Sunday, October 24, 2010

Re: [LINUX_Newbies] Re: MS vs. Linux, formerly "top five mistakes of newbies"

The whole standards issue is huge. Microsoft uses standards for leverage.
Those that they don't control such as ODF they fiddle with so that their
implementation causes problems with office suites that strictly follow the
standard. They have done the same thing with browsers and has led Opera to
allege that it is at a competitive disadvantage for following standards that
Microsoft has agreed to follow. It all exists to keep competitors off
balance and always a step behind.

This is why I don't want Mono based apps. We can live without mono (just
like we always have) and it gives Microsoft control that they would not
otherwise have. No matter what the apps are or what the legal status is it
has the potential to make users dependent on Microsoft and that it just what
they want. Qt and GTK are enough to keep programmers busy IMO and there has
been little written for .NEt that has been ported over. Add to that that
Microsoft alleges patent infringement by Linux without specifying what is
infringed upon and we can see that it is something that we can avoid.

Aside: On this subject, Ubuntu which uses GNOME, written in GTK, has been
wondering about writing apps in Qt which is the basis for the competing
desktop environment KDE. Fuel was added to this when the developer of
Gwibber written in GTK complained about the limitations that GTK imposed
upon him and that Qt would be a better environment. This has nothing to do
with the topic, but it is food for thought when we are looking at what we
have available to us without relying on Microsoft. We do not need .NET or
Mono derived from it, IMO.

Roy

Using Kubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat, 64-bit
Location: Canada


On 24 October 2010 09:34, Scott <scottro@nyc.rr.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 07:51:49AM -0400, Roy wrote:
> > they [MS] do not have to defeat us to win, only keep users away and they
> know
>
> > that. Desktop Linux has stalled. We are growing on the server side but so
> is
> > MS. Unix is losing ground there.
>
> Way back when, when I got my MCSE (yup, I confess, I am one, as well as
> a couple of other MS certs) for Windows NT4, there was a lot of emphasis
> on migrating from Unix. At that time, there were actually cost
> advantages in some cases--as well as migrating from Novell Netware.
> Back then, MS was more concerned about being able to integrate with
> Unix. Through some clever marketing, offering products that had
> advantages in many ways (Windows isn't all bad), and of course, some
> evil skulduggery, they've changed the picture.
>
> Now, I think the shoe is on the other foot--probably the majority of us
> who work (as opposed to students) and aren't self-employed, use Active
> Directory domains. (I sure hope Jeff is an exception.) There's more
> need for Linux to be compatible with MS than vice versa. Like it or
> not, MS is, in many cases, the de facto standard. Yes, we can argue how
> they violate standards, but in this world, at present, they set the
> standard for the vast majority, and a client doesn't want to hear,
> "You're using MS, which violates standards." (Unless, of course, you're
> a monopoly or have your clients locked in some other way.)
>
> So, that's part of the problem. MS can set the standard, and OO, for
> example, has to be able to adjust. While in some cases, they've driven
> away customers--such as the guitar string manufacturer that was fined
> for some unintentional license violations, most companies have to offer
> MS compatibility to deal with their customers.
>
> > The most interesting case is OOO. I want to see where that
> > goes because MS has had one court case go against it for its own office
> > suite, so they must be feeling some fear as MSOffice is their cash cow.
>
> Of course, now there's the OOffice Oracle debacle. Silly of Oracle,
> who dislikes MS, to give them more ammunition. (Sure, you can use
> OpenOffice, but have you seen that it's now forked because of Oracle's
> decisions? You better stay with us, you know that we're not going to do
> that.)
>
> --
> Scott Robbins
> PGP keyID EB3467D6
> ( 1B48 077D 66F6 9DB0 FDC2 A409 FA54 EB34 67D6 )
> gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys EB3467D6
>
> Cordelia: Hi! You having fun?
> Angel: Sure. This is, uh...
> Cordelia: Your idea of hell.
> Angel: Actually, in hell you tend to know a lot of the people
>
>


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