What is needed is a method of killing patent trolls from being able to sue. Like you have to have a shipping product in 3-5 years from the date the patent was granted or else the patent is invalid.
Certainly for a trivial little idea like the one that Eolas came up with, then I whole heartedly agree. But I am not so sure when it comes to a field like medicine that is exceedingly complicated and yet incredibly expensive to develop to a final product. For example, a company or university might come up with a method of getting a chemical to a part of the body to which it is difficult or dangerous to administer medicine in a conventional way. It might be a revolutionary technique that may one day lead to new cures, but it doesn't mean that they can also come up with the actual cure. They have to leave part that to others.
Most great ideas/technologies are developed by standing on the shoulders of giants. The question is, how do you compensate those giants without being able to have purely abstract patents?
What I would like to see is a certain level of sophistication be required before a patent is allowed. I don't think that I will find too much opposition to that viewpoint around here!
DOS v1 had 301 confirmed bugs in IBM's bugs database so IBM wrote DOS 1.1 from scratch, all versions since are built on that version
According to the Wikipedia entry on IBM PC-DOS, DOS 1.1 was written by Tim Paterson (the original author of 86-DOS) after he started work at Microsoft. A quick scan of Google seemed to back up the idea that Microsoft wrote DOS 1.1 for IBM.
Nobody can complain of or sue Microsoft effectively. Microsoft can use the law to bust someone's balls for something.
What about Eolas (don't want to link to a patent troll), which sued Microsoft for auto-activated controls in a web browser and won half a billion dollars? Or i4i which sued them for being able to edit custom XML tags in Office 2007 and won $290 million? Oh, and Sun sued them over Java and won, although that resulted in Java not being installed by default on the dominant platform which I always thought was a terrible outcome for Sun.
I am sure that there are plenty of other examples, but those are the ones that jumped to mind. Most lawsuits end in private settlements so we never know the final figure.
Why? Competition. That's how a market system works.
Actually, the market currently works by shipping you a system with Windows. To say anything else is just an idealised concept of market forces. This story is all about subverting the way the market works.
Now in this case, you might think that you would save $45 without getting an operating system, but that $300 laptop is sold with a support cost built in. The manufacturer has to provide a system for support at a mostly fixed infrastructure cost. This cost is determined by assuming that only a certain percentage of laptops sold need to be supported, so that cost can be shared amongst all the laptops.
When they do provide support it can be mostly scripted because they are dealing with known hardware AND software. This brings down the costs. But if everybody phones up to complain that their sound doesn't work on their particular Linux distro then the support costs skyrocket because they have to pay for more knowledgable people, who will spend MUCH longer debugging the problem (which could end up being bugs in the distro and not the laptop).
So how much of your $45 do you really think that you will get back by not having Windows pre-installed?
How many people in the world are complaining about the increase in extreme weather events like floods, droughts, heat waves, cold snaps and severe storms? These are events in which people die and property damage costs millions and sometimes billions of dollars.
This is not just about there being more pleasant days for people in Greenland.
I'm sure all our clients, suppliers, government departments etc will be *REALLY* happy to have to move to such a system. I already said that we couldn't use ODF because everyone with whom we communicate uses Microsoft products. Asking them all to use Latex would be even worse that asking them to install a plug-in for the software that they currently use. It would be financial suicide.
The name was given to Greenland by Eric the Red as a marketing exercise to get people to emigrate there. When they arrived they did not find it green as the name would suggest. Some parts of it were greener than they are now, but on the whole it was a very inhospitable place.
Yes, it does work in DOSBox. Gog.com sell it, so it must.
Hey, what do you know! Having a look at that page, I just spotted that I bought it from Gog. I don't remember doing that! Well, I'm off to play a game.
I suspect that they did actually have a studio audience, but they gave the show as much laughter as it deserved. As soon as you go so self-referential as the mini series did, then it becomes more cringeworthy than funny. It just looks line a fanfic film.
I think that if you get to the stage of hearing the audience response before finding out if something is funny, then you aren't making a masterpiece. But what would I know? My favourite seasons were 1 and 2, which most people think were the worst. It was before they got the fancy special effects and had to make stories with a heart rather than moster-of-the-week material.
Why was the Amiga version of Wing Commander easier to install? Did you run it on an old Amiga computer? If so, you could have also run the version that you had on a PC from that era. I still have a working 386 that I can install old games onto.
If you ran the Amiga game on an emulator like WinUAE, then you could do the same thing with your PC version using DOSBox. It does a pretty good job too. I have a copy of Windows 3.1 running on my Windows 7 system.
It is a bit disingenuous to say that PC games are hard to install when you are talking about one from 1990. Try a modern game. I have an exceedingly low spec gaming system, and it runs everything that I have thrown at it (on default settings). I just plug it in (or download it) and play without having to do any effort at all.
Mate, it's not biased because of one platform versus another, it's biased because OOXML isn't a widely-supported (or well-supported) standard, and they're picking it on the false premise that it is.
You can say it isn't widely supported, but it is widely used - way more than ODF. And considering that 99% of the files are already in that format and do not require conversion (which would inevitably lead to formatting differences) then you can't say that there are no benefits to choosing that format and that this therefore must be the result of bias.
In my business, I would love to move to a free office suite, but most of our files get sent to other people outside this company and so we have to use the format that makes it easy to deal with the real world.
it seems to want to create confusion between it and the name of the cross-platform product OpenOffice.org, or open source in general.
To be fair, OpenOffice.org does have the name Office in it so you could say that Microsoft didn't start it!
But seriously folks, I don't think that it is a problem to "imply independence from vendor lock-in" because that is the point of making, publishing and standardising the format after all. They wanted other office products to use their format.
Even more shocking is that the new series might be doomed because of a sensationalist headline on slashdot!
The fact that they are doing the new series is worthy enough news, you don't need to build up a non-existing story to promote it. Even the summary shows what a crock the headline is when it says that one of the show's actors was "wary of the practicality of it". If it was such a concern, then they could just not film it in front of an audience.
never mind that the standards are developed in cooperation between the browser vendors, and at least two vendors must implement something before it is viable for standardization.
That was the old way of doing it, when Microsoft and Netscape kept adding more and more features in the hope that it would make it into the standard. Think tables, frames, blink - oh wait: thank god it didn't work for blink!
These days it is frowned on to add features that are outside the standards, with a few exceptions like styles with prepended browser identifiers and things hacked into meta tags (like iPhone's ones to control the layout on the small screen which I think should have been a custom style).
However, you are correct that the Microsoft way is to stick to the finalised standards rather than the ones that are still in flux. I think the reason they did this was to avoid a repetition of the box-model saga, where IE had to implement a box model before it was spelt out in any standard. But when the standard went a different way, they were stuck being incompatible with the rest of the world.
This wouldn't be a problem if the standardisation process didn't take many years to finalise. The HTML standard needs to improve in small increments. Not too small, or the browser manufacturers will always be playing catch up, and the user would be expected to upgrade every single time a new version was released. But not too big so that it takes 5-7 years for a standard to become official.
Buying a computer from a small, local shop does not mean for a second that it is illegal or uses pirated software. I think that this is another cultural difference (like your comment about the FCC requirements when talking about computers from another country). In my country, the small, local computer shops are everywhere and account for a sizable proportion of computer sales (I don't know the exact breakdown). It is not uncommon to find computers branded with a company of which you have never heard. They still have to use legitimate software, and Microsoft do occasionally crack down on some shop for selling pirated copies of their software.
I understand that in the US that this is nowhere near as common, that it is the large stores that dominate computer sales. In that case, it is certainly understandable that you would consider a serial number to be the norm.
You're really pissing me off. You keep moving between a specific scenario to a generalization, as if the two were equal.
That's funny. I'm getting pissed off because you can't address the specific claim, but instead keep wandering off into unrelated scenarios about different products and then spew general anti-Microsoft FUD. But then you went on to say:
Mono is a large project that goes well beyond the Community Promise stuff.
Wow, that is actually about the correct software package. Maybe we are finally going to see some insightful argument that blows my position out of the ballpark...
The danger is adopting Mono leads to greater adoption of proprietary parts, and strengthens Microsoft's hand.
Oh no! You have gone back to reiterating an old FUD claim, one that apparently required the user to switch away from Mono for it to become true. Here's a tip: constant repetition of a statement is not the same as a well-reasoned argument.
You act like Mono exists in isolation and is made up of only the Community Promise bits.
Well, obviously I don't because I covered this explicitly in my first message. I said that "the general public won't be able to make the distinction between technology that is covered by the Microsoft Community Promise Agreement and the parts that is not". When the FAT32/TomTom litigation happened, people claimed that Microsoft was going after Linux; that this was the start of the war against open source. In fact, they were just going after TomTom. Most of their claims weren't even about any open source software, and those that were involved TomTom using a Microsoft-invented technology for which MS did have an active licence program. It didn't stop a lot of people confusing the story into thinking that their evil enemy was going to try to kill off Linux in the courts.
Microsoft has, and always will, use their technologies to reinforce their desktop monopoly.
Here's a tip: constant repetition of a statement is not the same as a well-reasoned argument.
If you believe in open standards, then you should not follow Microsoft's lead.
Here's a tip: constant repetition of a statement is not the same as a well-reasoned argument. Yes, I know that I am hypocritically repeating myself, but I am being ironic to prove a point.
I have seen this same FUD claim that Microsoft will stop Mono for 7 years, and yet they still haven't made any move to kill off the project. I bet that we will come back in another 7 years time and they still will not have done anything to stop it. Even then, there will be people such as yourself still clinging to the claim that it is too dangerous to use Mono.
It is clear that neither of us are going to accept the other's view. I see no reason to continue this discussion.
You claim this isn't about being sued by Microsoft
I wish you would stop paraphrasing me, badly.
Huh? What exactly is wrong with my statement? I asked "When has Microsoft ever made a promise not to sue for patent infringement about a public, free licence, and then turned around and sued anyway?" and you answered "I never said they did or will." That looks incredibly like you are saying that this isn't about being sued by Microsoft. So if you agree that you are not in danger of being sued for using Mono, what is your problem with it? Let's see:
Later on, if Silverlight is adopted by the web as a whole, in part because it is "cross-platform", then they can just pull the plug on Linux. New versions will be tied to Windows. The idea of being cross-platform will be quietly dropped.
So let me get this straight. The danger in using some open source software is that a company might pull the plug on some other proprietary software that you are not using. That does not make sense.
So what if some people might be tempted to move across to Silverlight? Do you disuade someone from using OpenOffice because they will suffer from vendor they move across to Microsoft Office? (Is that better than a car analogy?) Your entire argument is not based on problems with people starting to use Mono, but with problems of people stopping the use of Mono.
DETAILS MATTER. See above. I also talked a lot about other issues besides lawsuits.
None of your issues have been at all relevant to the subject.
Microsoft drops Silverlight or IE for Linux (wasn't it just for Solaris)? Mono keeps working.
Microsoft makes a patent deal with Novell? Mono works even better.
You don't want to "pay Microsoft a royalty to use a computer"? Mono is free.
Microsoft's market share has been reduced by open source software? Mono will continue this trend.
Microsoft is trying to use ".NET and Silverlight to try and get (their marketshare) back"? Umm, so what? Didn't you ask me earlier if I was a communist for not wanting a company to get paid for their services? Why do you have a problem with one wanting to increase their marketshare?
"Microsoft has, and always will, use their technologies to reinforce their desktop monopoly"? Use Mono on Linux to stick it to the man!
"People often point to Moonlight when talking about Silverlight and being cross-platform"? Umm, so what again?
"Does Microsoft have a history of playing the cross-platform game, and then dropping it once they achieve dominance? Yes." And yet as far as I know they have never gone back on one of their Microsoft Community Promises (which is what would be required to stop the Mono project)
"Microsoft a convicted, abusive monopoly? Yes"? Right, last century and not in anyway like today's issue.
Assuming everything a corporation says is a lie is just as bad as assuming everything a corporation says is the truth.
I agree, but then I didn't assume that everything this corporation said was a lie. I said that this followed the pattern used as standard PR spin by deflecting blame without specifying details to allow the public to check it for themselves (or to uninstall the software). I did say that the story was plausible and that I would normally give them the benefit of the doubt, which shows that I don't consider everything MS says to be a lie.
Funny, when stuff like this happens to Apple, why does everyone give them the benefit of the doubt, but when it is Microsoft it is "EVIL" instantly?
I think that it is funny that you would claim this in response to me calling Apple evil (or at least I labelled their practice of allowing everyone to screw with the user to be evil).
We found the problem. It wasn't our fault, and it doesn't matter because it's not happening to anyone. (lie)
Until Microsoft say which service causes this (so it can be independently verified by users) then you just have to assume that it is a lie. Normally I like to give the benefit of the doubt (and it does seem feasible that a 3rd party app is responsible, but like you said, this follows the standard style of PR spin that most companies employ.
This would not be a problem if the mobile OS actually valued the customer over the developers and phone companies. My last Symbian phone prompted the user to give permission to any app that wanted to access the Internet. No spyware under the guise of a game here, no 3rd party services chewing up quota, no apps being just thin layers over websites.
I hate seeing that circle animation that says data access is happening on my iPhone for something that shouldn't need it. Even worse, I hate the fact that on the iPhone the developer can turn off that display so you don't know if any connection has occured. Evil. I presume that the Windows Phone does the same thing.
When has Microsoft ever made a promise not to sue for patent infringement about a public, free licence, and then turned around and sued anyway?
I never said they did or will. I said, "anybody who believes in open standards should stay away from Mono. If you follow Microsoft's lead you will get burned."
Well, unless you mean that Microsoft will literally come around and set fire to you, then I can't see what other reasonable interpretation there could be. You claim this isn't about being sued by Microsoft, but then you go on to say:
Microsoft already has a patent deal with Novell and it's distribution of Linux. Don't want to be sued by Microsoft for using Linux? Buy Novell and pay royalties to Microsoft.
So you ARE talking about being sued. How much of that deal was just a PR exercise anyway? It is not as if any other distro has been sued - especially for something that Microsoft promised to keep free. The only close thing would be TomTom being sued for using FAT32, but then that is a technology that is actively licenced and has NEVER been given away. TomTom was violating the licence, and if it were the GPL licence that they violated then nobody around here would complain if they got sued.
But back to the topic in hand. If your entire reason to avoid Mono is because you might decide to go off and use another product (Silverlight), then surely you should be arguing against using Silverlight and leave Mono alone. To use a car analogy, it is like arguing that you should not buy a car because you might one day upgrade to a tank and shoot at people. A car will still get you from point A to point B even if you don't buy a tank, and Mono will still work if Microsoft decide to drop Silverlight. There is still no justification for your advice to stay away from Mono.
Yes, and this is why anybody who believes in open standards should stay away from Mono. If you follow Microsoft's lead you will get burned.
That doesn't make sense. There was nothing in what I said that could lead you to that conclusion. It is you own hatred of Microsoft makes you believe it. When has Microsoft ever made a promise not to sue for patent infringement about a public, free licence, and then turned around and sued anyway?
They won't give a shit once they get beyond the adoption stage. They'll just tell everybody to license their intellectual property that they invested in.
There is more than one standard covered by a promise not to sue. If they reneg on this one then all of their promises would be null and void. They wouldn't be able to convince anyone to use their standards then.
You're not a communist, are you? Don't they deserve to get paid?
I see we are dealing with an intellectual giant here. It was Microsoft who set the price for their licence, not me. They decided to give it away, as is their right. It is also their right to change the terms of their offers, but they know that the backlash against them would be very damaging if they screwed around with such a high profile agreement.
First you swallow the open parts, then you eat the rest, and finally you're locked in.
Then only use their standardised stuff. Use the C# language, compiled to.NET with Mono's extensions. Then you will be OK. But I don't think you need to worry. People have been saying that Microsoft will sue for 7 years, but it still hadn't happened. You can believe that they will do it, but there is no evidence to support that view.
Slashdot Mirror
What is needed is a method of killing patent trolls from being able to sue. Like you have to have a shipping product in 3-5 years from the date the patent was granted or else the patent is invalid.
Certainly for a trivial little idea like the one that Eolas came up with, then I whole heartedly agree. But I am not so sure when it comes to a field like medicine that is exceedingly complicated and yet incredibly expensive to develop to a final product. For example, a company or university might come up with a method of getting a chemical to a part of the body to which it is difficult or dangerous to administer medicine in a conventional way. It might be a revolutionary technique that may one day lead to new cures, but it doesn't mean that they can also come up with the actual cure. They have to leave part that to others.
Most great ideas/technologies are developed by standing on the shoulders of giants. The question is, how do you compensate those giants without being able to have purely abstract patents?
What I would like to see is a certain level of sophistication be required before a patent is allowed. I don't think that I will find too much opposition to that viewpoint around here!
DOS v1 had 301 confirmed bugs in IBM's bugs database so IBM wrote DOS 1.1 from scratch, all versions since are built on that version
According to the Wikipedia entry on IBM PC-DOS, DOS 1.1 was written by Tim Paterson (the original author of 86-DOS) after he started work at Microsoft. A quick scan of Google seemed to back up the idea that Microsoft wrote DOS 1.1 for IBM.
Nobody can complain of or sue Microsoft effectively. Microsoft can use the law to bust someone's balls for something.
What about Eolas (don't want to link to a patent troll), which sued Microsoft for auto-activated controls in a web browser and won half a billion dollars? Or i4i which sued them for being able to edit custom XML tags in Office 2007 and won $290 million? Oh, and Sun sued them over Java and won, although that resulted in Java not being installed by default on the dominant platform which I always thought was a terrible outcome for Sun.
I am sure that there are plenty of other examples, but those are the ones that jumped to mind. Most lawsuits end in private settlements so we never know the final figure.
Why? Competition. That's how a market system works.
Actually, the market currently works by shipping you a system with Windows. To say anything else is just an idealised concept of market forces. This story is all about subverting the way the market works.
Now in this case, you might think that you would save $45 without getting an operating system, but that $300 laptop is sold with a support cost built in. The manufacturer has to provide a system for support at a mostly fixed infrastructure cost. This cost is determined by assuming that only a certain percentage of laptops sold need to be supported, so that cost can be shared amongst all the laptops.
When they do provide support it can be mostly scripted because they are dealing with known hardware AND software. This brings down the costs. But if everybody phones up to complain that their sound doesn't work on their particular Linux distro then the support costs skyrocket because they have to pay for more knowledgable people, who will spend MUCH longer debugging the problem (which could end up being bugs in the distro and not the laptop).
So how much of your $45 do you really think that you will get back by not having Windows pre-installed?
How many people in the world are complaining about the increase in extreme weather events like floods, droughts, heat waves, cold snaps and severe storms? These are events in which people die and property damage costs millions and sometimes billions of dollars.
This is not just about there being more pleasant days for people in Greenland.
I'm sure all our clients, suppliers, government departments etc will be *REALLY* happy to have to move to such a system. I already said that we couldn't use ODF because everyone with whom we communicate uses Microsoft products. Asking them all to use Latex would be even worse that asking them to install a plug-in for the software that they currently use. It would be financial suicide.
The name was given to Greenland by Eric the Red as a marketing exercise to get people to emigrate there. When they arrived they did not find it green as the name would suggest. Some parts of it were greener than they are now, but on the whole it was a very inhospitable place.
Yes, it does work in DOSBox. Gog.com sell it, so it must.
Hey, what do you know! Having a look at that page, I just spotted that I bought it from Gog. I don't remember doing that! Well, I'm off to play a game.
)
Sorry about that! I hope that I didn't cause any offense. I promise that in the future I won't leave you feeling, as you say, "open all day.
So you use pdf then?
No, this is for collaborative editing purposes.
I suspect that they did actually have a studio audience, but they gave the show as much laughter as it deserved. As soon as you go so self-referential as the mini series did, then it becomes more cringeworthy than funny. It just looks line a fanfic film.
I think that if you get to the stage of hearing the audience response before finding out if something is funny, then you aren't making a masterpiece. But what would I know? My favourite seasons were 1 and 2, which most people think were the worst. It was before they got the fancy special effects and had to make stories with a heart rather than moster-of-the-week material.
Why was the Amiga version of Wing Commander easier to install? Did you run it on an old Amiga computer? If so, you could have also run the version that you had on a PC from that era. I still have a working 386 that I can install old games onto.
If you ran the Amiga game on an emulator like WinUAE, then you could do the same thing with your PC version using DOSBox. It does a pretty good job too. I have a copy of Windows 3.1 running on my Windows 7 system.
It is a bit disingenuous to say that PC games are hard to install when you are talking about one from 1990. Try a modern game. I have an exceedingly low spec gaming system, and it runs everything that I have thrown at it (on default settings). I just plug it in (or download it) and play without having to do any effort at all.
Mate, it's not biased because of one platform versus another, it's biased because OOXML isn't a widely-supported (or well-supported) standard, and they're picking it on the false premise that it is.
You can say it isn't widely supported, but it is widely used - way more than ODF. And considering that 99% of the files are already in that format and do not require conversion (which would inevitably lead to formatting differences) then you can't say that there are no benefits to choosing that format and that this therefore must be the result of bias.
In my business, I would love to move to a free office suite, but most of our files get sent to other people outside this company and so we have to use the format that makes it easy to deal with the real world.
it seems to want to create confusion between it and the name of the cross-platform product OpenOffice.org, or open source in general.
To be fair, OpenOffice.org does have the name Office in it so you could say that Microsoft didn't start it!
But seriously folks, I don't think that it is a problem to "imply independence from vendor lock-in" because that is the point of making, publishing and standardising the format after all. They wanted other office products to use their format.
Even more shocking is that the new series might be doomed because of a sensationalist headline on slashdot!
The fact that they are doing the new series is worthy enough news, you don't need to build up a non-existing story to promote it. Even the summary shows what a crock the headline is when it says that one of the show's actors was "wary of the practicality of it". If it was such a concern, then they could just not film it in front of an audience.
never mind that the standards are developed in cooperation between the browser vendors, and at least two vendors must implement something before it is viable for standardization.
That was the old way of doing it, when Microsoft and Netscape kept adding more and more features in the hope that it would make it into the standard. Think tables, frames, blink - oh wait: thank god it didn't work for blink!
These days it is frowned on to add features that are outside the standards, with a few exceptions like styles with prepended browser identifiers and things hacked into meta tags (like iPhone's ones to control the layout on the small screen which I think should have been a custom style).
However, you are correct that the Microsoft way is to stick to the finalised standards rather than the ones that are still in flux. I think the reason they did this was to avoid a repetition of the box-model saga, where IE had to implement a box model before it was spelt out in any standard. But when the standard went a different way, they were stuck being incompatible with the rest of the world.
This wouldn't be a problem if the standardisation process didn't take many years to finalise. The HTML standard needs to improve in small increments. Not too small, or the browser manufacturers will always be playing catch up, and the user would be expected to upgrade every single time a new version was released. But not too big so that it takes 5-7 years for a standard to become official.
Buying a computer from a small, local shop does not mean for a second that it is illegal or uses pirated software. I think that this is another cultural difference (like your comment about the FCC requirements when talking about computers from another country). In my country, the small, local computer shops are everywhere and account for a sizable proportion of computer sales (I don't know the exact breakdown). It is not uncommon to find computers branded with a company of which you have never heard. They still have to use legitimate software, and Microsoft do occasionally crack down on some shop for selling pirated copies of their software.
I understand that in the US that this is nowhere near as common, that it is the large stores that dominate computer sales. In that case, it is certainly understandable that you would consider a serial number to be the norm.
(Hint: They are required by FCC regulation).
I think that you will find that the FCC's jurisdiction doesn't cover Iceland.
You're really pissing me off. You keep moving between a specific scenario to a generalization, as if the two were equal.
That's funny. I'm getting pissed off because you can't address the specific claim, but instead keep wandering off into unrelated scenarios about different products and then spew general anti-Microsoft FUD. But then you went on to say:
Mono is a large project that goes well beyond the Community Promise stuff.
Wow, that is actually about the correct software package. Maybe we are finally going to see some insightful argument that blows my position out of the ballpark...
The danger is adopting Mono leads to greater adoption of proprietary parts, and strengthens Microsoft's hand.
Oh no! You have gone back to reiterating an old FUD claim, one that apparently required the user to switch away from Mono for it to become true. Here's a tip: constant repetition of a statement is not the same as a well-reasoned argument.
You act like Mono exists in isolation and is made up of only the Community Promise bits.
Well, obviously I don't because I covered this explicitly in my first message. I said that "the general public won't be able to make the distinction between technology that is covered by the Microsoft Community Promise Agreement and the parts that is not". When the FAT32/TomTom litigation happened, people claimed that Microsoft was going after Linux; that this was the start of the war against open source. In fact, they were just going after TomTom. Most of their claims weren't even about any open source software, and those that were involved TomTom using a Microsoft-invented technology for which MS did have an active licence program. It didn't stop a lot of people confusing the story into thinking that their evil enemy was going to try to kill off Linux in the courts.
Microsoft has, and always will, use their technologies to reinforce their desktop monopoly.
Here's a tip: constant repetition of a statement is not the same as a well-reasoned argument.
If you believe in open standards, then you should not follow Microsoft's lead.
Here's a tip: constant repetition of a statement is not the same as a well-reasoned argument. Yes, I know that I am hypocritically repeating myself, but I am being ironic to prove a point.
I have seen this same FUD claim that Microsoft will stop Mono for 7 years, and yet they still haven't made any move to kill off the project. I bet that we will come back in another 7 years time and they still will not have done anything to stop it. Even then, there will be people such as yourself still clinging to the claim that it is too dangerous to use Mono.
It is clear that neither of us are going to accept the other's view. I see no reason to continue this discussion.
You claim this isn't about being sued by Microsoft
I wish you would stop paraphrasing me, badly.
Huh? What exactly is wrong with my statement? I asked "When has Microsoft ever made a promise not to sue for patent infringement about a public, free licence, and then turned around and sued anyway?" and you answered "I never said they did or will." That looks incredibly like you are saying that this isn't about being sued by Microsoft. So if you agree that you are not in danger of being sued for using Mono, what is your problem with it? Let's see:
Later on, if Silverlight is adopted by the web as a whole, in part because it is "cross-platform", then they can just pull the plug on Linux. New versions will be tied to Windows. The idea of being cross-platform will be quietly dropped.
So let me get this straight. The danger in using some open source software is that a company might pull the plug on some other proprietary software that you are not using. That does not make sense.
So what if some people might be tempted to move across to Silverlight? Do you disuade someone from using OpenOffice because they will suffer from vendor they move across to Microsoft Office? (Is that better than a car analogy?) Your entire argument is not based on problems with people starting to use Mono, but with problems of people stopping the use of Mono.
DETAILS MATTER. See above. I also talked a lot about other issues besides lawsuits.
None of your issues have been at all relevant to the subject.
Mono keeps working.
Mono works even better.
Mono is free.
Mono will continue this trend.
Umm, so what? Didn't you ask me earlier if I was a communist for not wanting a company to get paid for their services? Why do you have a problem with one wanting to increase their marketshare?
Use Mono on Linux to stick it to the man!
Umm, so what again?
And yet as far as I know they have never gone back on one of their Microsoft Community Promises (which is what would be required to stop the Mono project)
Right, last century and not in anyway like today's issue.
No.
Assuming everything a corporation says is a lie is just as bad as assuming everything a corporation says is the truth.
I agree, but then I didn't assume that everything this corporation said was a lie. I said that this followed the pattern used as standard PR spin by deflecting blame without specifying details to allow the public to check it for themselves (or to uninstall the software). I did say that the story was plausible and that I would normally give them the benefit of the doubt, which shows that I don't consider everything MS says to be a lie.
Funny, when stuff like this happens to Apple, why does everyone give them the benefit of the doubt, but when it is Microsoft it is "EVIL" instantly?
I think that it is funny that you would claim this in response to me calling Apple evil (or at least I labelled their practice of allowing everyone to screw with the user to be evil).
We found the problem. It wasn't our fault, and it doesn't matter because it's not happening to anyone. (lie)
Until Microsoft say which service causes this (so it can be independently verified by users) then you just have to assume that it is a lie. Normally I like to give the benefit of the doubt (and it does seem feasible that a 3rd party app is responsible, but like you said, this follows the standard style of PR spin that most companies employ.
This would not be a problem if the mobile OS actually valued the customer over the developers and phone companies. My last Symbian phone prompted the user to give permission to any app that wanted to access the Internet. No spyware under the guise of a game here, no 3rd party services chewing up quota, no apps being just thin layers over websites.
I hate seeing that circle animation that says data access is happening on my iPhone for something that shouldn't need it. Even worse, I hate the fact that on the iPhone the developer can turn off that display so you don't know if any connection has occured. Evil. I presume that the Windows Phone does the same thing.
When has Microsoft ever made a promise not to sue for patent infringement about a public, free licence, and then turned around and sued anyway?
I never said they did or will. I said, "anybody who believes in open standards should stay away from Mono. If you follow Microsoft's lead you will get burned."
Well, unless you mean that Microsoft will literally come around and set fire to you, then I can't see what other reasonable interpretation there could be. You claim this isn't about being sued by Microsoft, but then you go on to say:
Microsoft already has a patent deal with Novell and it's distribution of Linux. Don't want to be sued by Microsoft for using Linux? Buy Novell and pay royalties to Microsoft.
So you ARE talking about being sued. How much of that deal was just a PR exercise anyway? It is not as if any other distro has been sued - especially for something that Microsoft promised to keep free. The only close thing would be TomTom being sued for using FAT32, but then that is a technology that is actively licenced and has NEVER been given away. TomTom was violating the licence, and if it were the GPL licence that they violated then nobody around here would complain if they got sued.
But back to the topic in hand. If your entire reason to avoid Mono is because you might decide to go off and use another product (Silverlight), then surely you should be arguing against using Silverlight and leave Mono alone. To use a car analogy, it is like arguing that you should not buy a car because you might one day upgrade to a tank and shoot at people. A car will still get you from point A to point B even if you don't buy a tank, and Mono will still work if Microsoft decide to drop Silverlight. There is still no justification for your advice to stay away from Mono.
Yes, and this is why anybody who believes in open standards should stay away from Mono. If you follow Microsoft's lead you will get burned.
That doesn't make sense. There was nothing in what I said that could lead you to that conclusion. It is you own hatred of Microsoft makes you believe it. When has Microsoft ever made a promise not to sue for patent infringement about a public, free licence, and then turned around and sued anyway?
They won't give a shit once they get beyond the adoption stage. They'll just tell everybody to license their intellectual property that they invested in.
There is more than one standard covered by a promise not to sue. If they reneg on this one then all of their promises would be null and void. They wouldn't be able to convince anyone to use their standards then.
You're not a communist, are you? Don't they deserve to get paid?
I see we are dealing with an intellectual giant here. It was Microsoft who set the price for their licence, not me. They decided to give it away, as is their right. It is also their right to change the terms of their offers, but they know that the backlash against them would be very damaging if they screwed around with such a high profile agreement.
First you swallow the open parts, then you eat the rest, and finally you're locked in.
Then only use their standardised stuff. Use the C# language, compiled to .NET with Mono's extensions. Then you will be OK. But I don't think you need to worry. People have been saying that Microsoft will sue for 7 years, but it still hadn't happened. You can believe that they will do it, but there is no evidence to support that view.