigation and controversy.
Yep. This is exactly the sort of behavior that lends credence in the public mindset to the notion that Linux/OSS folks have no respect for IP. And that, I think, is about the only thing that has kept SCO afloat for so long.
I think this is more a problem with the current crop of sound cards than with Linux.
Some sound card manufacturer out there will one day realize that there's a lot of money to be made by writing a Linux driver for his card. It can't be rocket science... after all, he knows what his card needs, and he can easily get the source to the OS.
The fact that there are various Linux distributions may complicate things a bit, but it really shouldn't be that much of a problem. And if the manufacturer doesn't want to bother constantly updating for 10 different distro's, he can always open source his driver. (This is surely the sticking point, though... fear that other manufacturers will gain from that sort of thing.)
If you ask me, making Apple play Whack-A-Mole by running around to different countries trying to find one that's friendly to your cause is a lot like SCO or Microsoft shopping around for the friendliest venue in which to have their various cases tried. If you've actually got a legal leg to stand on in your own damn country, then make your case and get on with it. Else, stop your infringing behavior, and stop giving the rest of us a black eye.
The current strategy definitely does not live up to the name "PlayFair."
Not sure how you get from Flat Sales and Declining Market Share to "healthy market"
According to it's press release, Apple shipped 749,000 computers and 804,000 iPods in Q2, 2004. If its sales are "flat," that'd mean Apple should ship approximately 3 million machines this year, and about 3.2 million iPods. 3 million machines alone would be a pretty decent market, but the installed base is quite a lot larger. Macs tend to have a long useful life (I'm typing this on a machine that's 5 years old and which remains quite useful), so the market that third parties can sell into is quite a bit larger than that indicated by market share alone. That is how I get from "Flat Sales" to "healthy market."
I'm leaning towards the idea that Apple is trying to milk it's "legacy" base of Mac users while transitioning to a consumer device company. In which case, I hope not, but how else do you read the evidence?
Why? What evidence is there to support this idea? Apple's oft-stated and well known long term plan for the consumer market is the "digital lifestyle," and every time Steve Jobs brings that up, he includes a diagram with various consumer electronic devices and a Macintosh in the middle. iPod, iTunes, iSight, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, etc. are all meant to sell Macintosh computers. They work as well as they do specifically because Apple is able to integrate those things with the Mac hardware and OS.
So sure, you may see even more of Apple's income in the future come from consumer electronics like iPod, particularly if Apple can also sell those items into the Windows and Linux markets. But there's no way that Apple is going to give up control over the system at the heart of the digital lifestyle, not to mention the heart of its revenue, which is the Mac.
According to the NY Times today, Apple's recent quarterly results show that profits have tripled lately. Yes, that's due largely to incredible iPod sales, but I think it does show that Apple is not completely clueless when it comes to pricing its products.
Apple has never been the cheapest computer you can buy, in any sense of "cheapest." For many of us, this is a feature. Apple has never tried to compete with the cheapest machines on the market, either. But smart consumers know that there's a lot more to the cost of a computer than its price. If you get more value out of a PC of whatever brand, go for it. If you get more value out of a Mac, why are you complaining?
Apple's sales are flat, their marketshare is declining...
Assuming those two assertions are actually true, then the only conclusion one can draw is that the market is expanding. This is no big surprise, as Linux market share seems to be increasing dramatically, and Microsoft's market share is probably either flat or decreasing slightly. So what? All that matters is that there's a healthy market for Mac products. And there is.
.. then I found that this clear plastic eMac stand COST $95 (you can find it when you select the eMac; price is from apple.ca)
Note to readers: that's 95 Canadian dollars, or 59 US dollars. US$95 would indeed be a lot, but US$59 seems reasonable for a well designed accessory that does its job well and adds certain convenience. Feel free to skip it and buy an aftermarket stand, or make your own, or use an old text book.
That only begs the question, "What's permanent?" Data stored in SRAM has a longer life than in DRAM. Magnetic media are longer-lived still, with film, paper, clay, metal, and stone giving successively longer useful lives.
The cops aren't going to bang down your door for saving chat logs.
No, you're probably right. But that doesn't mean it's not useful to discuss the issue. You could, after all, be sued by the other party. Or the offense might be discovered as part of a wider investigation, and you could presumably be charged.
What would have happened if Linda Tripp had lived in New Hampshire and used iChat to talk to Monica Lewinsky instead of the telephone? I expect that saving transcripts of the chats would still have landed her in hot water.
IMO, Tripp's secret taping of her phone conversations with Lewinsky was wrong, but (again, IMO) saving chat logs is not. The reason for that opinion is that reasonable people would not expect phone conversations to be recorded, but reasonable people would expect that comments typed into a computer might persist beyond the scope of the chat.
It's probably also worth noting that, at least at the moment, Amazon is offering Cocoa in a Nutshell for $15.98, down from $39.95.
That's probably a good indication that a new edition is on its way. Like most other frameworks, Cocoa is constantly growing. Apple recently added the controller layer and key value binding to support it. These things are important, but they aren't mentioned in the Nutshell book right now. $16 isn't a bad deal for a slightly out of date edition, IMO, but if you want a complete reference, wait a month or two. WWDC is coming up, and I would be surprised if O'Reilly didn't update this volume then.
Besides, if you're using Xcode, or even if you're not, you hardly need a paper reference to Cocoa. Xcode's code completion feature really helps jog your memory, and full documentation for all the classes is just a click or two away.
Exactly what constitutes recording? Saving on magnetic media? Printing on paper? Storage in RAM? Storage in SRAM? Storage in human memory?
The answer is important, since chat software "saves" conversations in RAM, at least as long as the chat window is open. I can preserve a record of a chat session for as long as I want by simply not closing the window. Given that fact, I would expect that all chat sessions are recorded, and therefore use of chat software implies consent by all parties to record the session.
I suppose that if you're really concerned about this, you could strengthen that case by transmitting a statement immediately after starting a chat session along the lines of "This chat session may be recorded. If you do not consent to the recording of this session, disconnect from this session now."
I'm pretty sure that if you ask any security expert, they'll tell you that obscurity is not security. In other words, if you're relying on poor usability to protect you from intrusion and other bad things, your software is not secure.
Indeed, I'd take that a bit further. An interface that's difficult to use may be a security liability. Administrative tools which are difficult to use are far more likely to flummox legitimate administrators than to dissuade some curious kid with time on his hands or someone bent on doing some real harm. Bugs are less likely to be spotted and fixed if the software is hard to use in the first place. And prospective customers are less likely to be able to decide whether a tool really does what it claims to do before they buy it.
That's not to say that there aren't plenty of relatively secure programs out there with lousy user interfaces. And there are surely plenty of pretty, easy to use programs that are full of holes.
But really, if you have to rely on ugliness to increase the security of your software, what does that say about your code?
I, for one, need at least a couple extra spacial dimensions. Then I might have a chance at organizing all my crap.
Trouble is, you can't just invent that kind of thing. And that goes for things like Moore's Law, too... Moore didn't invent Moore's law, he simply noticed it and put it into words. (It should be noted, however, that Moore was arguably a driving force behind the causes of Moore's Law.)
We might "need" a stated law that describes exponential increases in computational efficiency. But unless and until it actually starts happening on a regular basis, nobody is going to be able to observe it.
It's great that Apple does things this way, and I'm just as big a fan, but really it's more like the absence of a huge mis-feature. The ridiculous maze of DLL's and other crap on Windows is just a poor solution to an old problem that was allowed to metastasize. And traditional Unixes have always lived under the assumption that a knowledgeable administrator would install software, manage permissions, etc., so complicated installs there were historically not viewed as much of a problem.
So create another disk image, run the installer, and point it at your new image. Once mounted, a disk image is just another volume.
Disclaimer: I haven't installed OO, so I don't know if it's one of those that wants to install stuff all over the system. If it is, I'd just avoid it for now, or fix it.
No; it's pretty clear from recent history that any action by Congress will make things worse. Most members of Congress consider only one thing when framing legislation: "Will my position on this attract more money from the big campaign donors?".
That's true up to a point, but eventually you reach a point when the electorate gets so pissed off that big money matters less. When we can't put frozen homemade waffles in a toaster for breakfast because it would violate somebody's patent, or when we can't write software without a team of lawyers present, the people are going to get pissed off. I'm not saying this will happen quickly or soon. But I can certainly see it becoming a major political issue. And it's one that conservatives, libertarians, and liberals can agree on.
Even big businesses with large libraries of legitimate patents have an interest in fixing the system in order to protect the enforceability of their patents.
First of all, bad patents are everyone's business. Each time the PTO grants a patent on something obvious, it limits my freedom and yours. And the issue isn't just my personal or professional freedom; it's a major time sink and money sink that is a huge drag on businesses, and therefore a detriment to the economy. It's therefore important to keep bad patents in check. If the PTO can't do that, then it should be reformed, since I can't think of any other reason for it to exist.
Second, there are LOTS of examples of bad patents out there by any measure. No, I'm not just talking about the ones that/. gets fired up about. And I'm not saying that the patent on subdomains is a bad one just because many of us here on/. don't like it. In fact, I specifically set aside the issue of that patent's validity so that my point wouldn't get confused with that one. (And to clarify, I do think that seems to be a bad patent simply because there's apparently plenty of prior art.)
Third, I'm clearly not the only one who thinks along these lines. Check out this article for a view consistant with mine. Happily, it seems from this (oldish) article that even the USPTO acknowledges the problem and wants to do something about it.
Fourth, what I said in my original post applies even if it's just a single category of patents that's the problem. If any significant percentage of, say, software patents or business method patents are found by the courts to be invalid, it should become much easier to challenge and invalidate patents in those categories.
You admit most of these things yourself:
Granted, there probably are patents which should not be granted...or maybe there is actually some validity for such patents being granted, i.e. the technology behind 1-click shopping perhaps..regardless, the patent examiners are human and statistically will make mistakes. That is a given. Especially when there are new technological areas that patents are being sought.
Sounds to me that we agree that bad patents exist, and only disagree over how many and how big a problem they are.
The last thing needed is any Congressional tinkering. The PTO and patents in general are not broken...granted, it may need some improvements. So let's not indict the whole PTO for a few patents that "seem" to be "bad"
Why so wishy-washy? You grant that the PTO may need "some improvements," and the PTO is created by Congress. If the PTO can fix its process such that it avoids shifting the burden of deciding which patents are and are not valid to the courts as much as it seems to currently, then that's great. If not, Congress should do it, because it needs to be done. There are more than "a few" patents that are bad, and it's a problem that I'd like to see fixed.
This seems to me to be very much like the ancient custom of displaying someone's head on a pike in the town square. Sure, many of us would prefer that AOL stay even closer to that tradition, but offering up some spammer's Porche isn't a bad start.
There are two important aspects to this action. First, AOL sending a clear warning to other spammers. "Stay off our network or your house may be next." Second, AOL is appeasing and entertaining its customers. "Be glad you're an AOL customer, because we're actually doing something about spam."
Let's put this particular patent and its validity aside for a moment and consider that the USPTO does seem to grant quite a lot of patents that it probably should not, and which will eventually be shown to be invalid.
In some sense, the more this happens, the better. A large number of bad patents diminishes the authority of the USPTO. After a few dozen of these make it though the courts, there will be a fair body of case law that defense lawyers can point at and say "Your honor, the Patent Office has a long history of granting patents without doing appropriate research, and this case is just one more example." At least one of the following will happen:
Courts will give less weight to patents, and patents will become easier and cheaper to invalidate in the courts.
Holders of significant numbers of patents will start to police the system, pre-emptively challenging bad patents and leaning on patent abusers to knock it off.
Congress, in an effort to appease pissed-off businesses, will attempt to reform the USPTO.
Congress will make it artificially more difficult to invalidate a patent, thus making the problem worse.
Any of the above except the last item would be an improvement. Of course, the last item seems the most likely, but it would really just delay the necessary and inevitable patent reform.
Business right now relies on patents like an addict relies on his chosen drug. Withdrawal will be painful and reform will be difficult, but it will ultimately make the nation much healthier and more productive.
Sure. It'd be pretty stupid to acquire a company with the intent of converting its users over to your product, and then encourage them to consider other options equally by not giving them an easy upgrade path to your product. I'd think that someday soon FrameMaker users will be able to read their files into InDesign.
...that Adobe has puchased a competitor and then killed off the competing product. Didn't they do the same thing with PageMaker?
In any case, it would seem difficult for a company to justify splitting its development resources between two competing products. FrameMaker users surely must have (or should have) seen this coming.
I heard the same story. Isn't it already illegal to break into someone else's computer and take control of it?
The same laws that are supposed to prevent hackers from breaking into corporate and government systems should apply to companies that use adware and spyware. And IMO, companies that use adware to sell anti-adware products should also be charged with extortion.
Aside from costs, I think knowledge of the language is good reason for them to let local programmers write the software in their own lanuage
And considering how much Microsoft stands to make when a whole new market opens up, it might consider paying a few of those local programmers for their time.
I'm not saying that anything about this plan is stupid or even dishonest. Frankly, it's a pretty smart move, but it's also arrogant and greedy. And that's pretty much par for the course.
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Ethical business practice, my ass. I've since long found out that most of the salesdroids I encounter are lying thieves, burnt on making a quick buck with as little to do for it as possible.
Oh, I see. Well, then, I guess that makes it okay.
It seems to me all of this hubbub created by Linspire is only creating a bad rap for Linux by inviting constant litigation and controversy.
Yep. This is exactly the sort of behavior that lends credence in the public mindset to the notion that Linux/OSS folks have no respect for IP. And that, I think, is about the only thing that has kept SCO afloat for so long.
As if Linspire don't have enough problems.
All of which they seem to have brought upon themselves.
They say all publicity is good publicity, but after taking a look at these apps I know exactly two things:
1. I have zero respect for the Linspire folks.
2. The Linspire folks have zero imagination and zero respect for other people's work.
I think this is more a problem with the current crop of sound cards than with Linux.
Some sound card manufacturer out there will one day realize that there's a lot of money to be made by writing a Linux driver for his card. It can't be rocket science... after all, he knows what his card needs, and he can easily get the source to the OS.
The fact that there are various Linux distributions may complicate things a bit, but it really shouldn't be that much of a problem. And if the manufacturer doesn't want to bother constantly updating for 10 different distro's, he can always open source his driver. (This is surely the sticking point, though... fear that other manufacturers will gain from that sort of thing.)
If you ask me, making Apple play Whack-A-Mole by running around to different countries trying to find one that's friendly to your cause is a lot like SCO or Microsoft shopping around for the friendliest venue in which to have their various cases tried. If you've actually got a legal leg to stand on in your own damn country, then make your case and get on with it. Else, stop your infringing behavior, and stop giving the rest of us a black eye.
The current strategy definitely does not live up to the name "PlayFair."
Not sure how you get from Flat Sales and Declining Market Share to "healthy market"
According to it's press release, Apple shipped 749,000 computers and 804,000 iPods in Q2, 2004. If its sales are "flat," that'd mean Apple should ship approximately 3 million machines this year, and about 3.2 million iPods. 3 million machines alone would be a pretty decent market, but the installed base is quite a lot larger. Macs tend to have a long useful life (I'm typing this on a machine that's 5 years old and which remains quite useful), so the market that third parties can sell into is quite a bit larger than that indicated by market share alone. That is how I get from "Flat Sales" to "healthy market."
I'm leaning towards the idea that Apple is trying to milk it's "legacy" base of Mac users while transitioning to a consumer device company. In which case, I hope not, but how else do you read the evidence?
Why? What evidence is there to support this idea? Apple's oft-stated and well known long term plan for the consumer market is the "digital lifestyle," and every time Steve Jobs brings that up, he includes a diagram with various consumer electronic devices and a Macintosh in the middle. iPod, iTunes, iSight, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, etc. are all meant to sell Macintosh computers. They work as well as they do specifically because Apple is able to integrate those things with the Mac hardware and OS.
So sure, you may see even more of Apple's income in the future come from consumer electronics like iPod, particularly if Apple can also sell those items into the Windows and Linux markets. But there's no way that Apple is going to give up control over the system at the heart of the digital lifestyle, not to mention the heart of its revenue, which is the Mac.
According to the NY Times today, Apple's recent quarterly results show that profits have tripled lately. Yes, that's due largely to incredible iPod sales, but I think it does show that Apple is not completely clueless when it comes to pricing its products.
Apple has never been the cheapest computer you can buy, in any sense of "cheapest." For many of us, this is a feature. Apple has never tried to compete with the cheapest machines on the market, either. But smart consumers know that there's a lot more to the cost of a computer than its price. If you get more value out of a PC of whatever brand, go for it. If you get more value out of a Mac, why are you complaining?
Apple's sales are flat, their marketshare is declining...
Assuming those two assertions are actually true, then the only conclusion one can draw is that the market is expanding. This is no big surprise, as Linux market share seems to be increasing dramatically, and Microsoft's market share is probably either flat or decreasing slightly. So what? All that matters is that there's a healthy market for Mac products. And there is.
.. then I found that this clear plastic eMac stand COST $95 (you can find it when you select the eMac; price is from apple.ca)
Note to readers: that's 95 Canadian dollars, or 59 US dollars. US$95 would indeed be a lot, but US$59 seems reasonable for a well designed accessory that does its job well and adds certain convenience. Feel free to skip it and buy an aftermarket stand, or make your own, or use an old text book.
The key word here is permanent.
That only begs the question, "What's permanent?" Data stored in SRAM has a longer life than in DRAM. Magnetic media are longer-lived still, with film, paper, clay, metal, and stone giving successively longer useful lives.
The cops aren't going to bang down your door for saving chat logs.
No, you're probably right. But that doesn't mean it's not useful to discuss the issue. You could, after all, be sued by the other party. Or the offense might be discovered as part of a wider investigation, and you could presumably be charged.
What would have happened if Linda Tripp had lived in New Hampshire and used iChat to talk to Monica Lewinsky instead of the telephone? I expect that saving transcripts of the chats would still have landed her in hot water.
IMO, Tripp's secret taping of her phone conversations with Lewinsky was wrong, but (again, IMO) saving chat logs is not. The reason for that opinion is that reasonable people would not expect phone conversations to be recorded, but reasonable people would expect that comments typed into a computer might persist beyond the scope of the chat.
It's probably also worth noting that, at least at the moment, Amazon is offering Cocoa in a Nutshell for $15.98, down from $39.95.
That's probably a good indication that a new edition is on its way. Like most other frameworks, Cocoa is constantly growing. Apple recently added the controller layer and key value binding to support it. These things are important, but they aren't mentioned in the Nutshell book right now. $16 isn't a bad deal for a slightly out of date edition, IMO, but if you want a complete reference, wait a month or two. WWDC is coming up, and I would be surprised if O'Reilly didn't update this volume then.
Besides, if you're using Xcode, or even if you're not, you hardly need a paper reference to Cocoa. Xcode's code completion feature really helps jog your memory, and full documentation for all the classes is just a click or two away.
Exactly what constitutes recording? Saving on magnetic media? Printing on paper? Storage in RAM? Storage in SRAM? Storage in human memory?
The answer is important, since chat software "saves" conversations in RAM, at least as long as the chat window is open. I can preserve a record of a chat session for as long as I want by simply not closing the window. Given that fact, I would expect that all chat sessions are recorded, and therefore use of chat software implies consent by all parties to record the session.
I suppose that if you're really concerned about this, you could strengthen that case by transmitting a statement immediately after starting a chat session along the lines of "This chat session may be recorded. If you do not consent to the recording of this session, disconnect from this session now."
I'm pretty sure that if you ask any security expert, they'll tell you that obscurity is not security. In other words, if you're relying on poor usability to protect you from intrusion and other bad things, your software is not secure.
Indeed, I'd take that a bit further. An interface that's difficult to use may be a security liability. Administrative tools which are difficult to use are far more likely to flummox legitimate administrators than to dissuade some curious kid with time on his hands or someone bent on doing some real harm. Bugs are less likely to be spotted and fixed if the software is hard to use in the first place. And prospective customers are less likely to be able to decide whether a tool really does what it claims to do before they buy it.
That's not to say that there aren't plenty of relatively secure programs out there with lousy user interfaces. And there are surely plenty of pretty, easy to use programs that are full of holes.
But really, if you have to rely on ugliness to increase the security of your software, what does that say about your code?
I, for one, need at least a couple extra spacial dimensions. Then I might have a chance at organizing all my crap.
Trouble is, you can't just invent that kind of thing. And that goes for things like Moore's Law, too... Moore didn't invent Moore's law, he simply noticed it and put it into words. (It should be noted, however, that Moore was arguably a driving force behind the causes of Moore's Law.)
We might "need" a stated law that describes exponential increases in computational efficiency. But unless and until it actually starts happening on a regular basis, nobody is going to be able to observe it.
It's great that Apple does things this way, and I'm just as big a fan, but really it's more like the absence of a huge mis-feature. The ridiculous maze of DLL's and other crap on Windows is just a poor solution to an old problem that was allowed to metastasize. And traditional Unixes have always lived under the assumption that a knowledgeable administrator would install software, manage permissions, etc., so complicated installs there were historically not viewed as much of a problem.
So create another disk image, run the installer, and point it at your new image. Once mounted, a disk image is just another volume.
Disclaimer: I haven't installed OO, so I don't know if it's one of those that wants to install stuff all over the system. If it is, I'd just avoid it for now, or fix it.
...African, or European?
That's true up to a point, but eventually you reach a point when the electorate gets so pissed off that big money matters less. When we can't put frozen homemade waffles in a toaster for breakfast because it would violate somebody's patent, or when we can't write software without a team of lawyers present, the people are going to get pissed off. I'm not saying this will happen quickly or soon. But I can certainly see it becoming a major political issue. And it's one that conservatives, libertarians, and liberals can agree on.
Even big businesses with large libraries of legitimate patents have an interest in fixing the system in order to protect the enforceability of their patents.
Second, there are LOTS of examples of bad patents out there by any measure. No, I'm not just talking about the ones that
Third, I'm clearly not the only one who thinks along these lines. Check out this article for a view consistant with mine. Happily, it seems from this (oldish) article that even the USPTO acknowledges the problem and wants to do something about it.
Fourth, what I said in my original post applies even if it's just a single category of patents that's the problem. If any significant percentage of, say, software patents or business method patents are found by the courts to be invalid, it should become much easier to challenge and invalidate patents in those categories.
You admit most of these things yourself:
Sounds to me that we agree that bad patents exist, and only disagree over how many and how big a problem they are.
Why so wishy-washy? You grant that the PTO may need "some improvements," and the PTO is created by Congress. If the PTO can fix its process such that it avoids shifting the burden of deciding which patents are and are not valid to the courts as much as it seems to currently, then that's great. If not, Congress should do it, because it needs to be done. There are more than "a few" patents that are bad, and it's a problem that I'd like to see fixed.
This seems to me to be very much like the ancient custom of displaying someone's head on a pike in the town square. Sure, many of us would prefer that AOL stay even closer to that tradition, but offering up some spammer's Porche isn't a bad start.
There are two important aspects to this action. First, AOL sending a clear warning to other spammers. "Stay off our network or your house may be next." Second, AOL is appeasing and entertaining its customers. "Be glad you're an AOL customer, because we're actually doing something about spam."
It's all deliciously medieval.
In some sense, the more this happens, the better. A large number of bad patents diminishes the authority of the USPTO. After a few dozen of these make it though the courts, there will be a fair body of case law that defense lawyers can point at and say "Your honor, the Patent Office has a long history of granting patents without doing appropriate research, and this case is just one more example." At least one of the following will happen:
Any of the above except the last item would be an improvement. Of course, the last item seems the most likely, but it would really just delay the necessary and inevitable patent reform.
Business right now relies on patents like an addict relies on his chosen drug. Withdrawal will be painful and reform will be difficult, but it will ultimately make the nation much healthier and more productive.
Sure. It'd be pretty stupid to acquire a company with the intent of converting its users over to your product, and then encourage them to consider other options equally by not giving them an easy upgrade path to your product. I'd think that someday soon FrameMaker users will be able to read their files into InDesign.
...that Adobe has puchased a competitor and then killed off the competing product. Didn't they do the same thing with PageMaker?
In any case, it would seem difficult for a company to justify splitting its development resources between two competing products. FrameMaker users surely must have (or should have) seen this coming.
I heard the same story. Isn't it already illegal to break into someone else's computer and take control of it?
The same laws that are supposed to prevent hackers from breaking into corporate and government systems should apply to companies that use adware and spyware. And IMO, companies that use adware to sell anti-adware products should also be charged with extortion.
Aside from costs, I think knowledge of the language is good reason for them to let local programmers write the software in their own lanuage
And considering how much Microsoft stands to make when a whole new market opens up, it might consider paying a few of those local programmers for their time.
I'm not saying that anything about this plan is stupid or even dishonest. Frankly, it's a pretty smart move, but it's also arrogant and greedy. And that's pretty much par for the course.