I'm afraid that you are also being used by fat bloated corporations purely because you do not expect to earn as high a salary as people in Europe and the US do - no different to the concept of a "sweatshop" in that sense.
In today's world of advanced communications and the Internet, it is irrelevant where in the world you are located, particularly if you're involved in software programming or support where files can be whisked to the other side of the world in milliseconds.
In other words, you are paid less for doing as good or better a job than one of your European or American counterparts.
In simplistic terms, that sounds to me like pay equality and racial harmony has just gone "out of the window" in favour of company profits and you're just being used so that a fat CEO somewhere can get his new company jet.
Everyone seems so willing to make the argument other countries should not rely so much on foreign (American) software.
If you believe this then you're missing the point entirely. The backlash is not against "American software", it's against being locked into proprietary code and proprietary protocols.
The fact that MS believe only in the proprietary model means that they are the focus of the backlash a lot of the time - however, traditional Unix vendors like SCO and Sun are also targets of much criticism by the Open Source community.
Wouldn't that mean the loss of more American tech jobs? Aren't those lines of thinking in conflict?
Tech jobs will go to India purely because it's cheaper to hire a techie in India rather than the US or Europe. A company's decision to do that is based purely on profit and it's irrelevant whether the techies support Windows, Linux, etc.
Or is it okay to lose tech jobs, as long as those jobs are Microsoft's, and somehow that won't affect other tech jobs.???
No, it's not alright for just MS to lose jobs but please remember that it's the company's own decision to lay off its workforce, not some external factor.
I'm a firm believer in goverment taxation of profits for companies that outsource jobs outside of countries where they do the most business.
As far as I am concerned, if a company makes money in a particular country, then it has an obligation to not just take money out of that country but put something back into it like jobs and livelihoods - i.e. it should be made more expensive to outsource jobs to another country due to taxation of profits.
By far, the most common phrase I hear from Home users is - Wow - No more viruses!
Most of what you say is valid but please do not go portraying to potential Linux newbies that there are "No more viruses".
Sure, at the moment, there are few reports of Linux viruses and because of Linux's simpler security model to Windows, plus the fact that there is no real "standard" set of Linux applications, Linux probably will never be as susceptible to viruses as Windows where recent worm viruses attack through Outlook for example.
However, Linux is theoretically more susceptible to intrusion and buffer overflow type attacks, especially where a new user doesn't shutdown unnecessary services and keep those that are needed regularly updated.
Also, if you have a Windows machine that's infected by a virus, then there is some rationale behind blaming Microsoft for leaving a security hole in their code. On a Linux system, the only person to blame is the owner of the system. Becoming a Linux (or any free Unix) user implies that you are also prepared to take on a good deal much more responsibility for your system and taking on that level of responsibility is far beyond most Joe Averages that use their Windows PCs to surf the Internet, collect email and play games.
I'm not being elitist here because if more people use Linux, then more people feed back bugs and enhancement requests to the Open Source developer community and software gets better quicker. But there does need to be a mentality change if you move from Windows to Linux - while there's a lot of knowledgeable Windows people out there who can probably move to Linux quite quickly (should they want to), it's beyond most people as things stand today and it's therefore much better for them to stay "with the devil they know" rather than move to Linux purely because it's "fashionable" to be seen to be rebellious.
FACT: Mozilla (Firebird) has switched to a development model that can continue (albeit at a reduced pace) even when the AOL funding stops and Microsoft has finished "cutting off their air supply".
So I read that to mean the Mozilla still keeps developing despite anything MS may or may not want to do. Surely that's a good thing?
FACT: Google is still depending on ad revenue to pay for the thousands of servers and fat bandwidth pipes with which they spider and serve the (still rapidly) growing internet.
Yes, but this isn't like the IE vs Netscape fight because Google is already entrenched as a search engine whereas Microsoft would be starting from afresh - during the browser wars, it was all about features and the fact that IE was embedded into Windows.
Besides, if MS come up with a search engine that's better than Google and is free for all to use, I don't see a problem with it. I don't personally like MS one bit but I'm not going to not use an MS product purely because it bears the Microsoft logo. If they start charging for it and/or lock out the Linux users then that's different...
PROBLEM: If Microsoft can cut off Google's ad revenue (say, by providing their own search engine that is preinstalled for their users and good enough to prevent most users from switching), then it won't matter if you can choose Google as your preferred search engine in Mozilla, because although Mozilla will still be around, google.com might not be.
If Google dies through Microsoft pressure then there will be be a free replacement that MS won't be able to touch. The Open Directory Project has a long way to go but it's a foundation stone that'll probably get a lot more attention if Google disappears.
But trying to hard to understand the culture/history? I think not, in fact quite the opposite. Doesn't recent events show "us" quite clearly, that "we" cannot make the mistake of "just getting on and [code]"? Isn't that stance a bit naive?
Sure, it might be naive because the Open Source model is constantly being put to the test as the size of the model grows.
However, the concept of Open Source and "getting on and coding" existed long before Microsoft had the idea of selling an OS. While it might be argued that Linux has popularity because of Microsoft (as a backlash to MS), the various project groups that handle things like Apache, OpenOffice, KDE, etc. do just "get on and code" based on bug reports and feature requests from users.
As for SCO, let's just see what happens. There's already signs of SCO starting a U-turn - even Darl McBride was shocked by the amount of anti-SCO sentiment...
because IBM or similar entities sure as hell can't be trusted with the "keys to the kingdom"
IBM and Linux is probably something of a "parasitic" relationship - IBM sees a lot of money to be made from Linux as well as now having a weapon to beat Microsoft with while the Linux/Open Source community benefits from sponsorship & exposure.
IBM can use Linux (just as much as Microsoft could if they wanted to) but it can never control or own it because of the GPL.
What is the definition of this (new) "open source" that is currently being (re)written by all these major players?
Is it being rewritten? No, I don't think so. There are other types of software licences other than the GPL and there's nothing to stop anyone writing commercial software on Linux - as long as you don't use any GPL code, you can do that.
Are you aware of Bill Gate's intention to give the vast majority of his fortune away?
Yes, I have heard this said, of course. But most of his personal fortune is (I assume) sat in investments simply making more money that he can never possibly spend rather than being allowed to be released slowly now to start doing some good.
I get the feeling that you view the existence of billionares as somehow detrimental to the poor.
In a capitalist society, I don't deny anyone the opportunity to make their fortune. However, billionaires are the CEOs of big corporations, those corporations employ people, those people buy houses close to where they work, the house prices are driven up and the poorest are driven out of those areas. Not to mention those corporations (excluding Microsoft) like Nike that rely on third-world sweatshops for products or those like Macdonalds that change the face of agriculture through intense farming methods.
When all said and done, there is only so much money and if much of it is owned by a rich few, then a larger proportion of the remainder of the population has less of it.
So, yes, indirectly billionaires do create poverty and therefore there is an onus on them to help alleviate that poverty - that's my reasoning.
but all of those millionares spending their money has been of great benefit to the poor in those areas.
How? Okay, maybe Bill Gates employs a butler, nanny or gardener or two but what does he bring to the poor in the area?
I'm sorry but I can see a point to a rich person buying a mansion or a yacht or a private jet or a Rolls Royce - but once that person has done that, what else is there to do with the money apart from investing it to make more money?
This is where I have a real problem understanding the need for more wealth than you can ever possibly hope to spend...
Surely, all that's left is to gain some popularity & kudos by giving it away freely to the needy. And is it not better to do that during one's lifetime rather than after it?
Issues such as drivers, buying linux pre-installed, standards compliance, etc are glossed over. Granted this is a Linux 101 article, but these are important topics.
Be careful though... even Windows IT departments only tend to support a fixed number of hardware platforms on the corporate intranet - i.e. there will be a specific hardware vendor for laptops, servers, etc.
Plus, IT departments never use preinstalled PCs anyway, they usually "Ghost" on an image of the corporate platform straight onto the hard-disk...
At that level, Linux is no different - you can use a distribution that will pick up all the hardware on one laptop perfectly fine but on another you'll need to play about with drivers and config files.
The hurdle here isn't Linux itself, it's actually about having the people who can create custom disk images in Linux as well as they can in Windows.
Re:But Microsoft *is* our local economy
on
Linux Going Mainstream
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
My only point is that is struck me as odd that an American(?) like Phipps working for Sun Microsystems would invoke the "we want them to invest in their own nations' economies" argument.
Yeah, that got me too...
I don't know the inner machinations of corporate IT departments but I'm assuming that someone somewhere in the IT department of every Windows house has some kind of Service Level Agreement with Microsoft for support.
Assuming that a corporation rolls out Linux, even though they have people trained on Linux, they still have an SLA with Red Hat, SuSE, etc. etc. If that's the case, they probably paid for their Linux distro from an American (Red Hat) or German (SuSE) company so the money is still going out away from the local economy.
The only way no money changes hands is if the corporate IT department supports Linux entirely "in-house" which is currently going to be far beyond what the majority of corporations will be in a postion to do currently.
It's actually good to see someone come up with a good, honest, valid criticism of Linux for a change. And, to be honest, there's no real answer to this because game companies won't invest in Linux ports of games until they can be virtually guaranteed of a certain number of sales.
I do actually wonder, though, if when people say "Linux isn't ready for the desktop", they really mean (like you quite rightly say) "There aren't enough games for it".
The reason why I say this is because I look back to Windows 95, for example, which was accepted on the desktop yet both Gnome and KDE are far more advanced as GUIs - yet people still make the "not ready" statement.
Incidentally, before anyone flames me for not saying KDE and Gnome are better than, say, Windows XP, my reasons for comparing to Windows 95 was because it was far more reliant on command-line usage and didn't have stuff like "Active Desktop" which a lot of Windows people seem to like (can't think why though...)
Re:When did FS get edited out of the story?
on
Linux Going Mainstream
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Perhaps you're trying too hard to understand "the culture" rather than just getting on and trying out some free software for yourself.
That's not a facetious answer but the fact is that Open Source software does not begin and end with Linux - there is a huge amount of Open Source Windows software (by virtue of it being Open Source, many people port applications to Windows from Linux and vice versa), just go to Sourceforge and see for yourself.
There are zealots in every movement, you just need to read between the lines a little and see for yourself...
This is coming from somebody who (according to the link on his/her sig) makes coats for pets and plays Yahtzee against a chihuahua???
Have you thought of starting back again with a Hasbro "My First Computer" and see how you fare with that first???
I've tried to do a similar thing with people and free CDs. There's been some take up of Linux but not that much - those that have installed it like it but keep a Windows dual boot system, others just can't be bothered to install the CDs in the first place.
The main issue is that because I work in a "techie" industry and most of my close friends work in other techie industries, invariably they get hold of MSDN CDs from their places of work (and from each other) so that they never pay for a Microsoft product anyway. I don't know one of them that's ever paid any money for a piece of Microsoft software.
It'll be interesting to see if there's a change in attitude if and when Microsoft make products that cannot be pirated but, at the moment, my friends and colleagues see no reason to learn something new and legally free when they're already using stuff that's "illegally free".
I think they're a little "tunnel-visioned" but can't say I blame them for not switching to Linux, under those circumstances...
Re: What's the prob. -Mozilla (Firebird)?
on
Google v. Microsoft
·
· Score: 1
1. You have broadband to download Mozilla, people who have dial-up will never be able to get it.
In my experience, Joe Average seems to have no problem filling up his PC with gigs worth of spyware and pr0n over a dial-up connection so 13MB of Mozilla won't make much difference.
If you don't have an ISP at all, IE comes installed out of the box.
If you don't have an ISP, you don't have an Internet connection so you can't do an Internet search. (Did you really mean "ISP"?)
2. You know how, where, and why to use Mozilla. Manny users can only install virii that comes attached to email on their systems.
Ignorance is no excuse. "Joe Average" seems to have little problem investing lots of money and time into learning to drive a car. It costs less to buy a few decent computer books and/or attend a PC course.
Until the next emergency hotfix modifies your DNS to have google.com to resolve to search.msn.com. Sure, you can edit your hosts file, but how many users even know what a hosts file is?
To be honest, good luck to Microsoft if they manage to do this because that's just making use of the stupidity of "Joe Average" who believes all the marketing hype Microsoft, AOL, etc. tell him anyway.
Much as I believe Microsoft's security track record to be poor, if it wasn't for stupid "Joe Average" opening each and every email attachment he receives, the Internet wouldn't grind to a halt every two weeks for the rest of us (Linux/Windows/Mac/etc.) users that actually get off our backsides and learn about how computers & software work.
"Joe Average" deserves all he gets as long as it doesn't affect those of us with some intelligence.
I'm not denying for a moment that Linux could be used to monitor the activities of people and therefore impinge on their human rights.
However, the difference between Linux and Windows is that, with Linux, the user takes full responsibility for what software is run on his/her machine and how it is run. With Windows, the user does not have anywhere near that choice and does not necessarily know what Windows is doing in the background.
If the Chinese government is using Linux to watch its people, then the Chinese government is to blame. Likewise, the government is to blame if it is doing the same with a "standard" Windows release. Microsoft take half the responsibility if they have provided the code to the Chinese government to allow this monitoring to take place.
Now we WANT MS to track people, to investigate them and to make sure they aren't doing anything wrong with their products? And who should determine what is the right thing and what is the wrong thing? MS?
I don't see where you're drawing this conclusion from. No, we don't want MS to track people because it is the job of a government to track people, not a corporation.
Then, at least, if the government abuses its power of monitoring people, you (theoretically) have the power to vote them out of office.
If a US corporation was selling arms to a country that gave that country's government the ability to deny human rights to the population, we would expect someone to step in and stop it.
If MS are selling products in China then great, no problem. But if they're knowingly selling products that allow the Chinese government to deny Chinese people their human rights, then that's no different to selling arms.
If AI believe this to be the case, then I defned them for bringing it to public attention. If MS are ultimately innocent, then so be it and AI will end up looking like fools.
If $20 is a month's wages for someone and it meant they could not afford to buy that anti-cancer treatment for themselves or a relative, then, no, he would not be worth that money.
Also, the comparison of software to medecine is irrelevant.
Medecine *should* give every human being the right to as good a quality of life as possible. Software improves and enriches the lives of many (allows them to do complex jobs much quicker, provides leisure, etc.) but it's not a necessity in the same way that good health is.
Gates probably isn't "100% evil" but he is "100% business man".
The question I have is this and it is directed at all hideously rich people, not just Gates:
How much personal wealth does one person need before they have enough money to happily buy themselves and the next 10 generations of their offspring anything they need?
I'm not denying anyone the right to make money, we live in a capitalist society after all... But Gates (and others like him) has billions as a personal fortune that he and his offspring would not be able to spend in the next 100 years, even if they never made any more money at all.
Those personal billions (and I'm not talking about company profits and shareholders) were made out of industries that employ people from communities all over the globe. Yes, those employees made some wealth themselves but what about the less fortunate people in those communities? What about giving up some of that money to fight poverty, especially bearing in mind that corporations moving into communities drive up things like house prices which in turn contribute to poverty.
Gates (and others) give to charities but most of them give only enough to improve their position in the world of business. Otherwise, why is Gates' public spirit so widely publiced? e.g. "The Bill an Melinda Gates Foundation".
Us normal people that donate to charity could also probably donate more, but at least we tend not to publicise the fact...
Slashdot Mirror
The man that gets paid a fair wage for the job he does and earns enough to pay his mortgage and feed his family.
In today's world of advanced communications and the Internet, it is irrelevant where in the world you are located, particularly if you're involved in software programming or support where files can be whisked to the other side of the world in milliseconds.
In other words, you are paid less for doing as good or better a job than one of your European or American counterparts.
In simplistic terms, that sounds to me like pay equality and racial harmony has just gone "out of the window" in favour of company profits and you're just being used so that a fat CEO somewhere can get his new company jet.
If you believe this then you're missing the point entirely. The backlash is not against "American software", it's against being locked into proprietary code and proprietary protocols.
The fact that MS believe only in the proprietary model means that they are the focus of the backlash a lot of the time - however, traditional Unix vendors like SCO and Sun are also targets of much criticism by the Open Source community.
Wouldn't that mean the loss of more American tech jobs? Aren't those lines of thinking in conflict?
Tech jobs will go to India purely because it's cheaper to hire a techie in India rather than the US or Europe. A company's decision to do that is based purely on profit and it's irrelevant whether the techies support Windows, Linux, etc.
Or is it okay to lose tech jobs, as long as those jobs are Microsoft's, and somehow that won't affect other tech jobs.???
No, it's not alright for just MS to lose jobs but please remember that it's the company's own decision to lay off its workforce, not some external factor.
I'm a firm believer in goverment taxation of profits for companies that outsource jobs outside of countries where they do the most business.
As far as I am concerned, if a company makes money in a particular country, then it has an obligation to not just take money out of that country but put something back into it like jobs and livelihoods - i.e. it should be made more expensive to outsource jobs to another country due to taxation of profits.
Most of what you say is valid but please do not go portraying to potential Linux newbies that there are "No more viruses".
Sure, at the moment, there are few reports of Linux viruses and because of Linux's simpler security model to Windows, plus the fact that there is no real "standard" set of Linux applications, Linux probably will never be as susceptible to viruses as Windows where recent worm viruses attack through Outlook for example.
However, Linux is theoretically more susceptible to intrusion and buffer overflow type attacks, especially where a new user doesn't shutdown unnecessary services and keep those that are needed regularly updated.
Also, if you have a Windows machine that's infected by a virus, then there is some rationale behind blaming Microsoft for leaving a security hole in their code. On a Linux system, the only person to blame is the owner of the system. Becoming a Linux (or any free Unix) user implies that you are also prepared to take on a good deal much more responsibility for your system and taking on that level of responsibility is far beyond most Joe Averages that use their Windows PCs to surf the Internet, collect email and play games.
I'm not being elitist here because if more people use Linux, then more people feed back bugs and enhancement requests to the Open Source developer community and software gets better quicker. But there does need to be a mentality change if you move from Windows to Linux - while there's a lot of knowledgeable Windows people out there who can probably move to Linux quite quickly (should they want to), it's beyond most people as things stand today and it's therefore much better for them to stay "with the devil they know" rather than move to Linux purely because it's "fashionable" to be seen to be rebellious.
So I read that to mean the Mozilla still keeps developing despite anything MS may or may not want to do. Surely that's a good thing?
FACT: Google is still depending on ad revenue to pay for the thousands of servers and fat bandwidth pipes with which they spider and serve the (still rapidly) growing internet.
Yes, but this isn't like the IE vs Netscape fight because Google is already entrenched as a search engine whereas Microsoft would be starting from afresh - during the browser wars, it was all about features and the fact that IE was embedded into Windows.
Besides, if MS come up with a search engine that's better than Google and is free for all to use, I don't see a problem with it. I don't personally like MS one bit but I'm not going to not use an MS product purely because it bears the Microsoft logo. If they start charging for it and/or lock out the Linux users then that's different...
PROBLEM: If Microsoft can cut off Google's ad revenue (say, by providing their own search engine that is preinstalled for their users and good enough to prevent most users from switching), then it won't matter if you can choose Google as your preferred search engine in Mozilla, because although Mozilla will still be around, google.com might not be.
If Google dies through Microsoft pressure then there will be be a free replacement that MS won't be able to touch. The Open Directory Project has a long way to go but it's a foundation stone that'll probably get a lot more attention if Google disappears.
"parasitic" relationship Actually, to correct myself, I used the wrong term here - I meant "symbiotic" relationship because both parties benefit.
Sure, it might be naive because the Open Source model is constantly being put to the test as the size of the model grows.
However, the concept of Open Source and "getting on and coding" existed long before Microsoft had the idea of selling an OS. While it might be argued that Linux has popularity because of Microsoft (as a backlash to MS), the various project groups that handle things like Apache, OpenOffice, KDE, etc. do just "get on and code" based on bug reports and feature requests from users.
As for SCO, let's just see what happens. There's already signs of SCO starting a U-turn - even Darl McBride was shocked by the amount of anti-SCO sentiment...
because IBM or similar entities sure as hell can't be trusted with the "keys to the kingdom"
IBM and Linux is probably something of a "parasitic" relationship - IBM sees a lot of money to be made from Linux as well as now having a weapon to beat Microsoft with while the Linux/Open Source community benefits from sponsorship & exposure.
IBM can use Linux (just as much as Microsoft could if they wanted to) but it can never control or own it because of the GPL.
What is the definition of this (new) "open source" that is currently being (re)written by all these major players?
Is it being rewritten? No, I don't think so. There are other types of software licences other than the GPL and there's nothing to stop anyone writing commercial software on Linux - as long as you don't use any GPL code, you can do that.
Yes, I have heard this said, of course. But most of his personal fortune is (I assume) sat in investments simply making more money that he can never possibly spend rather than being allowed to be released slowly now to start doing some good.
I get the feeling that you view the existence of billionares as somehow detrimental to the poor.
In a capitalist society, I don't deny anyone the opportunity to make their fortune. However, billionaires are the CEOs of big corporations, those corporations employ people, those people buy houses close to where they work, the house prices are driven up and the poorest are driven out of those areas. Not to mention those corporations (excluding Microsoft) like Nike that rely on third-world sweatshops for products or those like Macdonalds that change the face of agriculture through intense farming methods.
When all said and done, there is only so much money and if much of it is owned by a rich few, then a larger proportion of the remainder of the population has less of it.
So, yes, indirectly billionaires do create poverty and therefore there is an onus on them to help alleviate that poverty - that's my reasoning.
but all of those millionares spending their money has been of great benefit to the poor in those areas.
How? Okay, maybe Bill Gates employs a butler, nanny or gardener or two but what does he bring to the poor in the area?
I'm sorry but I can see a point to a rich person buying a mansion or a yacht or a private jet or a Rolls Royce - but once that person has done that, what else is there to do with the money apart from investing it to make more money?
This is where I have a real problem understanding the need for more wealth than you can ever possibly hope to spend...
Surely, all that's left is to gain some popularity & kudos by giving it away freely to the needy. And is it not better to do that during one's lifetime rather than after it?
Be careful though... even Windows IT departments only tend to support a fixed number of hardware platforms on the corporate intranet - i.e. there will be a specific hardware vendor for laptops, servers, etc.
Plus, IT departments never use preinstalled PCs anyway, they usually "Ghost" on an image of the corporate platform straight onto the hard-disk...
At that level, Linux is no different - you can use a distribution that will pick up all the hardware on one laptop perfectly fine but on another you'll need to play about with drivers and config files.
The hurdle here isn't Linux itself, it's actually about having the people who can create custom disk images in Linux as well as they can in Windows.
Yeah, that got me too...
I don't know the inner machinations of corporate IT departments but I'm assuming that someone somewhere in the IT department of every Windows house has some kind of Service Level Agreement with Microsoft for support.
Assuming that a corporation rolls out Linux, even though they have people trained on Linux, they still have an SLA with Red Hat, SuSE, etc. etc. If that's the case, they probably paid for their Linux distro from an American (Red Hat) or German (SuSE) company so the money is still going out away from the local economy.
The only way no money changes hands is if the corporate IT department supports Linux entirely "in-house" which is currently going to be far beyond what the majority of corporations will be in a postion to do currently.
I do actually wonder, though, if when people say "Linux isn't ready for the desktop", they really mean (like you quite rightly say) "There aren't enough games for it".
The reason why I say this is because I look back to Windows 95, for example, which was accepted on the desktop yet both Gnome and KDE are far more advanced as GUIs - yet people still make the "not ready" statement.
Incidentally, before anyone flames me for not saying KDE and Gnome are better than, say, Windows XP, my reasons for comparing to Windows 95 was because it was far more reliant on command-line usage and didn't have stuff like "Active Desktop" which a lot of Windows people seem to like (can't think why though...)
That's not a facetious answer but the fact is that Open Source software does not begin and end with Linux - there is a huge amount of Open Source Windows software (by virtue of it being Open Source, many people port applications to Windows from Linux and vice versa), just go to Sourceforge and see for yourself.
There are zealots in every movement, you just need to read between the lines a little and see for yourself...
I disagree - the music of Garth Brooks will never sound impressive...
This is coming from somebody who (according to the link on his/her sig) makes coats for pets and plays Yahtzee against a chihuahua??? Have you thought of starting back again with a Hasbro "My First Computer" and see how you fare with that first???
Thank God! I've been sat here waiting for that bloody pizza for over an hour now...
Can't IBM just hand-out free cuddly stuffed Tuxes and show the ads in the early evening to catch the kiddies?
Even the hardest CEO won't be able to resist his toddler offspring screaming:
"WAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH! Daddy! I wanna stuffed penguin!"
The main issue is that because I work in a "techie" industry and most of my close friends work in other techie industries, invariably they get hold of MSDN CDs from their places of work (and from each other) so that they never pay for a Microsoft product anyway. I don't know one of them that's ever paid any money for a piece of Microsoft software.
It'll be interesting to see if there's a change in attitude if and when Microsoft make products that cannot be pirated but, at the moment, my friends and colleagues see no reason to learn something new and legally free when they're already using stuff that's "illegally free".
I think they're a little "tunnel-visioned" but can't say I blame them for not switching to Linux, under those circumstances...
In my experience, Joe Average seems to have no problem filling up his PC with gigs worth of spyware and pr0n over a dial-up connection so 13MB of Mozilla won't make much difference.
If you don't have an ISP at all, IE comes installed out of the box.
If you don't have an ISP, you don't have an Internet connection so you can't do an Internet search. (Did you really mean "ISP"?)
2. You know how, where, and why to use Mozilla. Manny users can only install virii that comes attached to email on their systems.
Ignorance is no excuse. "Joe Average" seems to have little problem investing lots of money and time into learning to drive a car. It costs less to buy a few decent computer books and/or attend a PC course.
FACT: Mozilla (Firebird) is being developed a lot faster than IE and now supercedes IE in all but the website compatibility issue.
FACT: Mozilla (Firebird) allows me to use the URL bar for search words and I can choose my preferred search engine.
FACT: IE is Microsoft's product and as far as I'm concerned, they can now do what they like with it.
FACT: For the forseeable future, I can still choose my preferred search engine.
So what's the problem?
To be honest, good luck to Microsoft if they manage to do this because that's just making use of the stupidity of "Joe Average" who believes all the marketing hype Microsoft, AOL, etc. tell him anyway.
Much as I believe Microsoft's security track record to be poor, if it wasn't for stupid "Joe Average" opening each and every email attachment he receives, the Internet wouldn't grind to a halt every two weeks for the rest of us (Linux/Windows/Mac/etc.) users that actually get off our backsides and learn about how computers & software work.
"Joe Average" deserves all he gets as long as it doesn't affect those of us with some intelligence.
However, the difference between Linux and Windows is that, with Linux, the user takes full responsibility for what software is run on his/her machine and how it is run. With Windows, the user does not have anywhere near that choice and does not necessarily know what Windows is doing in the background.
If the Chinese government is using Linux to watch its people, then the Chinese government is to blame. Likewise, the government is to blame if it is doing the same with a "standard" Windows release. Microsoft take half the responsibility if they have provided the code to the Chinese government to allow this monitoring to take place.
...a soft drinks manufacturer wants to sell more tooth rotting, stomach eating, fizzy flavoured water than another soft drinks manufacturer.
I don't see where you're drawing this conclusion from. No, we don't want MS to track people because it is the job of a government to track people, not a corporation.
Then, at least, if the government abuses its power of monitoring people, you (theoretically) have the power to vote them out of office.
If a US corporation was selling arms to a country that gave that country's government the ability to deny human rights to the population, we would expect someone to step in and stop it.
If MS are selling products in China then great, no problem. But if they're knowingly selling products that allow the Chinese government to deny Chinese people their human rights, then that's no different to selling arms.
If AI believe this to be the case, then I defned them for bringing it to public attention. If MS are ultimately innocent, then so be it and AI will end up looking like fools.
Also, the comparison of software to medecine is irrelevant.
Medecine *should* give every human being the right to as good a quality of life as possible. Software improves and enriches the lives of many (allows them to do complex jobs much quicker, provides leisure, etc.) but it's not a necessity in the same way that good health is.
The question I have is this and it is directed at all hideously rich people, not just Gates:
How much personal wealth does one person need before they have enough money to happily buy themselves and the next 10 generations of their offspring anything they need?
I'm not denying anyone the right to make money, we live in a capitalist society after all... But Gates (and others like him) has billions as a personal fortune that he and his offspring would not be able to spend in the next 100 years, even if they never made any more money at all.
Those personal billions (and I'm not talking about company profits and shareholders) were made out of industries that employ people from communities all over the globe. Yes, those employees made some wealth themselves but what about the less fortunate people in those communities? What about giving up some of that money to fight poverty, especially bearing in mind that corporations moving into communities drive up things like house prices which in turn contribute to poverty.
Gates (and others) give to charities but most of them give only enough to improve their position in the world of business. Otherwise, why is Gates' public spirit so widely publiced? e.g. "The Bill an Melinda Gates Foundation".
Us normal people that donate to charity could also probably donate more, but at least we tend not to publicise the fact...