Zimmerman and Hayden, sitting in a tree...

[Sunder]

Roy Silvernail wrote:
> 
> Concur.  MICROS~1 is moving steadily toward a secured platform that gives
> them full control of what will and won't run.  Were it up to them, there
> would be no third-party development.  Ironic, considering third-party
> development has played such a large part in their rise to ubiquity.

I wouldn't worry about them.  I have this analogy in mind that micro$hit is
a lot like IBM.  Once threatened with heavy competition from the pc clones,
they went to microchannel.  But no one followed.  Most people decided to
not go for proprietary, generic stuff.

Until recently, the last time I've played with Linux was about 5 years ago
and that was with Slackware.  I've spent most of my unix time in OpenBSD
or Solaris land.  Recently having come back, I see little difference from 
a users point of view in installation or use difficulty to w98 or w2k and 
Mandrake 7.2 or RedHat 7.

Sure 9x/NT/2k is not now nor has ever been remotely linux like, but the
idea of getting your linux (or BSD) from a specific vendor doesn't stop 
you from running (open source) software.

Even most non-open sourced stuff will run under linux emulation on *BSD
boxes anyway.

What the dickwads are doing is attempting to coerce hardware vendors to
lock themselves into windows only.  They won't do it.  Those that will
can look forward to huge losses of money or having their drivers reverse
engineered.


For more fun, see today's slashdot.org: 

http://slashdot.org/articles/01/02/15/1825221.shtml

Based on Allchin's words, I'd say they're seeing the writing on the wall.
Perhaps some new survey indicating how many open source systems versus
how many microsoft systems there really are out there crawled up his ass.


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