Not to mention the fact that pl/sql is a proprietary hook tying you to the exorbitant Oracle per-concurrent-user licenses. No way you'll manage to get away without rewriting your entire environment. Never write in pl/sql or in transact-sql. Even totally overweight clients are better than that! Keep strictly to odbc, or jdbc, or dbi, and don't bother writing one single line in ADO, as long as ole db is not widely supported. I hope no one besides Micros~1 will support it.
Do I understand it right that any single table has to fit into one, single file, or will PostgreSql transparantly split the table over several OS files?
Even file/web/print servers need tweaking once in a while, even if they don't seem to be such maintenance hogs. The majority of IT projects, however, seem to be quite more labour intensive. I don't see linux breaking through in day to day business practices, unless IT people start picking up linux skills at a much faster rate than is the case today. And since services account for the bulk of IT business, I guess that leaves linux as being promising, but nothing more than that.
It's not gonna last? Ok, lets go back to what determines the levels of salary of any type of worker:
pA dX/dA --- = ----- pB dX/dB
with A and B two resources, pA and pB their prices, and X the output. You can find this result in any first-term handbook on economics. I personally recommend "Economics", by Lipsey and Steiner.
The reasoning embodied in the formula is rather simple. The market will settle for that utilization level of resources at which the marginal productivity per dollar of the one resource will be equal to the marginal productivity per dollar of any other resource.
It is obvious that productivity is at the centre of the whole reasoning.
In terms of IT work, we can translate it as following: as long as paying out huge amounts to a few programmers to make the computers a particular task automatically is still cheaper than having a Mexican army of clerks trying to complete the same task manually, the company is better off shelling out big bucks to the IT staff.
So what's the gist? Well, as a programmer use tools that are particularly fit for the problem at hand, so that you can truly solve the problem in record time. The faster you become at solving a problem, the more money you will start making. For a starters, stay away from C++, Java and the like, on economic grounds. Any programming environment that forces you to focus on details that are not relevant to the problem at hand are simly eating into your salary.
In a mainframe environment, the lords of the system are the user group. They decide over life and death. In a unix environment, the sysadmin wants to control your life. In an oracle environment, the dba is the guy to kow tow to. Regardless of all the crap they've produced in addition, in a Microsoft environment, the user is the lord of the system. They've dethroned the autocrats who think the center of the world is the server room. Users definitely prefer NT-admins and SqlServer dbas to their Unix and Oracle counterparts, if it were only because they tend to be so much more responsive the users' needs. Linux, on its side, will have to prove itself: if it goes the Unix and Oracle way, it will never reach the masses.
Well, one side of the equation is that all that freedom creates a rather expensive need for support.
The other side of the equation is that users are free to produce the creative solutions that in the end pay for all the hassle. The remainding is called "profit".
The idea should be to introduce just enough standardisation to be able to support this heterogenous environment that stimulates creative solutions, without standardising away all opportunities that this creativity brings.
Sysadminning environments can never be a goal in itself.
Does anyone feel like going to the lords of server admin and dba and beg them to install that one extra application that would save you weeks and weeks of stupid typing work, or extract that one query-result from the database that you really need?
No? Well get your own PC and start doing your own thing, and make sure to network it, so that you can still collaborate with the rest of the organisation.
Some people really think that users abandoned the mainframe in large numbers, just because it had dumb text-based terminals. Wrong. As a matter of fact, they left the mainframe, at the time, for a system that was text-based too (msdos). What really matters, is that the users rather help themselves, than be at the mercy of the autocratic, self-serving lords of the central system.
Since the nc brings back the situation that users desperately wanted to leave, it will continue to fail miserably.
Any company that installs NCs, will see PCs popping up all over. And users will have 2 monitors on their desktop, one for the NC and one for the PC; and in the end all the real data will reside in the PC, and the NC will just be decoration. A bit later, some smart company will come up with PC-based terminal emulation for the NC-server and the NC will disappear completely. Bye bye.
Since we've been through all that, I can only see totally brainless managers trying this again...
You are advocating something that is worse than patents on software! The main part of a database design reflects reality, and therefore, is something that other people will come along with too, when they model the same kind of problems.
It's not because you are the first one to think of modeling an existing problem, that you have the right to ask money of anybody else working in the same problem area.
Worse, it's not because you are the first to run to the patent office that you are allowed to aks money from other people.
It's not the support of Corel that will make a difference in itself, so I wouldn't worry about them dropping free software. If they're in free software now, it's because that's a business opportunity for them. They don't need any encouragement.
By the way, any legal procedure requires you to ask "cease and desist" a few times first, before you go to court. You must have tried and insisted first, within reason, to solve the problem by yourself, before you bring it before the judge.
I'm all for the idea to start the procedure, and to push through whatever is possible, to the maximum extent possible un...
Which technology does usually become the pervasise one? Software that gets used in big, expensive projects, that only the richest corporations can afford, or software that gets used by the smaller projects with budgetary restrictions?
Well, just look at companies, like for example SGI, and its demise.
I think there should be an annex to Moore's law. If there are two competing pieces of software, who are both useable, and the one is easier to copy than the other, then the latter may be more stable or have more features, the first one will still win.
If either MySQL or PostGreSQL are sufficiently useable, they will win.
Everybody's equal before the law, and there will be no exception to the rule. And now that we were going the prosecute copyright violations severely, and even throw relations with China in the balance for them, the D.A. must prosecute;if there is violation of the law, none of us should settle for less than the maximum penalty.
The Philippines are a developing country and must focus on developing their human resources to the level that will allow them to participate fully in mainstream economic activity. Therefore, I am happy to see that they are pushing through measures for keeping children in schools.
However, in addition to these measures to keep children from shirking classes, we must take into consideration what Philippine law enactment and enforcement agencies have done to make sure that: (1) a decent proportion of national income is invested in education. (2) children, regardless of the financial background, are offered sufficient opportunities to quality education.
The more it is clear that the Philippine government means business, in dealing with the education of the children, the more easily people will accept this kind of restrictions in their freedom and the freedom of their children, in order for them to stand a better chance in their lives.
Quite a lot of people consider freedom to be a goal in itself. I think, however, that freedom must be weighed against the other goals that the community may have, including the goal to achieve better living standards for the next generation.
From the wealthy suburbs of middle-class America, people may take a dim look on restrictions on personal freedom, but I am sure that the Phillipinos, given their relatively low level of income, can be convinced to throw part of it in the balance.
Copyright laws were devised with protecting the weak and the poor in mind, that is, the writers.
Isn't it striking that the richest man in the world has made a habit of it of bullying every one around and abuse and re-abuse the law?
We must therefore add clauses to the copyright laws that prevent their abuse.
The law needs to state clearly that the author seeking protection under the copyright law, may never issue a license to a copy, but only the copy itself. There cannot be any restriction on selling or transferring the copy otherwise. The author is entitled to the proceeds of the first sale only en has no rights whatsoever to claim in subsequent sales; just like a house owner has no rights in subsequent sales of his house.
It is clear that the law must also state clearly that there can be no patents for software, but only copyrights.
I think that there are quite a number of women who are successful in their fields. Just as example, what job does Madeleine Albright do anyway?
Part of the problem is that men must mentally stop looking at a woman as female, when we want to look at them as just another professional in her field; which is sometimes difficult, if she is attractive. By the way, if she is attractive, she doesn't always want us to forget that she is female. That's part of life too. This is an aspect of men-women relations that will always be there, to some extent.
Another problem may be the fact that mankind has a tendency to create informal hierarchies amongst people in the workplace. There seems to be tendency for women to rank lowlier than men in the informal hierarchy.
However, if a woman insists on getting to the top, and she has the talent for it, and she is willing to give up time-eaters like, for example, fully-enjoyed motherhood, I don't really think it is harder for a woman to reach the top. It is simple hard for everyonek; and men will eventually respect her for her professional work.
The biggest empires of this century have been built on copyrights and patents.
In itself, this is not too much of a problem. However, if you look at the initial motivation for copyright protection, you can see that the law was there to protect the weak and the poor, the writers and inventors. How can we reconcile the outcome of one full century of copyright protection, with the fact that the music industry seems to benefit from copyright laws so much more than the artists who were supposed to be the main beneficiaries? Does Bill Gates need protection from us, or is it rather the other way around?
I think it is, indeed, inappropriate to refer to the "Cathedral and the Bazaar" in conjunction with SAP. The guys who write the linux kernel know very well how to write it, and are wildly enthusiastic about it.
Most people using ERP often don't have a clue how a company works, is supposed to work, how to write software for that, and, most importantly, they are definitely not wildly enthusiastic about writing that kind of software.
"(in fact i think bookkeeping/accounting etc. is something rather boring..) "
and then:
"one ore 2 dedicated programmers who built a custom solution for the company there..."
Do you have the faintest idea how much time and money a company can waste with one or two programmers writing a custom solution enterprise-wide, who think that accounting/bookkeeping is boring?
Most of the companies who've implemented SAP found this out first, and then implemented SAP.
In my opinion, some (well, quite a number of) people turn to machines, when they have problems socializing with people (for various reasons, not only people who are mildly autistic).
Because they spend so much time with computers, quite a number of these people become successful in the IT business. Which is good! If you are excellent at something, because you work hard to develop your talents, you deserve to be rewarded. And being not that good at socialising doesn't detract from it.
It is a well-known fact that an SAP-implementation bill can run up to astronomical levels. The part that goes to OS licenses is minute, compared to what the company will pay (in that order):
(1) Front-end business consultants for process re-engineering (usually E&Y, KPMG, AA,...) (2) Implementation consultants and customisation programmers (3) SAP licenses (4) Oracle licenses (or Sybase, or SQLServer,...)
I don't mention the costs involved in: (1) Time from employees involved in the project (2) Training costs and other costs of transition
These costs are usually not accounted for in the total cost of the project, but are believed to be a multiple of the visible costs.
I don't believe that the OS bill will reach 5% of the total visible costs, in case the company implements proprietary Unix or NT.
Given the amount of FUD spread about Linux, I don't see that many companies invest the amounts needed for the whole project, and have the whole thing run on Linux.
If you want companies to run their business backbone ERP on Linux, the open source world will have to produce their own SAP. However, when I read what/.ers write about accounting and stuff, they seem to find it a boring subject. Companies know this too. Would you get your accounting software from people who are not really interested in accounting?
So lets conclude that, making abstraction of the odd exception, businesses will never run their business backbone ERP systems on Linux.
Ok, I'm not advocating any increase in government power or ability to regulate. It's true that we 'd rather need to go the other way.
However, there's one thing we forget here. Micros~1's billions are implicitly built on government willingness to enforce copyrights (across the world). Now we can see where all of this copyright enforcement - I admit, rather unexpectedly, has led to.
If I'm now looking at the government to solve this problem, it's because, to a large extent, they created the problem in the first place.
I also believe that the original spirit of copyright and patent laws was to protect the weak, the inventors and writers. It is obviously the case that the modern "writers", the software companies, are not weak any longer and are getting too much protection. The way Micros~1 used its copyrights (and the threat of government assistance in enforcing them) proves that we must reduce these rights drastically. For example, the system in which Micros~1 makes PC-makers pay for each CPU they ship, regardless whether they are shipping the CPU with Windows, should be outlawed straight away. There should be a provision in the copyright laws that prohibits this kind of practices, and we should add more and more restrictions, as we see that companies abuse copyright laws.
I agree. A fact is that no one else could have done it, except for someone with the market power of Micros~1. They used their domination of the desktop to stiffle competition in the market for web browsers. This is a very serious issue. In order to protect society, the court should now order that Micros~1 be split up, and that Windows be regulated as an essential utility.
Ok, now I will need to surf until I find the passage in which RMS said that "these people have no business using a computer." I think he was referring to people who were unable to either install or compile an OS or a kernel. As soon as I have recovered the url, I will post it.
I surely don't want to see Microsoft or Windows disappear or destroyed, and definitely not now, right away, while so many people depend on it to run their computers.
Windows is, in my opinion, an essential utility. Of course, the average business user can do all their work as well on MacOS. However, they have an large investment in "implemented" software on Windows. It's absolutely unfeasible to ask them to move this software, and data (often stored in proprietary formats) to another OS. Everyone will need a sufficient span of time to migrate, when a credible alternative comes along.
APIs, protocols, and data formats have to some extent the similar properties to natural languages. Of course, you can say everything in Spanish. Of course, you don't need English. However, if you spent half your life studying English, and use it every day in running your life, you have a large "implemented investment" in the English language. It will take time and a lot of effort to move to another language.
MacOS is not that much of a solution that addresses these issues. MacOS requires you to invest, not only in proprietary OS, but also in proprietary hardware. I don't think this is an attractive proposition. It's, beyond any doubt, the main reason why PCs beat Apple in the market, in spite of the fact that Apple technology was quite often more advanced and more user-friendly. Most of us were just not interested, whether Apple was better or not, we just saw what Apple was trying to do with their proprietary hardware. Going from Microsoft to Apple is going in exactly the opposite direction as you should go.
The DOJ must indeed insist with the court that Linux is no competition to Windows.
Linux is nothing more than a job protection programme for nerds, who insist on the idea that every computer user types in stuff like: gcc -La.out -vi -OMyThing.o -kMyProgram.cpp -1 -2q...
... Or else stay away from computers. I think, for example, that RMS was absolutely clear on that one.
That's why I believe that Microsoft must be split up into at least two companies, one for the Windows, and one for applications. Furthermore, Windows must be regulated as an essential utility, until there is sufficient competition on the desktop.
I would say, as soon as Windows has a market share below 50%, this arrangement may be reviewed.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention the fact that pl/sql is a proprietary hook tying you to the exorbitant Oracle per-concurrent-user licenses. No way you'll manage to get away without rewriting your entire environment. Never write in pl/sql or in transact-sql. Even totally overweight clients are better than that! Keep strictly to odbc, or jdbc, or dbi, and don't bother writing one single line in ADO, as long as ole db is not widely supported. I hope no one besides Micros~1 will support it.
Do I understand it right that any single table has to fit into one, single file, or will PostgreSql transparantly split the table over several OS files?
Even file/web/print servers need tweaking once in a while, even if they don't seem to be such maintenance hogs. The majority of IT projects, however, seem to be quite more labour intensive. I don't see linux breaking through in day to day business practices, unless IT people start picking up linux skills at a much faster rate than is the case today. And since services account for the bulk of IT business, I guess that leaves linux as being promising, but nothing more than that.
It's not gonna last? Ok, lets go back to what determines the levels of salary of any type of worker:
pA dX/dA
--- = -----
pB dX/dB
with A and B two resources, pA and pB their prices, and X the output. You can find this result in any first-term handbook on economics. I personally recommend "Economics", by Lipsey and Steiner.
The reasoning embodied in the formula is rather simple. The market will settle for that utilization level of resources at which the marginal productivity per dollar of the one resource will be equal to the marginal productivity per dollar of any other resource.
It is obvious that productivity is at the centre of the whole reasoning.
In terms of IT work, we can translate it as following: as long as paying out huge amounts to a few programmers to make the computers a particular task automatically is still cheaper than having a Mexican army of clerks trying to complete the same task manually, the company is better off shelling out big bucks to the IT staff.
So what's the gist? Well, as a programmer use tools that are particularly fit for the problem at hand, so that you can truly solve the problem in record time. The faster you become at solving a problem, the more money you will start making. For a starters, stay away from C++, Java and the like, on economic grounds. Any programming environment that forces you to focus on details that are not relevant to the problem at hand are simly eating into your salary.
In a mainframe environment, the lords of the system are the user group. They decide over life and death. In a unix environment, the sysadmin wants to control your life. In an oracle environment, the dba is the guy to kow tow to. Regardless of all the crap they've produced in addition, in a Microsoft environment, the user is the lord of the system. They've dethroned the autocrats who think the center of the world is the server room. Users definitely prefer NT-admins and SqlServer dbas to their Unix and Oracle counterparts, if it were only because they tend to be so much more responsive the users' needs. Linux, on its side, will have to prove itself: if it goes the Unix and Oracle way, it will never reach the masses.
Well, one side of the equation is that all that freedom creates a rather expensive need for support.
The other side of the equation is that users are free to produce the creative solutions that in the end pay for all the hassle. The remainding is called "profit".
The idea should be to introduce just enough standardisation to be able to support this heterogenous environment that stimulates creative solutions, without standardising away all opportunities that this creativity brings.
Sysadminning environments can never be a goal in itself.
Does anyone feel like going to the lords of server admin and dba and beg them to install that one extra application that would save you weeks and weeks of stupid typing work, or extract that one query-result from the database that you really need?
No? Well get your own PC and start doing your own thing, and make sure to network it, so that you can still collaborate with the rest of the organisation.
Some people really think that users abandoned the mainframe in large numbers, just because it had dumb text-based terminals. Wrong. As a matter of fact, they left the mainframe, at the time, for a system that was text-based too (msdos). What really matters, is that the users rather help themselves, than be at the mercy of the autocratic, self-serving lords of the central system.
Since the nc brings back the situation that users desperately wanted to leave, it will continue to fail miserably.
Any company that installs NCs, will see PCs popping up all over. And users will have 2 monitors on their desktop, one for the NC and one for the PC; and in the end all the real data will reside in the PC, and the NC will just be decoration. A bit later, some smart company will come up with PC-based terminal emulation for the NC-server and the NC will disappear completely. Bye bye.
Since we've been through all that, I can only see totally brainless managers trying this again...
You ignorant c*nt!
You are advocating something that is worse than patents on software! The main part of a database design reflects reality, and therefore, is something that other people will come along with too, when they model the same kind of problems.
It's not because you are the first one to think of modeling an existing problem, that you have the right to ask money of anybody else working in the same problem area.
Worse, it's not because you are the first to run to the patent office that you are allowed to aks money from other people.
It's not the support of Corel that will make a difference in itself, so I wouldn't worry about them dropping free software. If they're in free software now, it's because that's a business opportunity for them. They don't need any encouragement.
By the way, any legal procedure requires you to ask "cease and desist" a few times first, before you go to court. You must have tried and insisted first, within reason, to solve the problem by yourself, before you bring it before the judge.
I'm all for the idea to start the procedure, and to push through whatever is possible, to the maximum extent possible un...
Which technology does usually become the pervasise one? Software that gets used in big, expensive projects, that only the richest corporations can afford, or software that gets used by the smaller projects with budgetary restrictions?
Well, just look at companies, like for example SGI, and its demise.
I think there should be an annex to Moore's law. If there are two competing pieces of software, who are both useable, and the one is easier to copy than the other, then the latter may be more stable or have more features, the first one will still win.
If either MySQL or PostGreSQL are sufficiently useable, they will win.
Everybody's equal before the law, and there will be no exception to the rule. And now that we were going the prosecute copyright violations severely, and even throw relations with China in the balance for them, the D.A. must prosecute;if there is violation of the law, none of us should settle for less than the maximum penalty.
The Philippines are a developing country and must focus on developing their human resources to the level that will allow them to participate fully in mainstream economic activity. Therefore, I am happy to see that they are pushing through measures for keeping children in schools.
However, in addition to these measures to keep children from shirking classes, we must take into consideration what Philippine law enactment and enforcement agencies have done to make sure that:
(1) a decent proportion of national income is invested in education.
(2) children, regardless of the financial background, are offered sufficient opportunities to quality education.
The more it is clear that the Philippine government means business, in dealing with the education of the children, the more easily people will accept this kind of restrictions in their freedom and the freedom of their children, in order for them to stand a better chance in their lives.
Quite a lot of people consider freedom to be a goal in itself. I think, however, that freedom must be weighed against the other goals that the community may have, including the goal to achieve better living standards for the next generation.
From the wealthy suburbs of middle-class America, people may take a dim look on restrictions on personal freedom, but I am sure that the Phillipinos, given their relatively low level of income, can be convinced to throw part of it in the balance.
Copyright laws were devised with protecting the weak and the poor in mind, that is, the writers.
Isn't it striking that the richest man in the world has made a habit of it of bullying every one around and abuse and re-abuse the law?
We must therefore add clauses to the copyright laws that prevent their abuse.
The law needs to state clearly that the author seeking protection under the copyright law, may never issue a license to a copy, but only the copy itself. There cannot be any restriction on selling or transferring the copy otherwise. The author is entitled to the proceeds of the first sale only en has no rights whatsoever to claim in subsequent sales; just like a house owner has no rights in subsequent sales of his house.
It is clear that the law must also state clearly that there can be no patents for software, but only copyrights.
I think that there are quite a number of women who are successful in their fields. Just as example, what job does Madeleine Albright do anyway?
Part of the problem is that men must mentally stop looking at a woman as female, when we want to look at them as just another professional in her field; which is sometimes difficult, if she is attractive. By the way, if she is attractive, she doesn't always want us to forget that she is female. That's part of life too. This is an aspect of men-women relations that will always be there, to some extent.
Another problem may be the fact that mankind has a tendency to create informal hierarchies amongst people in the workplace. There seems to be tendency for women to rank lowlier than men in the informal hierarchy.
However, if a woman insists on getting to the top, and she has the talent for it, and she is willing to give up time-eaters like, for example, fully-enjoyed motherhood, I don't really think it is harder for a woman to reach the top. It is simple hard for everyonek; and men will eventually respect her for her professional work.
The biggest empires of this century have been built on copyrights and patents.
In itself, this is not too much of a problem. However, if you look at the initial motivation for copyright protection, you can see that the law was there to protect the weak and the poor, the writers and inventors. How can we reconcile the outcome of one full century of copyright protection, with the fact that the music industry seems to benefit from copyright laws so much more than the artists who were supposed to be the main beneficiaries? Does Bill Gates need protection from us, or is it rather the other way around?
I think it is, indeed, inappropriate to refer to the "Cathedral and the Bazaar" in conjunction with SAP. The guys who write the linux kernel know very well how to write it, and are wildly enthusiastic about it.
Most people using ERP often don't have a clue how a company works, is supposed to work, how to write software for that, and, most importantly, they are definitely not wildly enthusiastic about writing that kind of software.
You write:
..."
"(in fact i think bookkeeping/accounting etc. is something rather boring..) "
and then:
"one ore 2 dedicated programmers who built a custom solution for the company there
Do you have the faintest idea how much time and money a company can waste with one or two programmers writing a custom solution enterprise-wide, who think that accounting/bookkeeping is boring?
Most of the companies who've implemented SAP found this out first, and then implemented SAP.
In my opinion, some (well, quite a number of) people turn to machines, when they have problems socializing with people (for various reasons, not only people who are mildly autistic).
Because they spend so much time with computers, quite a number of these people become successful in the IT business. Which is good! If you are excellent at something, because you work hard to develop your talents, you deserve to be rewarded. And being not that good at socialising doesn't detract from it.
It is a well-known fact that an SAP-implementation bill can run up to astronomical levels. The part that goes to OS licenses is minute, compared to what the company will pay (in that order):
...) ...)
/.ers write about accounting and stuff, they seem to find it a boring subject. Companies know this too. Would you get your accounting software from people who are not really interested in accounting?
(1) Front-end business consultants for process re-engineering (usually E&Y, KPMG, AA,
(2) Implementation consultants and customisation programmers
(3) SAP licenses
(4) Oracle licenses (or Sybase, or SQLServer,
I don't mention the costs involved in:
(1) Time from employees involved in the project
(2) Training costs and other costs of transition
These costs are usually not accounted for in the total cost of the project, but are believed to be a multiple of the visible costs.
I don't believe that the OS bill will reach 5% of the total visible costs, in case the company implements proprietary Unix or NT.
Given the amount of FUD spread about Linux, I don't see that many companies invest the amounts needed for the whole project, and have the whole thing run on Linux.
If you want companies to run their business backbone ERP on Linux, the open source world will have to produce their own SAP. However, when I read what
So lets conclude that, making abstraction of the odd exception, businesses will never run their business backbone ERP systems on Linux.
Ok, I'm not advocating any increase in government power or ability to regulate. It's true that we 'd rather need to go the other way.
However, there's one thing we forget here. Micros~1's billions are implicitly built on government willingness to enforce copyrights (across the world). Now we can see where all of this copyright enforcement - I admit, rather unexpectedly, has led to.
If I'm now looking at the government to solve this problem, it's because, to a large extent, they created the problem in the first place.
I also believe that the original spirit of copyright and patent laws was to protect the weak, the inventors and writers. It is obviously the case that the modern "writers", the software companies, are not weak any longer and are getting too much protection. The way Micros~1 used its copyrights (and the threat of government assistance in enforcing them) proves that we must reduce these rights drastically. For example, the system in which Micros~1 makes PC-makers pay for each CPU they ship, regardless whether they are shipping the CPU with Windows, should be outlawed straight away. There should be a provision in the copyright laws that prohibits this kind of practices, and we should add more and more restrictions, as we see that companies abuse copyright laws.
I agree. A fact is that no one else could have done it, except for someone with the market power of Micros~1. They used their domination of the desktop to stiffle competition in the market for web browsers. This is a very serious issue. In order to protect society, the court should now order that Micros~1 be split up, and that Windows be regulated as an essential utility.
Ok, now I will need to surf until I find the passage in which RMS said that "these people have no business using a computer." I think he was referring to people who were unable to either install or compile an OS or a kernel. As soon as I have recovered the url, I will post it.
I surely don't want to see Microsoft or Windows disappear or destroyed, and definitely not now, right away, while so many people depend on it to run their computers.
Windows is, in my opinion, an essential utility. Of course, the average business user can do all their work as well on MacOS. However, they have an large investment in "implemented" software on Windows. It's absolutely unfeasible to ask them to move this software, and data (often stored in proprietary formats) to another OS. Everyone will need a sufficient span of time to migrate, when a credible alternative comes along.
APIs, protocols, and data formats have to some extent the similar properties to natural languages. Of course, you can say everything in Spanish. Of course, you don't need English. However, if you spent half your life studying English, and use it every day in running your life, you have a large "implemented investment" in the English language. It will take time and a lot of effort to move to another language.
MacOS is not that much of a solution that addresses these issues. MacOS requires you to invest, not only in proprietary OS, but also in proprietary hardware. I don't think this is an attractive proposition. It's, beyond any doubt, the main reason why PCs beat Apple in the market, in spite of the fact that Apple technology was quite often more advanced and more user-friendly. Most of us were just not interested, whether Apple was better or not, we just saw what Apple was trying to do with their proprietary hardware.
Going from Microsoft to Apple is going in exactly the opposite direction as you should go.
The DOJ must indeed insist with the court that Linux is no competition to Windows.
...
Linux is nothing more than a job protection programme for nerds, who insist on the idea that every computer user types in stuff like: gcc -La.out -vi -OMyThing.o -kMyProgram.cpp -1 -2q
... Or else stay away from computers. I think, for example, that RMS was absolutely clear on that one.
That's why I believe that Microsoft must be split up into at least two companies, one for the Windows, and one for applications. Furthermore, Windows must be regulated as an essential utility, until there is sufficient competition on the desktop.
I would say, as soon as Windows has a market share below 50%, this arrangement may be reviewed.