Sort of like Elvis. For better or worse, by virtue of POSIX compliance (sort of), even WinXP is 'just another Unix', just not a particularly good implementation. If the trade press didn't have pro-monopoly blinders on (thoughfully provided by the monopolists, and would be monopolists) they would have noticed that FOSS, through the mechanism of the BSD TCP/IP implemeention, not only out-innovated everbody else, it decimated the proprietary competion virtually extinguishing it.
Good point, but the key difference is that both you and I can't have 100% ownership of the same physical object, whereas we can both fully own the same idea and neither of us is poorer for it. I suppose you could argue that in either case, the value of the owned thing is 1/2 either way.
>Which version of linux? if its RH Enterprise then the price is acceptable.
It is the Linux installer kit, which is essentially no version of Linux. On re-reading the specs, I notice that these are actually single Opteron machines and the Linuc version offers 1GB more memory (cost, about $130) and an extran 80GB disk (cost, around $100). Tha makes up about $230 of the $300 differential, but the real question is 'why can't I buy the *exact same* HP workstation products w/o Windows?' If you look at IBM's website, they play the same games. And as somebody else pointed out, so does Dell. I have to figure that it costs these vendors more moeny to produce machines that have just slightly different configurations, but one configuration (the cheaper one) only comes with windows, and the other, moer expensive one, only comes with Linux. I'm guessing that somebody made it worth their while to go to that extra trouble, and it wasn't Red Hat.
The idea of intellectual property doesn't work best in a capitalistic society, it works best in a monopolistic society. It is worth remembering that Intellectual Property is entirely the construct of government and law. No such thing exists in the 'nautral' world, IP law, just like the ideas that it supposedly 'protects', is a abstract invention of humans. IP isn't the same as a lump of iron ore, or a bar of gold, or the computer I'm typing this on. I believe it was Jefferson that remarked that your posession of an idea is not in any way lessened by the fact that I posess the same idea. That's still true today. I'm firmly convinced that economic growth creates IP law, and not the other way around. That growth creates what would be what would be short term economic opportunities. The people that have been able to take advantage of those opportunties have used part of the capital thus created to subvert the political process in order to make those temporary advantages permanent through the creation of IP law.
>Fueled by their intellectual property theft from western countries
Which really tells you just how short sighted the current Western obsession with granting monopoly protection to the 'owner' every single idea, or every expression of an idea, really is. If China manages to avoid the IP regime of the west, they will blow on past everybody else regardless of how many engineers they graduate because those engineers will not have to worry about infringing somebodies bogus patent, or (effectively) eternal copoyright. You will have a country of 1 billion people standing on each others shoulders and seeing farther instead of trying to farther themselves by holding their would be competitors down in the mud and sitting on their backs.
HP pulls the same crap. If you look at their otherwise very nice dual Opterona machines, they have one version with WinXP Pro that is $3499. The closest Linux version, with the HP Linux installer kit is $3799. Note that these machines do not come with Linux pre-installe,d they come with the HP 'linux installer kit' so it doesn't cost HP any more to produce these machines. In addition, these machines are specifically targeted at the Workstation market, not the Office PC market, so Linux would be a natural fit in this market. But some mysterious force prevents HP from selling the equivalent machine at a lower price with no OS. It is pretty darn obvious that the DOJ should have required that Microsoft's OEM agreements should always allow distributors to sell machines without Windows discounted by the cost of Windows. Instead, after a successful anti-trust prosecution, we get the same old slimy, probably illegal tactics that we have always seen from Microsoft. Thanks, W!
Hear, Hear! Well spoken Bruce! I notice that Sun and Apple are conspicuouly absent from the list of members. Of course, this presents an enormous opportunity for Sun and Apple as they collectively have enough market share that they can create a market for OF motherboards, and it presents Sun with yet another chance to flat out own the Linux market. Of course, Sun will screw it up and miss the boat in yet another hopeless attempt to prop up Solaris/SPARC. 5 years later they will have figured out that the boat has sailed without them and by then it will be too late.
> Itaniums do run 32bit applications. At least for Linux.
The problem is that Itanium doesn't run X86 pre-compiled Win32 binaries as fast as Opteron and Xeon do, and for the vast majority of computer users, and 90% of desktop computer users, that is all that matters.
According to the article, Theo and his team have their heads down, focused on making sure that OpenBSD is of the highest possible quality. This I do not doubt. But if so, when does Theo find the time to review the millions of line sof Linux source and decide that it is all crap? I have a full time job (and a wife and kid), and while I'm no super-genius like Theo (or Linux, or RMS) I sure don't have enough free time to vett the Linux source.
Let's face it, this is yet another Linux hit piece from Dan Lyons who tirelessly scours the globe for negative things to write about Linux.
I moved to CA in 1988, and I never got my taxes right until I started paying somebody to do them for me. The state just corrects the mistakes and eitehr sends you a bill or a check.
What I'd really like to see is the Federal governemnt offer to collect income tax for the state and just have one additional line on the Federal tax for 'For the privilege of living in the great state of X, tack on an extra 30%' and get rid of all of the state social engineering in the tax code that happens in addition to the Federal social engineering. The only problem I can se is that the Feds would probably help themselves to a 10% 'handling' fee.
Actually, what I *really* want (enough to google for it, anyway) is a consumer grade (and priced) VHS deck with Firewire support so I can read those old VHS tapes onto my computer with computer control of the deck similar to how my Sony Digital 8 cam works.
Then I can edit them before I write them out to DVD. Anybody know of such a beast?
In any rational universe, Sun would have released Teamware under the GPL when they end-of-lifed it three years ago. But we're talking about Sun. It contains (as far as I know) no technology licensed from third parties. Sun's primary problem was that the sole purpose of Teamware, other than to facilitate Solaris development, was to sell more Sun hardware, so among other things, true cross platform support never happened. The real irony is that Claire Giordano is one of the drivers for Open Solaris and she was also on the NSE/Teamware team (as well as Claeton Giardano - sorry for the slight Claire and Claeton:-)) so she is certainly aware of the product. Hopefully it will finally happen.GPL would be better, but CDDL is better than nothing, I guess.
Larry McVoy designed a prototype called 'NSE Lite' which was based on concepts developed by Eric Schmidt and Bunker Lampson which were incorporated into NSE which was built by a host of people including, but not limited to, Jon Fieber, Marty Honda, Ethan Adams, Terry Miller, David Hendricks, and Jill Foley. Larry McVoy had absolutely nothig to do with NSE or the core concepts of copy-modify-merge except for being an unhappy NSE customer. Glenn Skinner is listed as the patent author for 'smoosh' which is the central technology to both NSE-lite and Teamware. Larry claims that he is co-inventor. I don't know, I was in the NSE group, Larry was in the OS group at the time. Teamware itself was designed and implemented by Ethan Adams, Terry Miller, Jill Foley, Mark Sabiers, Lewie Knapp, Josh Sirota and Mitchell Nguyen. Larry's primary contribution was to complain a lot. Larry is a bright guy, but he didn't design Teamware anymore than Bill Joy designed Unix. He deserves a tremendous amount of credit for sucessfully productizing the technologies invented by the NSE team (and a lot of others) something that Sun, with substantially more resources, was unable to do, but it is an extreme stretch to call Larry the designer of Teamware (even though if Larry thinks so).
Depends on what you are using it for. My son is an expert button clicker and first person shooter player. He uses Windows. he can use a Mac. I write enterprise code for a living. Windows is a daily pain among other reasons, because it lacks an adequate CLI. cygwin would be fine if it didn't mangle names, but it does which means that things like the p4 cli commands don't work uisng bash on Windows.
While I would dearly love to send Tom DeLay on a one way, all expenses paid trip to Mars, the 'man on Mars' program is 100% pure pork. Let's face it, there are 27 electoral votes to be had in Florida, 34 in Texas, and 55 in CA, and 116 electoral votes gets you better than 1/3 of the way to being President and represents a significant chunk of the votes in the House as well. Anybody interested in science that compared the cost/benefit ratio of unmanned to manned space flight would figure out pretty quickly that the robots deliver much better bang for the buck than human astronauts, and it isn't even close. The robots don't need to eat, they don't need air, they can survive much greater ranges of temperature, and most importantly, you don't need to bring them back.
Exactly right. Right now, we have numerous incompatible implementations of Javascript, DOM, and CSS, and now we are going to fix that by dumping another layer of stuff on top that isn't supported by Microsoft or Apple, so basically it will also be non-standard. If Microsoft does adopt it, they will do everything they can to make sure that their implementation isn't compatible with everybody elses. Finally, the software developments environments for Javascript are primitive and not nearly as usable as mature as those built around Java. Let's face it, being Turing equivalent and all that, there is nothing here that you can't do right now with a Java Applet, and Java Applets have not exactly taken the world by storm.
Is it even neccessary to report these 'non-news' bits of PR fluff? I'm guessing that most Slashdot readers have run both Windows and Linux, and know first hand that Linux is orders of magnitude easier to keep patched, with or without Xen. In addition, most Linux/Unix apps are designed and packaged so you don't need to install them on every single machine in the first place. For most enterprises, application should be installed on application servers and NFS mounted everyplace else. Before somebody says, 'yeah, but then if the network goes down, everybody is down', I would suggest that if enterprises spent a tiny fraction of the money on their network that they spend on Windows and anti-virus software and desktop computers with moving parts, the network isn't going to be down much , if at all, assuming their IT staff is even halfway competent. We run primarily a Windows shop here. The Windows servers have issues on a daily basis. The internal network, to the best of my knowlege, has never prevented anybody from working. In any event, our truly critical data like the exchange server and source control server are already only available when the network is running. Without these servers being network accessible, we are pretty much dead in the water anyway, no matter how much bloatware is installed on our desktop machines.
Bill Gates announced today that IE will now be the only browser officially supported at Microsoft. He explained that since CSS2 is a flawed standard, and Firefox more closely conforms to CSS2 than IE, it therefore follows that Firefox is more flawed than IE. Gates further stated that thousands of good paying systems administration jobs depended on giving virus writers and malware vendors access to personal computers so changing to a browser which did not support ActiveX would cripple the US economy. Finally Gates noted that without a significant threat of virus exposure, software vendors would have no incentive to develop and market innovative new anti-virus products such as Microsoft's recent entry into the market. "The fact is that the US economy depends on customers using defective products from Microsoft and anybody that uses some other product is simply embracing Communism which we all know doesn't work" Gates said.
People can't call you on your iPOD.Granted, I'm in the minority, but for me, the cell phone is a neccessary evil, not something I really want. By contrast, portable Music is desirable. In addition, cell phones tend to make really lousy music players. Heck, for the most part, they aren't even very good telephones. When it is on, my Motorola V220 (or whatever) cell phone will transmit nasty buzzing sounds to any speaker within a meter or so. Maybe I'm overly sensitive, but that isn't a feature I'm looking for in a music player. Of course, this seems to be unique to the Motorola. My old Ericson T28 didn't do this.
At my son's school, there is a computer literacy test which students must pass to graduate. So what is the requirement for computer literacy? Writing a shell program? Creating a home page using HTML? Writing a business letter? No, of course not. The student must demonstrate that they know how to use Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Microsoft Excel. I'm fairly certain that such a requirement would not hold up in court, but where did it come from in the first place?
Well, I RTFA, and this is one of the most misleading titles I've seen in a long time. Microsoft explicitly states that they think their arsenal of software patents is a fine thing and they aren't willing to give up the right to sue. And if they aren't willing to give that up, what is there to discuss? In addition, there isn't anything that requires discussion. If Microsoft was really interested in wokring with the FOSS community, I'm sure there is somebody in their army of lawyers that could figure out how to write a royalty free non-discriminatory patent license that was compatible with the GPL. There is no need to discuss this with anybody, they can 'just do it'. The fact that they chose instead to have one of their lawyers give a content free, buzzword compliant speech tells us all we need to know about Microsoft's olive branch; the only thing they are interested in using it for is to poke people in the eye with it so they don't notice the sledgehammer they are holding in the other hand.
In addition, extremely wealthy wine producers were on Capitol Hill not all that long ago pleading with legislatures and the President for a 'guest worker amnesty' program that would allow undocumented workers to continue to work in the US. And they got it, for the same reason mega-wealthy software company owners and execs are going to ge tthe H-1B cap lifted. They don't want to pay what the market wage would be if immigration laws were enforced as it reduces profits, and those profits are the source of big campaign contributions.
I care because my wife and my son insist on using Microsoft products creating tons of extra work for hapless system administrator (that would be me) which effectively fills up my copious spare time. I have 4 Linux boxes at home in all sorts of roles which I spend almost no time on. But there is a Windows problem waiting for me when I get home just about every day.
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Sort of like Elvis. For better or worse, by virtue of POSIX compliance (sort of), even WinXP is 'just another Unix', just not a particularly good implementation. If the trade press didn't have pro-monopoly blinders on (thoughfully provided by the monopolists, and would be monopolists) they would have noticed that FOSS, through the mechanism of the BSD TCP/IP implemeention, not only out-innovated everbody else, it decimated the proprietary competion virtually extinguishing it.
Good point, but the key difference is that both you and I can't have 100% ownership of the same physical object, whereas we can both fully own the same idea and neither of us is poorer for it. I suppose you could argue that in either case, the value of the owned thing is 1/2 either way.
>Which version of linux? if its RH Enterprise then the price is acceptable. It is the Linux installer kit, which is essentially no version of Linux. On re-reading the specs, I notice that these are actually single Opteron machines and the Linuc version offers 1GB more memory (cost, about $130) and an extran 80GB disk (cost, around $100). Tha makes up about $230 of the $300 differential, but the real question is 'why can't I buy the *exact same* HP workstation products w/o Windows?' If you look at IBM's website, they play the same games. And as somebody else pointed out, so does Dell. I have to figure that it costs these vendors more moeny to produce machines that have just slightly different configurations, but one configuration (the cheaper one) only comes with windows, and the other, moer expensive one, only comes with Linux. I'm guessing that somebody made it worth their while to go to that extra trouble, and it wasn't Red Hat.
The idea of intellectual property doesn't work best in a capitalistic society, it works best in a monopolistic society. It is worth remembering that Intellectual Property is entirely the construct of government and law. No such thing exists in the 'nautral' world, IP law, just like the ideas that it supposedly 'protects', is a abstract invention of humans. IP isn't the same as a lump of iron ore, or a bar of gold, or the computer I'm typing this on. I believe it was Jefferson that remarked that your posession of an idea is not in any way lessened by the fact that I posess the same idea. That's still true today. I'm firmly convinced that economic growth creates IP law, and not the other way around. That growth creates what would be what would be short term economic opportunities. The people that have been able to take advantage of those opportunties have used part of the capital thus created to subvert the political process in order to make those temporary advantages permanent through the creation of IP law.
>Fueled by their intellectual property theft from western countries
Which really tells you just how short sighted the current Western obsession with granting monopoly protection to the 'owner' every single idea, or every expression of an idea, really is. If China manages to avoid the IP regime of the west, they will blow on past everybody else regardless of how many engineers they graduate because those engineers will not have to worry about infringing somebodies bogus patent, or (effectively) eternal copoyright. You will have a country of 1 billion people standing on each others shoulders and seeing farther instead of trying to farther themselves by holding their would be competitors down in the mud and sitting on their backs.
HP pulls the same crap. If you look at their otherwise very nice dual Opterona machines, they have one version with WinXP Pro that is $3499. The closest Linux version, with the HP Linux installer kit is $3799. Note that these machines do not come with Linux pre-installe,d they come with the HP 'linux installer kit' so it doesn't cost HP any more to produce these machines. In addition, these machines are specifically targeted at the Workstation market, not the Office PC market, so Linux would be a natural fit in this market. But some mysterious force prevents HP from selling the equivalent machine at a lower price with no OS. It is pretty darn obvious that the DOJ should have required that Microsoft's OEM agreements should always allow distributors to sell machines without Windows discounted by the cost of Windows. Instead, after a successful anti-trust prosecution, we get the same old slimy, probably illegal tactics that we have always seen from Microsoft. Thanks, W!
Hear, Hear! Well spoken Bruce! I notice that Sun and Apple are conspicuouly absent from the list of members. Of course, this presents an enormous opportunity for Sun and Apple as they collectively have enough market share that they can create a market for OF motherboards, and it presents Sun with yet another chance to flat out own the Linux market. Of course, Sun will screw it up and miss the boat in yet another hopeless attempt to prop up Solaris/SPARC. 5 years later they will have figured out that the boat has sailed without them and by then it will be too late.
> Itaniums do run 32bit applications. At least for Linux. The problem is that Itanium doesn't run X86 pre-compiled Win32 binaries as fast as Opteron and Xeon do, and for the vast majority of computer users, and 90% of desktop computer users, that is all that matters.
According to the article, Theo and his team have their heads down, focused on making sure that OpenBSD is of the highest possible quality. This I do not doubt. But if so, when does Theo find the time to review the millions of line sof Linux source and decide that it is all crap? I have a full time job (and a wife and kid), and while I'm no super-genius like Theo (or Linux, or RMS) I sure don't have enough free time to vett the Linux source.
Let's face it, this is yet another Linux hit piece from Dan Lyons who tirelessly scours the globe for negative things to write about Linux.
I moved to CA in 1988, and I never got my taxes right until I started paying somebody to do them for me. The state just corrects the mistakes and eitehr sends you a bill or a check.
What I'd really like to see is the Federal governemnt offer to collect income tax for the state and just have one additional line on the Federal tax for 'For the privilege of living in the great state of X, tack on an extra 30%' and get rid of all of the state social engineering in the tax code that happens in addition to the Federal social engineering. The only problem I can se is that the Feds would probably help themselves to a 10% 'handling' fee.
Actually, what I *really* want (enough to google for it, anyway) is a consumer grade (and priced) VHS deck with Firewire support so I can read those old VHS tapes onto my computer with computer control of the deck similar to how my Sony Digital 8 cam works. Then I can edit them before I write them out to DVD. Anybody know of such a beast?
In any rational universe, Sun would have released Teamware under the GPL when they end-of-lifed it three years ago. But we're talking about Sun. It contains (as far as I know) no technology licensed from third parties. Sun's primary problem was that the sole purpose of Teamware, other than to facilitate Solaris development, was to sell more Sun hardware, so among other things, true cross platform support never happened. The real irony is that Claire Giordano is one of the drivers for Open Solaris and she was also on the NSE/Teamware team (as well as Claeton Giardano - sorry for the slight Claire and Claeton :-)) so she is certainly aware of the product. Hopefully it will finally happen.GPL would be better, but CDDL is better than nothing, I guess.
Larry McVoy designed a prototype called 'NSE Lite' which was based on concepts developed by Eric Schmidt and Bunker Lampson which were incorporated into NSE which was built by a host of people including, but not limited to, Jon Fieber, Marty Honda, Ethan Adams, Terry Miller, David Hendricks, and Jill Foley. Larry McVoy had absolutely nothig to do with NSE or the core concepts of copy-modify-merge except for being an unhappy NSE customer. Glenn Skinner is listed as the patent author for 'smoosh' which is the central technology to both NSE-lite and Teamware. Larry claims that he is co-inventor. I don't know, I was in the NSE group, Larry was in the OS group at the time. Teamware itself was designed and implemented by Ethan Adams, Terry Miller, Jill Foley, Mark Sabiers, Lewie Knapp, Josh Sirota and Mitchell Nguyen. Larry's primary contribution was to complain a lot. Larry is a bright guy, but he didn't design Teamware anymore than Bill Joy designed Unix. He deserves a tremendous amount of credit for sucessfully productizing the technologies invented by the NSE team (and a lot of others) something that Sun, with substantially more resources, was unable to do, but it is an extreme stretch to call Larry the designer of Teamware (even though if Larry thinks so).
Depends on what you are using it for. My son is an expert button clicker and first person shooter player. He uses Windows. he can use a Mac. I write enterprise code for a living. Windows is a daily pain among other reasons, because it lacks an adequate CLI. cygwin would be fine if it didn't mangle names, but it does which means that things like the p4 cli commands don't work uisng bash on Windows.
While I would dearly love to send Tom DeLay on a one way, all expenses paid trip to Mars, the 'man on Mars' program is 100% pure pork. Let's face it, there are 27 electoral votes to be had in Florida, 34 in Texas, and 55 in CA, and 116 electoral votes gets you better than 1/3 of the way to being President and represents a significant chunk of the votes in the House as well. Anybody interested in science that compared the cost/benefit ratio of unmanned to manned space flight would figure out pretty quickly that the robots deliver much better bang for the buck than human astronauts, and it isn't even close. The robots don't need to eat, they don't need air, they can survive much greater ranges of temperature, and most importantly, you don't need to bring them back.
Me Too. Wake me up when the IE team decides to make IE 100% standard compliant. Now that would be news.
Exactly right. Right now, we have numerous incompatible implementations of Javascript, DOM, and CSS, and now we are going to fix that by dumping another layer of stuff on top that isn't supported by Microsoft or Apple, so basically it will also be non-standard. If Microsoft does adopt it, they will do everything they can to make sure that their implementation isn't compatible with everybody elses. Finally, the software developments environments for Javascript are primitive and not nearly as usable as mature as those built around Java. Let's face it, being Turing equivalent and all that, there is nothing here that you can't do right now with a Java Applet, and Java Applets have not exactly taken the world by storm.
Is it even neccessary to report these 'non-news' bits of PR fluff? I'm guessing that most Slashdot readers have run both Windows and Linux, and know first hand that Linux is orders of magnitude easier to keep patched, with or without Xen. In addition, most Linux/Unix apps are designed and packaged so you don't need to install them on every single machine in the first place. For most enterprises, application should be installed on application servers and NFS mounted everyplace else. Before somebody says, 'yeah, but then if the network goes down, everybody is down', I would suggest that if enterprises spent a tiny fraction of the money on their network that they spend on Windows and anti-virus software and desktop computers with moving parts, the network isn't going to be down much , if at all, assuming their IT staff is even halfway competent. We run primarily a Windows shop here. The Windows servers have issues on a daily basis. The internal network, to the best of my knowlege, has never prevented anybody from working. In any event, our truly critical data like the exchange server and source control server are already only available when the network is running. Without these servers being network accessible, we are pretty much dead in the water anyway, no matter how much bloatware is installed on our desktop machines.
Bill Gates announced today that IE will now be the only browser officially supported at Microsoft. He explained that since CSS2 is a flawed standard, and Firefox more closely conforms to CSS2 than IE, it therefore follows that Firefox is more flawed than IE. Gates further stated that thousands of good paying systems administration jobs depended on giving virus writers and malware vendors access to personal computers so changing to a browser which did not support ActiveX would cripple the US economy. Finally Gates noted that without a significant threat of virus exposure, software vendors would have no incentive to develop and market innovative new anti-virus products such as Microsoft's recent entry into the market. "The fact is that the US economy depends on customers using defective products from Microsoft and anybody that uses some other product is simply embracing Communism which we all know doesn't work" Gates said.
People can't call you on your iPOD.Granted, I'm in the minority, but for me, the cell phone is a neccessary evil, not something I really want. By contrast, portable Music is desirable. In addition, cell phones tend to make really lousy music players. Heck, for the most part, they aren't even very good telephones. When it is on, my Motorola V220 (or whatever) cell phone will transmit nasty buzzing sounds to any speaker within a meter or so. Maybe I'm overly sensitive, but that isn't a feature I'm looking for in a music player. Of course, this seems to be unique to the Motorola. My old Ericson T28 didn't do this.
At my son's school, there is a computer literacy test which students must pass to graduate. So what is the requirement for computer literacy? Writing a shell program? Creating a home page using HTML? Writing a business letter? No, of course not. The student must demonstrate that they know how to use Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Microsoft Excel. I'm fairly certain that such a requirement would not hold up in court, but where did it come from in the first place?
Actually, I think Darl McBride already claimed this in his 'open letter'. As I recall, use of FOSS also causes cancer.
Well, I RTFA, and this is one of the most misleading titles I've seen in a long time. Microsoft explicitly states that they think their arsenal of software patents is a fine thing and they aren't willing to give up the right to sue. And if they aren't willing to give that up, what is there to discuss? In addition, there isn't anything that requires discussion. If Microsoft was really interested in wokring with the FOSS community, I'm sure there is somebody in their army of lawyers that could figure out how to write a royalty free non-discriminatory patent license that was compatible with the GPL. There is no need to discuss this with anybody, they can 'just do it'. The fact that they chose instead to have one of their lawyers give a content free, buzzword compliant speech tells us all we need to know about Microsoft's olive branch; the only thing they are interested in using it for is to poke people in the eye with it so they don't notice the sledgehammer they are holding in the other hand.
In addition, extremely wealthy wine producers were on Capitol Hill not all that long ago pleading with legislatures and the President for a 'guest worker amnesty' program that would allow undocumented workers to continue to work in the US. And they got it, for the same reason mega-wealthy software company owners and execs are going to ge tthe H-1B cap lifted. They don't want to pay what the market wage would be if immigration laws were enforced as it reduces profits, and those profits are the source of big campaign contributions.
I care because my wife and my son insist on using Microsoft products creating tons of extra work for hapless system administrator (that would be me) which effectively fills up my copious spare time. I have 4 Linux boxes at home in all sorts of roles which I spend almost no time on. But there is a Windows problem waiting for me when I get home just about every day.