Because Microsoft wants to turn Linux into a platform for its products -- a last ditch effort to try and marginalize FOSS. First, they sign a deal with a few prominent Linux vendors, claiming that they will indemnify only those particular distros. Then, having given all the big enterprise Linux users a reason to switch over to those distros, Microsoft starts publishing software for those distros specifically, keeping it all closed of course. Finally, after a few years, Linux has become a platform for proprietary products...and is no longer a threat to Microsoft. By ensuring that only major Linux vendors are in on it, Microsoft helps sideline other FOSS projects, killing the culture of openness and freedom and limiting choice. Notice that no overtures have been made for non-commercial distros or distros that are popular among home users: Microsoft is not threatened by them. It's about the server market, and about Microsoft's continuing inability to maintain more than a 30% market share.
Vast corruption in the EU, spanning both legislature and judiciary? Government officers only wanting to make money by prosecuting large corporations?
Or did somebody not take their meds this morning? Let's review:
Microsoft is a monopoly, they have used their monopoly position to stifle the competition and deliver lower-quality products to the consumers. As a result of this monopoly, consumers have little freedom of choice in their software, and the security-deficient nature of the software has allowed an entire era of viruses, worms, botnets, and spyware to begin, when better designed software such as BSD would have made such things significantly harder to design (and as a consequence, prevented the "viruses happen" mindset that has now set in).
Microsoft got its start as a small PC software company that marketed its products to hobbyist users. Back then, the big monopoly that spread FUD was IBM, which maintains the largest patent portfolio in the US. Microsoft earned themselves a place in the monopoly hall of fame by jumping on the IBM bandwagon, in an effort to out-do Apple. Deregulation had nothing to do with it; Microsoft insisted, even back then, that software should be bought and sold and that hobbyists who copied software were doing a terrible thing (think back to those old magazines, where Gates claimed he was making less than $4/hour...).
"The State" has not given Microsoft preferential treatment. Microsoft has received the same treatment as all other corporations have, including the legal requirement to seek a profit, as well as the same IP protections and restrictions than Apple, Sun, IBM, the FSF, etc. have to endure. In fact, Microsoft has had a longstanding rule that its employees are not to even observe Linux or other FOSS, for fear that they might be forced to comply with the GPL, potentially annihilating their efforts to remain proprietary. For their open source lab, where Windows Services for Unix originated, Microsoft followed the terms of the GPL. There was no government preference there, nor has there ever been -- the problem was a lack of government action in the late 80s and throughout the 90s, when Microsoft was cementing its monopoly position, screwing over its partners, and crushing its competition.
I assume you are referring to an automobile engine, and obfuscating its design would make your product technically inferior -- which makes it less competitive in the ideal case.
I agree that patents do the opposite of what they are intended for, and that we should do away with them. I do not believe that patents are the reason Microsoft became such a problem, because while Microsoft has a large patent portfolio, there are companies that hold much larger patent portfolios that are not in a monopoly position.
It's not that I support Microsoft, or that I think they haven't done anything wrong. But the government shouldn't be done away with to prevent this from happening again; more regulation is needed, and loopholes can and should be closed.
Can you blame people for their paranoia? Microsoft habitually tries to destroy anything that they get involved with -- Apple, Javascript, IBM, etc.
It is not that Microsoft will turn Linux proprietary -- the GPL gets in the way. But consider this scenario: you can run your Linux (SUSE) server, and now, you can use Microsoft technologies! Get the integration you need, you can more easily manage a mixed environment! Five years pass Now, Linux is just a kernel that Microsoft never touches. But they essentially dominate the Linux server market, by simply offering a separate suite of software, all proprietary, that runs on a SUSE platform. Contract expires, and suddenly Microsoft's foot-in-the-door can be used to, say, suddenly migrate their software to another Unix-like OS, under a less restrictive license...and so Linux on the server takes a major hit.
Now, I don't mean to scream "Conspiracy!" but these tactics are typical of Microsoft. As you say, in the end, they are a company -- that must secure profits, both long-term and short-term. Securing a long-term profit by putting the heat on companies like Redhat, IBM, and organizations like Debian is more likely than a sudden philanthropic urge in Redmond.
Actually, he also agrees with the president's views on separation of church and state (hint: Mr. Bush was never taught the concept). To quote Mr. Lieberman: "Freedom of religion does not mean freedom from religion" (translation for atheists: "The establish clause does not matter"). He also has supported various efforts to hinder a woman's ability to get an abortion, and agrees with the president that the Geneva conventions are "quaint." Lieberman is, at best, a moderate Republican.
I am also very surprised at this announcement. Microsoft has been very careful to make sure that none of their employees actually see any GPL'ed code, for fear that they will be forced to GPL one product after another (the viral license theory). Of course, they have a separate GNU lab, which is responsible for "services for UNIX," and which will probably be involved in this Suse deal...
If it is so rare to use Vista Home in a VM, why bother to include a specific clause about it in the EULA? Microsoft cares about it enough to pay their legal team to come up with terms to prevent it -- probably has to do with small/independent/FOSS developers who are looking to save money and don't really need all the features in the Business and Ultimate editions of Vista when they are just testing some software. You know, the kind of developers who have become a growing annoyance for Microsoft, creating all those nasty little applications that are slowly breaking the Microsoft monopoly. Developers who might be creating web-based office apps, and need to test it on a lot of browsers. Developers that write replacements for the various features that are conspicuously absent from certain versions of Windows, but present in others.
I am glad Windows has worked so well for you. It has not worked that well for me. I get one problem after another with it, and it is missing features that I would like to have. The licensing is extremely restrictive, and the software is deliberately crippled. Worse, it has, on several occasions, simply stopped working, either a virus, or no ability to recover from a hardware failure, or a corrupted registry, etc. I end up having to fix everybody else' problems with Windows. Funny thing about Linux installs: they take some work to set up, but once something is configured it continues working. I have never had my profile mysteriously disappear and reappear. Viruses happen; they are always easier to recover from on Linux. The license is only restrictive for people planning to distribute the operating system; use is unlimited. I also see it as a tool, and I don't fiddle with it, because there is nothing to fiddle with. It WORKS and never stops working for me. Sure, people can come up with stories about how they have never seen a BSOD under Windows XP, but it is there and it still happens.
Typical situation in which Windows' licensing and deliberate crippling has tripped me up, and how Linux helped me fix it: collaboration. I had to edit a document with several people at the same time, and the only tool on Windows that would have been acceptable for this was Netmeeting. However, I needed to be able to separate my working desktop from the collaboration, something that Netmeeting had a great deal of difficulty getting right. An easy answer is to just have two virtual terminals, one of which is shared...while it is entirely POSSIBLE to have this in Windows, the ability to do this, even in XP Pro, has been deliberately removed, and the license forbids it. Funny, because a simple VNC session on my Linux based machine accomplished exactly what I needed, across both Windows and Linux. No fiddling: $ vncserver , and you are ready.
And in what universe do you live in where anyone can install Windows? I know plenty of people who cannot do it, either because of a fear of damaging their computer or just a lack of understanding of what to do at the initial prompts ("format" -- a lot of people still don't know what it means to do that). Sure, once you get into graphical mode, everything is easier (and there are people who still wouldn't know what to do), but getting that far on a clean install still isn't there. A typical Mandrake, Suse, Ubuntu, or Fedora install brings you right into graphical mode, assuming you have enough memory to support it (Windows gives up if you don't; Linux installs usually just revert to a text mode application). I don't mean to get religious about it, but none of the reasons you listed for using Windows have any relevance anymore.
Now, here are a few real reasons to use Windows:
Specialized software -- A lot of engineering and design software has only be implemented on Windows, and in most cases it would be difficult to run in wine. A possible compromise is to use a VM, but for compute-bound processes, this may not be a good idea.
Existing infrastructure -- If you have a lot of Windows-based infrastructure, migration will be costly. Access DBs, for example, don't open up very well in OOo, nor do complicated Excel spreadsheets. Give it time, this will change.
Gaming -- For non-professional users, gaming is relevant, and gaming on Linux just isn't there.
Those are just a few realistic reasons to stick with Windows. Really, anything else can be handled by either OS, if you know what you are doing. Unfortunately, companies like Microsoft sign large contracts with universities to get the students to only use their software, and upon graduation, you have another generation of programmers and admins who can't figure out how to use anybody else' software -- not just open source, but even closed source software from competitors.
Actually, I formulated a theory that the reason Microsoft included the "no VM" clause was to slow the spread of Linux. An acquaintance of mine recently asked for help with getting Office to work on his Linux machine (OOo wasn't rendering some old but important documents properly). After several attempts with wine, we finally used win4lin, which is just QEMU in a nicer shell. He has a valid XP license, and that worked just fine for him. This type of thing would be illegal in Vista.
Of course, Microsoft is pushing hard. Soon, they will push too hard, and mass migration away from them wills start to occur (I know, I know, this has been said since 1992...).
You can get what you paid for. You paid for a license.
I never understood the idea of selling software, until I realized that software is never sold. For Microsoft, selling software would make no sense, because they couldn't really tell you not to decompile it, as long as you weren't breaking patent or copyright laws. Naturally, Microsoft doesn't want this to happen, since it would allow people to figure out their various proprietary protocols and formats [and then write a description and have somebody else implement...], as well as turn a "home edition" into a thousand-user server.
And on which operating system do things just work and are really easy to fix? Let's see:
Windows XP
BSOD's after a common hardware failure (drive motor stopped spinning).
Lacks focus-under-mouse; attempts to resolve do not work very well.
Install new video capture card. Buggy drivers, no source code available. Issue is never resolved.
Mac OS X
Plug-n-play devices work right away. Finding drivers for everything else...
Development tools? A recent development. 3rd-party software gives me problems until very, very recently.
Where the hell is focus under mouse?
Where did you say the terminal was again? Where do I go to figure out what the actual problem is?
Solaris? Please.
Funny, my list doesn't have many system where things just work and are easy to fix. Windows never just works, and OS X only works if you use other Apple products. How is it easy to fix a problem if you cannot determine what the problem actually is? Or if your system BSODs? People are quick to point out how difficult to is to find Linux drivers for high-end hardware; why don't people point that out about Mac? Which is not to mention that there are many Linux-based operating systems, each with a different goal in mind, some with better tools than others.
That's funny, because most people get scared when the hear that they are using Linux. Try running KDE, plopping your friend in front of your computer, and seeing how hard it is for them to figure out what to do. I have done this several times, and people almost immediately adapt to: 1.) Using Konqueror 2.) Using GAIM 3.) Using OpenOffice 4.) Playing music. When something works differently, or doesn't work, they just shrug it off, assuming that it is simply some error or bug, the same way they shrug off problems in Windows. And there is scripting support on Windows, and I know somebody who does use JScript to automate certain tasks. It is more common to script things on Linux because more Linux users know how to write programs, but that doesn't make it necessary for using Linux. If you think about how most home users use computers, you get: Office (word processing, spreadsheets, etc.), Web, Instant Messaging, E-mail, and Gaming. Of these, the only thing that somebody would really be unable to use Linux for is gaming -- some day, the wine guys will solve that problem. In general, though, Linux has been usable for the average person for years now.
You beat me to it. Seriously though, firefox is highly overrated. Is it better than IE6? Without question. Are there better browsers out there? Again, without question.
Happens all the time. Actually, the worst part is not that worms can hit hospitals, but that most operating systems are very, very poor at handling hardware failures. Most of the 2k/XP BSODs that I've seen resulted from issues with hardware or hardware drivers, and in some cases these are just typical failures -- like the time that XP started randomly hanging because a hard drive motor burned out. Linux only does SLIGHTLY better out of the box, same with BSD. Life-support equipment should NEVER use an operating system like Windows or Linux -- they should be using a realtime operating system designed to handle equipment failures without freezing. This is not a question of cost, this is a question of life.
Capping it at 128kbps slows down downloads of music and movies. Why would you want to download these things? To see a movie that your government doesn't want you to buy...
Of course, the intelligent citizens will know that they can just split the downloads amongst themselves, essentially bandwidth-pooling. Maybe we need to educate the government.
Except that liberatrians are against net neutrality, see nothing wrong with Microsoft's conduct, and generally seem to think that if left alone, corporations will benefit everybody else by profiting off of them. What we really need to do is educate the general public more -- for instance, explaining to people what DRM actually is, rather than just waiting for them to come crying when they discover that they cannot play iTunes music on their MP3 player. Again and again, people give me a funny look when I say that software and medicine should not be patentable, or that the RIAA has not been hurt by file sharing (which can be backed up by real statistics). If the general public was actually educated in these matters, politicians would actually listen.
Which is why I disagree with the idea of intellectual property, not nearly as much with music as with medicine, but even so -- why should the person who created the music have the right to decide that other people don't have the right to listen to it? Every argument I've heard has centered around the idea that, without legal protection from copying, nobody would have the incentive to create intellectual property because they couldn't (in theory) profit off it because once one copy was sold, everyone else would just make their own copies from it. Yet the statistics show that this is not the case (see above, or just look for actual studies), so those arguments don't really hold water. So I repeat: why should a musician decide that only some people can listen to his works, and others cannot?
What did FM radio do for artists? The RIAA tried to stop FM radios from being produced, with the claim that the sound quality was too good and people would stop buying records...
I don't know if this is the most incredibly uninformed post I have ever read, or if the author was on mescaline while he wrote it. Here's the thing: downloading music has 0 impact on CD sales. The overwhelming majority of downloaders wouldn't have actually purchased the CD anyway, and the people who bought CDs before the advent of P2P networks...are still buying them. And CD sales don't make artists rich -- concerts make artists rich, and you cannot download the experience of seeing a band live. Driven by greed and technophobia, the RIAA has tried to construe this as an attack on their business, by claiming that they are losing money when they are posting record profits, and that it is possible to lose something they never had to begin with.
Slashdot Mirror
Because Microsoft wants to turn Linux into a platform for its products -- a last ditch effort to try and marginalize FOSS. First, they sign a deal with a few prominent Linux vendors, claiming that they will indemnify only those particular distros. Then, having given all the big enterprise Linux users a reason to switch over to those distros, Microsoft starts publishing software for those distros specifically, keeping it all closed of course. Finally, after a few years, Linux has become a platform for proprietary products...and is no longer a threat to Microsoft. By ensuring that only major Linux vendors are in on it, Microsoft helps sideline other FOSS projects, killing the culture of openness and freedom and limiting choice. Notice that no overtures have been made for non-commercial distros or distros that are popular among home users: Microsoft is not threatened by them. It's about the server market, and about Microsoft's continuing inability to maintain more than a 30% market share.
Or did somebody not take their meds this morning? Let's review:
It's not that I support Microsoft, or that I think they haven't done anything wrong. But the government shouldn't be done away with to prevent this from happening again; more regulation is needed, and loopholes can and should be closed.
It is not that Microsoft will turn Linux proprietary -- the GPL gets in the way. But consider this scenario: you can run your Linux (SUSE) server, and now, you can use Microsoft technologies! Get the integration you need, you can more easily manage a mixed environment! Five years pass Now, Linux is just a kernel that Microsoft never touches. But they essentially dominate the Linux server market, by simply offering a separate suite of software, all proprietary, that runs on a SUSE platform. Contract expires, and suddenly Microsoft's foot-in-the-door can be used to, say, suddenly migrate their software to another Unix-like OS, under a less restrictive license...and so Linux on the server takes a major hit.
Now, I don't mean to scream "Conspiracy!" but these tactics are typical of Microsoft. As you say, in the end, they are a company -- that must secure profits, both long-term and short-term. Securing a long-term profit by putting the heat on companies like Redhat, IBM, and organizations like Debian is more likely than a sudden philanthropic urge in Redmond.
Actually, he also agrees with the president's views on separation of church and state (hint: Mr. Bush was never taught the concept). To quote Mr. Lieberman: "Freedom of religion does not mean freedom from religion" (translation for atheists: "The establish clause does not matter"). He also has supported various efforts to hinder a woman's ability to get an abortion, and agrees with the president that the Geneva conventions are "quaint." Lieberman is, at best, a moderate Republican.
I'll bite. By the time it is deployed on a large-scale basis, we will all be using IPv7
I am also very surprised at this announcement. Microsoft has been very careful to make sure that none of their employees actually see any GPL'ed code, for fear that they will be forced to GPL one product after another (the viral license theory). Of course, they have a separate GNU lab, which is responsible for "services for UNIX," and which will probably be involved in this Suse deal...
If it is so rare to use Vista Home in a VM, why bother to include a specific clause about it in the EULA? Microsoft cares about it enough to pay their legal team to come up with terms to prevent it -- probably has to do with small/independent/FOSS developers who are looking to save money and don't really need all the features in the Business and Ultimate editions of Vista when they are just testing some software. You know, the kind of developers who have become a growing annoyance for Microsoft, creating all those nasty little applications that are slowly breaking the Microsoft monopoly. Developers who might be creating web-based office apps, and need to test it on a lot of browsers. Developers that write replacements for the various features that are conspicuously absent from certain versions of Windows, but present in others.
No, really, 3 computers should satisfy the world's computing needs...
...we had over 100,000 BBS's! You kids and your new-fangled internet...
Typical situation in which Windows' licensing and deliberate crippling has tripped me up, and how Linux helped me fix it: collaboration. I had to edit a document with several people at the same time, and the only tool on Windows that would have been acceptable for this was Netmeeting. However, I needed to be able to separate my working desktop from the collaboration, something that Netmeeting had a great deal of difficulty getting right. An easy answer is to just have two virtual terminals, one of which is shared...while it is entirely POSSIBLE to have this in Windows, the ability to do this, even in XP Pro, has been deliberately removed, and the license forbids it. Funny, because a simple VNC session on my Linux based machine accomplished exactly what I needed, across both Windows and Linux. No fiddling: $ vncserver , and you are ready.
And in what universe do you live in where anyone can install Windows? I know plenty of people who cannot do it, either because of a fear of damaging their computer or just a lack of understanding of what to do at the initial prompts ("format" -- a lot of people still don't know what it means to do that). Sure, once you get into graphical mode, everything is easier (and there are people who still wouldn't know what to do), but getting that far on a clean install still isn't there. A typical Mandrake, Suse, Ubuntu, or Fedora install brings you right into graphical mode, assuming you have enough memory to support it (Windows gives up if you don't; Linux installs usually just revert to a text mode application). I don't mean to get religious about it, but none of the reasons you listed for using Windows have any relevance anymore.
Now, here are a few real reasons to use Windows:
Those are just a few realistic reasons to stick with Windows. Really, anything else can be handled by either OS, if you know what you are doing. Unfortunately, companies like Microsoft sign large contracts with universities to get the students to only use their software, and upon graduation, you have another generation of programmers and admins who can't figure out how to use anybody else' software -- not just open source, but even closed source software from competitors.
Of course, Microsoft is pushing hard. Soon, they will push too hard, and mass migration away from them wills start to occur (I know, I know, this has been said since 1992...).
I never understood the idea of selling software, until I realized that software is never sold. For Microsoft, selling software would make no sense, because they couldn't really tell you not to decompile it, as long as you weren't breaking patent or copyright laws. Naturally, Microsoft doesn't want this to happen, since it would allow people to figure out their various proprietary protocols and formats [and then write a description and have somebody else implement...], as well as turn a "home edition" into a thousand-user server.
Which is exactly why the license forbids running most Vista editions in a VM.
Funny, my list doesn't have many system where things just work and are easy to fix. Windows never just works, and OS X only works if you use other Apple products. How is it easy to fix a problem if you cannot determine what the problem actually is? Or if your system BSODs? People are quick to point out how difficult to is to find Linux drivers for high-end hardware; why don't people point that out about Mac? Which is not to mention that there are many Linux-based operating systems, each with a different goal in mind, some with better tools than others.
That's funny, because most people get scared when the hear that they are using Linux. Try running KDE, plopping your friend in front of your computer, and seeing how hard it is for them to figure out what to do. I have done this several times, and people almost immediately adapt to: 1.) Using Konqueror 2.) Using GAIM 3.) Using OpenOffice 4.) Playing music. When something works differently, or doesn't work, they just shrug it off, assuming that it is simply some error or bug, the same way they shrug off problems in Windows. And there is scripting support on Windows, and I know somebody who does use JScript to automate certain tasks. It is more common to script things on Linux because more Linux users know how to write programs, but that doesn't make it necessary for using Linux. If you think about how most home users use computers, you get: Office (word processing, spreadsheets, etc.), Web, Instant Messaging, E-mail, and Gaming. Of these, the only thing that somebody would really be unable to use Linux for is gaming -- some day, the wine guys will solve that problem. In general, though, Linux has been usable for the average person for years now.
You beat me to it. Seriously though, firefox is highly overrated. Is it better than IE6? Without question. Are there better browsers out there? Again, without question.
Or, you can use a fingerprint reader. I doubt that anybody will forget their fingerprints...
Right, nothing wrong with that, unless the answer is...
Happens all the time. Actually, the worst part is not that worms can hit hospitals, but that most operating systems are very, very poor at handling hardware failures. Most of the 2k/XP BSODs that I've seen resulted from issues with hardware or hardware drivers, and in some cases these are just typical failures -- like the time that XP started randomly hanging because a hard drive motor burned out. Linux only does SLIGHTLY better out of the box, same with BSD. Life-support equipment should NEVER use an operating system like Windows or Linux -- they should be using a realtime operating system designed to handle equipment failures without freezing. This is not a question of cost, this is a question of life.
Of course, the intelligent citizens will know that they can just split the downloads amongst themselves, essentially bandwidth-pooling. Maybe we need to educate the government.
Except that liberatrians are against net neutrality, see nothing wrong with Microsoft's conduct, and generally seem to think that if left alone, corporations will benefit everybody else by profiting off of them. What we really need to do is educate the general public more -- for instance, explaining to people what DRM actually is, rather than just waiting for them to come crying when they discover that they cannot play iTunes music on their MP3 player. Again and again, people give me a funny look when I say that software and medicine should not be patentable, or that the RIAA has not been hurt by file sharing (which can be backed up by real statistics). If the general public was actually educated in these matters, politicians would actually listen.
Which is why I disagree with the idea of intellectual property, not nearly as much with music as with medicine, but even so -- why should the person who created the music have the right to decide that other people don't have the right to listen to it? Every argument I've heard has centered around the idea that, without legal protection from copying, nobody would have the incentive to create intellectual property because they couldn't (in theory) profit off it because once one copy was sold, everyone else would just make their own copies from it. Yet the statistics show that this is not the case (see above, or just look for actual studies), so those arguments don't really hold water. So I repeat: why should a musician decide that only some people can listen to his works, and others cannot?
What did FM radio do for artists? The RIAA tried to stop FM radios from being produced, with the claim that the sound quality was too good and people would stop buying records...
I don't know if this is the most incredibly uninformed post I have ever read, or if the author was on mescaline while he wrote it. Here's the thing: downloading music has 0 impact on CD sales. The overwhelming majority of downloaders wouldn't have actually purchased the CD anyway, and the people who bought CDs before the advent of P2P networks...are still buying them. And CD sales don't make artists rich -- concerts make artists rich, and you cannot download the experience of seeing a band live. Driven by greed and technophobia, the RIAA has tried to construe this as an attack on their business, by claiming that they are losing money when they are posting record profits, and that it is possible to lose something they never had to begin with.
I didn't know Sony had a contract with MacDonald's...