Because one of the predominant characteristic of OSS is that it's free. So it would make more sense that Microsoft, trying to explore its possibilities in the Linux arena, ported its applications that are already free.
I think it's obvious that the effort required to port Office would be much bigger than porting IE. So it would be better for them if they made some pilot projects.
Plus, there's Star Office (which it's free) so MS would probably be forced to give away Office for free. Do you really think they're going to do that when 2/3 of Microsoft profits come from Office?? A lot of people would move to Linux just to have Office for free. IMHO, it just doesn't match with their business model.
Have you guys noticed that the way Napster searches for songs has changed in the last week or so. Before, if you were looking for a Paul McCartney song you could search for "Pau Cartn" and it would work. Of course, this sometimes took a really long time. You can't do that now, you have to put the whole word: "Paul" or "McCartney" or both. As a result, the search is noticeably faster. I'm supposing that now they have an index of keywords while before they just did an extensive string search. Now, the problem with the current solution is that it's not rare for people to misspell the name of an artist or a song (Brittney Spears, Metalica, for instance). Can someone give an opinion on what the best algorithm for this kind of search would be or if indexing is the only way to go (although I'll miss many songs whose name I don't know completely)??
What if Amazon didn't patent it but stopped everyone else from doing so argumenting that they have prior art? Can you do that? Implement something new and innovative, NOT patent it, argue in court that no one else can patent it because you have prior art.
What happens if I go to another one, like Register.com??? I can still disrupt somebody else's business. This idea would be fine as long as Network Solutions had a monopoly on the domain name registration process. Now that it doesn't, some Internet authority (ICANN maybe?) should be setting up a web site for this kind of conflicts, instead of letting Network Solutions establish its own (and somewhat arbitrary) rules.
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Because one of the predominant characteristic of OSS is that it's free. So it would make more sense that Microsoft, trying to explore its possibilities in the Linux arena, ported its applications that are already free.
I think it's obvious that the effort required to port Office would be much bigger than porting IE. So it would be better for them if they made some pilot projects.
Plus, there's Star Office (which it's free) so MS would probably be forced to give away Office for free. Do you really think they're going to do that when 2/3 of Microsoft profits come from Office?? A lot of people would move to Linux just to have Office for free. IMHO, it just doesn't match with their business model.
Have you guys noticed that the way Napster searches for songs has changed in the last week or so. Before, if you were looking for a Paul McCartney song you could search for "Pau Cartn" and it would work. Of course, this sometimes took a really long time. You can't do that now, you have to put the whole word: "Paul" or "McCartney" or both. As a result, the search is noticeably faster. I'm supposing that now they have an index of keywords while before they just did an extensive string search. Now, the problem with the current solution is that it's not rare for people to misspell the name of an artist or a song (Brittney Spears, Metalica, for instance). Can someone give an opinion on what the best algorithm for this kind of search would be or if indexing is the only way to go (although I'll miss many songs whose name I don't know completely)??
What if Amazon didn't patent it but stopped everyone else from doing so argumenting that they have prior art? Can you do that? Implement something new and innovative, NOT patent it, argue in court that no one else can patent it because you have prior art.
What happens if I go to another one, like Register.com??? I can still disrupt somebody else's business. This idea would be fine as long as Network Solutions had a monopoly on the domain name registration process. Now that it doesn't, some Internet authority (ICANN maybe?) should be setting up a web site for this kind of conflicts, instead of letting Network Solutions establish its own (and somewhat arbitrary) rules.