Well it certianly COULD work out that badly under Linux and be a piece of cake under Windows but the opposite is true sometimes as well, especially when replacing one product with a newer model. For example, with Linux replacing an old CD writer with a new one is just a matter of unplugging the old one and plugging in the new. No drivers or special software need to be installed, it just works. With Windows half the time the software for the old burner won't work with the new one and cannot be removed cleanly but still manages to conflict with the new software (thanks Roxio). Before you say this is a rare exception, I deal with a lot of hardware and I've seen it also with scanners, cameras, printers and even wireless network cards. One of my customers has a couple of employees who travel between different offices and they have never ending problems with their printers. Every printer they plug in wants to install it's own special usb or parallel drivers and conflicts with the others. They all also like to install background utilities that flip out whenever they connect to one of the other printers. I can use all of their printers in all of their offices by changing a single line in just one config file (and I could easily make that a click on an icon sort of thing if I wanted to).
I don't think I've ever seen a ROM burner from the 80's much less one that still works (typical lifespan is about 2-4 years) but any IDE or SCSI rom burner or DVD should work just fine, you don't need any special drivers and it doesn't need to be "detected" as anything special. Likewise with the parallel scanner (it can't really be serial) the floressant(sp) bulb HAS to be on the verge of dieing by now so maybe when you replace it you can get a Linux compatable one. Locally used (and Linux compatable) scsi scanners are available for under $25 so I wouldn't let that stop you. I can't really help with the sound card except to suggest you check out the Alsa drivers if you havn't already.
I do not like the term GNU/Linux not out of disrespect - on the contrary, the FSF has given much to the world, and for that I am most appreciative. However, I use X, PostgreSQL, Apache, and a number of other tools that use different licenses, and I am NOT about to start call it GNU/MIT/Qt/Apache/BSD/etc/Linux.
I agree with you for basically the same reason but I think you and many others may be misunderstanding RMSs motivations. Although I'm sure respect/ego play a part I think he is more interested in spreading the awareness of the GNU philosophy and the name issue is part of that. It would be a real shame if Linux won the the battle but lost the war because the new users didn't understand the value of Free Software.
Re:Keep putting it off. Please !
on
Longhorn in 2006
·
· Score: 1
Even if they release it, who says that you have to use it?
Probably the same guy/gal who decides that the shiny new PCs will come with the newest WinOS wheather we like it or not (and buying a PC without an OS gets you reported to MS). Sure for a little while you can purchase additional licenses for your existing WinOS and just install that in place of the new one you've already paid for but that adds to the cost and becomes impractical eventually due to driver compatability issues.
Re:Keep putting it off. Please !
on
Longhorn in 2006
·
· Score: 1
It sounds like there will be good money to be made recovering peoples' documents when they manage to misuse the DRM features... Asuming that doing so isn't illegal under the DMCA then there will be GREAT money in it!
I've found that benchmarks that I do not confirm myself are just about always accurate (after purchasing the actual hardware and testing it myself) when they are replicated by multiple sources.
The problem is that benchmarks almost never represent exactly the customers' intended usage and even small differences in the two setups can make a huge difference in performance. That's one reason it is so important for the benchmark procedure and test conditions to be spelled out in detail (another is so someone else CAN replicate the experiment). For example, I'd expect Linux to compare much more favorably to Win03 on a system with only 128MB of ram than on a system with 1GB due to the extra overhead of Windows.
Again, this is a popular misconception. If you are talking the local grey box manufacturer, yeah, you can probably get a $499 PC, but it will not have many of the features that the brand name boxes will have or the software. Generally you get what you pay for and with Apple products, you get a quality product with features that really do make a difference.
Maybe things are better at the high end but at the low end an Emac is roughly 2x as much as an equivilant HP from Wal-Mart. (1299 vs. 599).
and it's hard to find a good x86 box with Linux preloaded
This unfortunately in some cases has become true with Dell backing off their Linux push at Microsoft's urging. However, there are other companies out there bundling Linux in.
The problem is that when purchasing something completely different than they are familiar with people really want to be able to see/try it in person and you just cannot walk into a store and see a Linux PC (or even an Apple around here). To some extent geek friends with Linux or Mac boxes and Knoppix CDs can help but it is going to be slow going. At this point getting alternatives into offices where the requirements are more clearly known is probably the best way to get home users familiar with them.
For these reasons (trademark infringement, extortion), it would be completely within Microsoft's rights (and perhaps duties) to check for and remove such software as part of the normal update process.
Please no! I already run into plenty of situations where updates cause problems of their own so the last thing I want is for MS to start making their updates more complex.
n the past year? Since NT3.5 (A staple on many corporate desktops for more than a couple of years) the admin/punter divide has been standard.
Which is why I said "any consumer Windows OS". The first NT based OS targeted at consumers (as opposed to businesses) was WinXP.
Yes, a lot of software assumes admin rights when it really has no place doing so (even OpenOffice for Windows requires Admin rights to install!) However, for a similar task under unix, try installing Perl and a bunch of CPAN modules on a per-user basis rather than a system-wide basis. (we do this a lot because different 3rd party apps require different perl versions). Don't even get me started on gcc.
I can see how this would be a problem for you, I've always thought of things like Perl & GCC as the sorts of things that would be installed system wide. Maybe VMware or User Mode Linux would be a better choice. I was thinking more in terms of installing programs as root/admin but still being usable by all users (complete with their own preferences etc) based on their login info. In *NIX almost everyone solves this in the same way, a single system wide preferences file plus a seperate set of preferences in the users home directory. At least in the case of Debian the packages also take care of making sure the programs appear in each users desktop/menues and lets you know if there might be permissions issues. It's not allways pretty but at least it's fairly consistant. With Windows apps, there doesn't appear to be any pattern at all. Some apps. just show up in the admins Start Menu while others show up for everyone. Some have seperate preferences for each users and some don't. A few want access to c:\windows whenever they run (or at least whenever you change anything) and some (most thankfully) don't. Some use the built in Windows facilities for profiles/preferences and some (most) use their own oddball method. Your right that the entire WinNT line of Windows has had all (or at least most) of the facilities to handle this stuff in a nice consistant manner but until recently the vast majority of users were still running Win9x/ME and even now these people still probably represent half or more of the Windows users. The whole thing tends to be self perpetuating, the developers get used to the programs they use behaving this way and the users are already used to it so nothing changes.
2) The idea that 'most' linux users don't run as root/admin, and 'most' Windows users do is not related to the operating system at all, but to the level of knowledge of each platform's user base.
I don't think that's entirely true. It's only been in the past year or so that any consumer Windows OS has had the ability to run as anything but root/admin and doing so has become a habit of both the users and developers. Even now many/most Windows programs still ass-u-me that there is only one user on the system and behave strangely if you try to actually use the system as a locked down multi-user system. Even those that have multiple users in mind seem to roll their own solutions rather than working with the OS. Linux on the other hand has been a multi-user system since day one and it really shows in the way applications install/behave (usually for good but sometimes for ill).
This shouldn't really be surprising, if you look at OS/2 or MacOS you'll see that native programs tend to follow the lead of the OS when it comes to things like scripting support or desktop integration.
The reason the mail software executes programs it receives is because a programmer designed it to do that. That same programmer, once Windows is dead and buried, will still be around writing code, maybe writing a new Linux mail program which does the exact same thing. Or, even if it's not him, somebody can, because even on Linux it is possible.
Right and five minutes later some other programmer or one of the users will fix that bug. It won't take the years that it took MS to figure out that the small measure of convienance provided by running around without any pants just isn't worth the risk.
There's nothing stopping Linux developers from requiring everyone to run as root.
Yes there are two things preventing this:
1. Common sense, this just isn't the way *Nix developers do things. 2. The lack of a marketing department insisting on stupid features.
Heck, the GPL is the best thing Microsoft has in its arsenal against Free Software, since BSD-ish licenses and the public domain simply lack the kind of "viral" qualities inherent in the GPL. As long as people are releasing code with a "viral" license, MS can propagate FUD about the license.
Sure but if all GPL software switched to a BSD style license tommorow then by the next day MS would be spreading BSD FUD. They'd be saying to companies "Do you want to contribute to BSD projects only to have your competitors freeload off your hard work?". Rember FUD doesn't have to stand up to facts or critical reasoning to be effective.
If they gave you a clean signal you'd be able to record a rental DVD on a VCR. Would you take that chance if you were them?
Sure, I can count on one hand the number of times I've rented the same movie twice anyway so being able to casually copy wouldn't change anything for me. Also, older movies are available for purchase for under $6 at the local Wal-Mart. I know there are some people who buy new/premium movies a lot but they are in the minority (IMHO) and cost obviously isn't an issue for them. So who's left? The 1% of people who habitually copy everything they get their hands on? Those people arn't stopped by macrovision and probably wouldn't be buying lots of full priced movies anyway.
If even 1 in 100 cannot buy/rent a movie and KNOW it's going to work then they are probably loosing as much sales as they would be from casual copying.
I can see macrovision a little bit -- enough that the pulsating brightness bugs me
Traditional macrovision only affects the brightness in areas of the screen that you can't see (either above or below, I forget which). The idea is that this fools the AGC (automatic gain control) on many VCRs into adjusting the brightness of the entire picture to compensate. Unless your TV also has an AGC it really shouldn't be noticeable. I'm pretty sure that there have been additions/changes to macrovision over the years though so maybe there are some additional tricks they use these days (chances are google knows). I'd be curious if using a different set of outputs from your DVD player makes a difference.
Would someone please just break through SCO's firewall, "borrow" the System V code tree, run the comparisons, and publish them for all the world to see?
It wouldn't do any good because:
A. Someone would still have to figure the legal standing of whatever code turned out to be the same.
B. It appears that the vast majority of the code SCO is worried about is NOT actually part of or owned by SCO but was written by third parties (SGI, IBM etc). SCO is claiming that their contracts with SCO licensees limits how these licensees can distribute code they wrote as an addon to SCO Unix. Depending on the day of the week they also seem to be saying that this code is a derived work of SCO Unix and is thus partly owned by SCO.
The DMCA was created in the spirit that new forms of electronic media were not safe from potential copyright violations, and the act did what it set out to do. Yet it also did a great deal more as special interests and corporate schmoozers managed to get their paws on the bill and turn it into more of a "dominant market player protection act" than anything else. We all agree that the amount of innovation stifled using the DMCA as justification is staggering. Yet electronic media should also be protected from the loopholes the bill originally solved. Here are a few potential solutions
What loopholes? It was already illegal to distribute copies of copyrighted materials, even in electronic form.
Um, I'd like to see the shell script that runs on networking equipment that determines which packets are copyrighted, which are legitimate, and which are porn.....
and forwards the porn to the network admin for closer inspection:)
Seriously, if people have lucid, convincing cases to make about why a mandatory switch to open-source applications will save taxpayer money, go win them over!
Saving money is not the only measure of a good solution. Mass., like many states has found its self in a position where it is so locked into propriatary software and formats that even while suing MS for antitrust violations they continue (at least in the short run) purchasing products and services from that same company. If that isn't a sign that being locked into a single vendor is dangerous then I don't know what is. What if next time there MS license is up for renewal MS puts in a clause that stipulates that Mass. will drop it's Antitrust suit or MS will pull their licenses for everything? Remember these antitrust cases are civil matters so they COULD do it without breaking any criminal laws. Could Mass really do anything but give in if this were to happen today?
I basically agree with you that there needs to be sane way for them to purchase non-free software where no OSS solution will do the job but I find it hard to believe that this hasn't been thought of. The press release just paraphrased the policy rather than linking to it and given their bizzare definition of monopoly I'm not willing to take their interpretation at face value. If they put it in terms of "Our GOAL is to switch to OSS software by 200X" would you still disagree?
Also, what if MS SQL Server is just the best tool for the job at hand? It's pretty darn fast. You may prefer another product yourself, but that doesn't mean there's anything really "wrong" with MS SQL. It's a totally viable contender. So why tell government organizations that they CAN NOT use it?
How is saying "we won't buy propriatary software" any different than saying "we won't cars with the hoods welded shut" or "we won't buy printers that can't handle legal size paper"? The way I see it is that OSS is essentially a feature and if they consider that feature important they certainly should make it a requirement.
As dictionary.com defines monopoly: A right granted by a government giving exclusive control over a specified commercial activity to a single party.
An in this case that party would be who exactly? There are many different Linux vendors and anyone, even MS could supply/support Linux solutions.
While you argue there are different Linux vendors, it is, in effect, correct. It is restricting it to one operating system
Tell that to the SuSe, Red Hat, Debian, Gentoo etc folks. I think each one of them would tell you that their product has advantages over the others. Also you seem to be ignoring the BSDs which are also open source but are clearly not Linux.
and this bars a lot of vendors who provide closed source software from competing for government contracts.
Any restriction or requirement is going to bar a lot of vendors but given that there are dozens if not hundreds of vendors that could bid on government projects using OSS that can hardly be called a monopoly.
Quite frankly, you sound like a bitter anti-capitalist to me.
Capitalism relies on an informed consumer. If the article is correct and the customer cannot know exactly what level of service they are purchasing then it is Comcast that is being anti-capitalist. As for your monopoly comment:
A: A company does not have to have 100% market share to be a monopoly. B: A company can be a monopoly in one market without being a monopoly in every market. It's entirely possible that Comcast has a monopoly on broadband Internet access where the previous poster lives.
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you don't seriously think that MS is willing to risk another anti-competition trial, do you?
Why not? The wern't punished in any significant way.
Can Microsoft afford to ship an update that breaks Photoshop or, say, Corel Office?
:)
Depends if MS has a similar competing product or not
Well it certianly COULD work out that badly under Linux and be a piece of cake under Windows but the opposite is true sometimes as well, especially when replacing one product with a newer model. For example, with Linux replacing an old CD writer with a new one is just a matter of unplugging the old one and plugging in the new. No drivers or special software need to be installed, it just works. With Windows half the time the software for the old burner won't work with the new one and cannot be removed cleanly but still manages to conflict with the new software (thanks Roxio). Before you say this is a rare exception, I deal with a lot of hardware and I've seen it also with scanners, cameras, printers and even wireless network cards. One of my customers has a couple of employees who travel between different offices and they have never ending problems with their printers. Every printer they plug in wants to install it's own special usb or parallel drivers and conflicts with the others. They all also like to install background utilities that flip out whenever they connect to one of the other printers. I can use all of their printers in all of their offices by changing a single line in just one config file (and I could easily make that a click on an icon sort of thing if I wanted to).
I don't think I've ever seen a ROM burner from the 80's much less one that still works (typical lifespan is about 2-4 years) but any IDE or SCSI rom burner or DVD should work just fine, you don't need any special drivers and it doesn't need to be "detected" as anything special. Likewise with the parallel scanner (it can't really be serial) the floressant(sp) bulb HAS to be on the verge of dieing by now so maybe when you replace it you can get a Linux compatable one. Locally used (and Linux compatable) scsi scanners are available for under $25 so I wouldn't let that stop you. I can't really help with the sound card except to suggest you check out the Alsa drivers if you havn't already.
I do not like the term GNU/Linux not out of disrespect - on the contrary, the FSF has given much to the world, and for that I am most appreciative. However, I use X, PostgreSQL, Apache, and a number of other tools that use different licenses, and I am NOT about to start call it GNU/MIT/Qt/Apache/BSD/etc/Linux.
I agree with you for basically the same reason but I think you and many others may be misunderstanding RMSs motivations. Although I'm sure respect/ego play a part I think he is more interested in spreading the awareness of the GNU philosophy and the name issue is part of that. It would be a real shame if Linux won the the battle but lost the war because the new users didn't understand the value of Free Software.
Even if they release it, who says that you have to use it?
Probably the same guy/gal who decides that the shiny new PCs will come with the newest WinOS wheather we like it or not (and buying a PC without an OS gets you reported to MS). Sure for a little while you can purchase additional licenses for your existing WinOS and just install that in place of the new one you've already paid for but that adds to the cost and becomes impractical eventually due to driver compatability issues.
It sounds like there will be good money to be made recovering peoples' documents when they manage to misuse the DRM features... Asuming that doing so isn't illegal under the DMCA then there will be GREAT money in it!
In 20 or 30 years, computers, telephones, and televisions will become part of our intimate clothing,"
So now we can display p0rn right ON our undies? What a time saver!
I've found that benchmarks that I do not confirm myself are just about always accurate (after purchasing the actual hardware and testing it myself) when they are replicated by multiple sources.
The problem is that benchmarks almost never represent exactly the customers' intended usage and even small differences in the two setups can make a huge difference in performance. That's one reason it is so important for the benchmark procedure and test conditions to be spelled out in detail (another is so someone else CAN replicate the experiment). For example, I'd expect Linux to compare much more favorably to Win03 on a system with only 128MB of ram than on a system with 1GB due to the extra overhead of Windows.
Again, this is a popular misconception. If you are talking the local grey box manufacturer, yeah, you can probably get a $499 PC, but it will not have many of the features that the brand name boxes will have or the software. Generally you get what you pay for and with Apple products, you get a quality product with features that really do make a difference.
Maybe things are better at the high end but at the low end an Emac is roughly 2x as much as an equivilant HP from Wal-Mart. (1299 vs. 599).
and it's hard to find a good x86 box with Linux preloaded
This unfortunately in some cases has become true with Dell backing off their Linux push at Microsoft's urging. However, there are other companies out there bundling Linux in.
The problem is that when purchasing something completely different than they are familiar with people really want to be able to see/try it in person and you just cannot walk into a store and see a Linux PC (or even an Apple around here). To some extent geek friends with Linux or Mac boxes and Knoppix CDs can help but it is going to be slow going. At this point getting alternatives into offices where the requirements are more clearly known is probably the best way to get home users familiar with them.
For these reasons (trademark infringement, extortion), it would be completely within Microsoft's rights (and perhaps duties) to check for and remove such software as part of the normal update process.
Please no! I already run into plenty of situations where updates cause problems of their own so the last thing I want is for MS to start making their updates more complex.
n the past year? Since NT3.5 (A staple on many corporate desktops for more than a couple of years) the admin/punter divide has been standard.
Which is why I said "any consumer Windows OS". The first NT based OS targeted at consumers (as opposed to businesses) was WinXP.
Yes, a lot of software assumes admin rights when it really has no place doing so (even OpenOffice for Windows requires Admin rights to install!) However, for a similar task under unix, try installing Perl and a bunch of CPAN modules on a per-user basis rather than a system-wide basis. (we do this a lot because different 3rd party apps require different perl versions). Don't even get me started on gcc.
I can see how this would be a problem for you, I've always thought of things like Perl & GCC as the sorts of things that would be installed system wide. Maybe VMware or User Mode Linux would be a better choice. I was thinking more in terms of installing programs as root/admin but still being usable by all users (complete with their own preferences etc) based on their login info. In *NIX almost everyone solves this in the same way, a single system wide preferences file plus a seperate set of preferences in the users home directory. At least in the case of Debian the packages also take care of making sure the programs appear in each users desktop/menues and lets you know if there might be permissions issues. It's not allways pretty but at least it's fairly consistant. With Windows apps, there doesn't appear to be any pattern at all. Some apps. just show up in the admins Start Menu while others show up for everyone. Some have seperate preferences for each users and some don't. A few want access to c:\windows whenever they run (or at least whenever you change anything) and some (most thankfully) don't. Some use the built in Windows facilities for profiles/preferences and some (most) use their own oddball method. Your right that the entire WinNT line of Windows has had all (or at least most) of the facilities to handle this stuff in a nice consistant manner but until recently the vast majority of users were still running Win9x/ME and even now these people still probably represent half or more of the Windows users. The whole thing tends to be self perpetuating, the developers get used to the programs they use behaving this way and the users are already used to it so nothing changes.
2) The idea that 'most' linux users don't run as root/admin, and 'most' Windows users do is not related to the operating system at all, but to the level of knowledge of each platform's user base.
I don't think that's entirely true. It's only been in the past year or so that any consumer Windows OS has had the ability to run as anything but root/admin and doing so has become a habit of both the users and developers. Even now many/most Windows programs still ass-u-me that there is only one user on the system and behave strangely if you try to actually use the system as a locked down multi-user system. Even those that have multiple users in mind seem to roll their own solutions rather than working with the OS. Linux on the other hand has been a multi-user system since day one and it really shows in the way applications install/behave (usually for good but sometimes for ill).
This shouldn't really be surprising, if you look at OS/2 or MacOS you'll see that native programs tend to follow the lead of the OS when it comes to things like scripting support or desktop integration.
The reason the mail software executes programs it receives is because a programmer designed it to do that. That same programmer, once Windows is dead and buried, will still be around writing code, maybe writing a new Linux mail program which does the exact same thing. Or, even if it's not him, somebody can, because even on Linux it is possible.
Right and five minutes later some other programmer or one of the users will fix that bug. It won't take the years that it took MS to figure out that the small measure of convienance provided by running around without any pants just isn't worth the risk.
There's nothing stopping Linux developers from requiring everyone to run as root.
Yes there are two things preventing this:
1. Common sense, this just isn't the way *Nix developers do things.
2. The lack of a marketing department insisting on stupid features.
Heck, the GPL is the best thing Microsoft has in its arsenal against Free Software, since BSD-ish licenses and the public domain simply lack the kind of "viral" qualities inherent in the GPL. As long as people are releasing code with a "viral" license, MS can propagate FUD about the license.
Sure but if all GPL software switched to a BSD style license tommorow then by the next day MS would be spreading BSD FUD. They'd be saying to companies "Do you want to contribute to BSD projects only to have your competitors freeload off your hard work?". Rember FUD doesn't have to stand up to facts or critical reasoning to be effective.
If they gave you a clean signal you'd be able to record a rental DVD on a VCR. Would you take that chance if you were them?
Sure, I can count on one hand the number of times I've rented the same movie twice anyway so being able to casually copy wouldn't change anything for me. Also, older movies are available for purchase for under $6 at the local Wal-Mart. I know there are some people who buy new/premium movies a lot but they are in the minority (IMHO) and cost obviously isn't an issue for them. So who's left? The 1% of people who habitually copy everything they get their hands on? Those people arn't stopped by macrovision and probably wouldn't be buying lots of full priced movies anyway.
If even 1 in 100 cannot buy/rent a movie and KNOW it's going to work then they are probably loosing as much sales as they would be from casual copying.
I can see macrovision a little bit -- enough that the pulsating brightness bugs me
Traditional macrovision only affects the brightness in areas of the screen that you can't see (either above or below, I forget which). The idea is that this fools the AGC (automatic gain control) on many VCRs into adjusting the brightness of the entire picture to compensate. Unless your TV also has an AGC it really shouldn't be noticeable. I'm pretty sure that there have been additions/changes to macrovision over the years though so maybe there are some additional tricks they use these days (chances are google knows). I'd be curious if using a different set of outputs from your DVD player makes a difference.
Would someone please just break through SCO's firewall, "borrow" the System V code tree, run the comparisons, and publish them for all the world to see?
It wouldn't do any good because:
A. Someone would still have to figure the legal standing of whatever code turned out to be the same.
B. It appears that the vast majority of the code SCO is worried about is NOT actually part of or owned by SCO but was written by third parties (SGI, IBM etc). SCO is claiming that their contracts with SCO licensees limits how these licensees can distribute code they wrote as an addon to SCO Unix. Depending on the day of the week they also seem to be saying that this code is a derived work of SCO Unix and is thus partly owned by SCO.
The DMCA was created in the spirit that new forms of electronic media were not safe from potential copyright violations, and the act did what it set out to do. Yet it also did a great deal more as special interests and corporate schmoozers managed to get their paws on the bill and turn it into more of a "dominant market player protection act" than anything else. We all agree that the amount of innovation stifled using the DMCA as justification is staggering. Yet electronic media should also be protected from the loopholes the bill originally solved. Here are a few potential solutions
What loopholes? It was already illegal to distribute copies of copyrighted materials, even in electronic form.
Um, I'd like to see the shell script that runs on networking equipment that determines which packets are copyrighted, which are legitimate, and which are porn.....
:)
and forwards the porn to the network admin for closer inspection
What temp agency are you working with that actually finds you real temporary tech jobs?
Seriously, if people have lucid, convincing cases to make about why a mandatory switch to open-source applications will save taxpayer money, go win them over!
Saving money is not the only measure of a good solution. Mass., like many states has found its self in a position where it is so locked into propriatary software and formats that even while suing MS for antitrust violations they continue (at least in the short run) purchasing products and services from that same company. If that isn't a sign that being locked into a single vendor is dangerous then I don't know what is. What if next time there MS license is up for renewal MS puts in a clause that stipulates that Mass. will drop it's Antitrust suit or MS will pull their licenses for everything? Remember these antitrust cases are civil matters so they COULD do it without breaking any criminal laws. Could Mass really do anything but give in if this were to happen today?
I basically agree with you that there needs to be sane way for them to purchase non-free software where no OSS solution will do the job but I find it hard to believe that this hasn't been thought of. The press release just paraphrased the policy rather than linking to it and given their bizzare definition of monopoly I'm not willing to take their interpretation at face value. If they put it in terms of "Our GOAL is to switch to OSS software by 200X" would you still disagree?
Also, what if MS SQL Server is just the best tool for the job at hand? It's pretty darn fast. You may prefer another product yourself, but that doesn't mean there's anything really "wrong" with MS SQL. It's a totally viable contender. So why tell government organizations that they CAN NOT use it?
How is saying "we won't buy propriatary software" any different than saying "we won't cars with the hoods welded shut" or "we won't buy printers that can't handle legal size paper"? The way I see it is that OSS is essentially a feature and if they consider that feature important they certainly should make it a requirement.
As dictionary.com defines monopoly:
A right granted by a government giving exclusive control over a specified commercial activity to a single party.
An in this case that party would be who exactly? There are many different Linux vendors and anyone, even MS could supply/support Linux solutions.
While you argue there are different Linux vendors, it is, in effect, correct. It is restricting it to one operating system
Tell that to the SuSe, Red Hat, Debian, Gentoo etc folks. I think each one of them would tell you that their product has advantages over the others. Also you seem to be ignoring the BSDs which are also open source but are clearly not Linux.
and this bars a lot of vendors who provide closed source software from competing for government contracts.
Any restriction or requirement is going to bar a lot of vendors but given that there are dozens if not hundreds of vendors that could bid on government projects using OSS that can hardly be called a monopoly.
Quite frankly, you sound like a bitter anti-capitalist to me.
Capitalism relies on an informed consumer. If the article is correct and the customer cannot know exactly what level of service they are purchasing then it is Comcast that is being anti-capitalist. As for your monopoly comment:
A: A company does not have to have 100% market share to be a monopoly.
B: A company can be a monopoly in one market without being a monopoly in every market. It's entirely possible that Comcast has a monopoly on broadband Internet access where the previous poster lives.