What Should Freedom Lovers Do?

[sunder]

An Metet wrote:

> In my devotion to freedom, I apparently go beyond the point where most
> cypherpunks are comfortable, in that I support private initiatives and
> technologies of all sorts and oppose government regulation of them.
> I am a supporter and admirer of Microsoft, which has achieved tremendous
> market success without relying on government support, indeed in the
> face of steadfast government opposition.  I oppose government antitrust
> efforts in general, and specifically those directed against Microsoft.

I agree with everything you've said in your post, including >PRIVATE< DRM 
measures, but, I disagree that Microsoft should be admired.

I've seen far too much evil emminated from Redmond:
* from outright theft of smaller companies' IP (i.e. Stacker),
* dumping ("We'll help you migrate from Netware to NT 3.51 for free"),
* FUD (GNU is communism and Anti-American),
* evil contracts (if you sell blank machines without Windows, you have to 
pay $X more for our software)
* stealth funding of SCO's lawsuit against IBM and linux end users,
* to lots of needless security holes - some even by design, (i.e. security 
is a checkbox as a marketing feature, or an afterthought: i.e. this chant: 
"Active X! Active X! Format Hard drive? Just say 'YES!'")

For the final one, I used to work at Earthweb, which ran Gamelan 
(pronounced gah-meh-lohn, not game LAN), a Java repository.  At one point, 
EW decided to start an Active X repository.  Some guy wrote an Active X 
browser component that shut off your machine if you clicked yes.  The 
component did exactly what it said it did, but it was a good example that 
it could have done something else.  Hence the "Active X! Active X! Format 
Hard Drive? Just say YES!" chant.

Let me tell you, Microsoft tried very, very hard to get us to remove that 
bit of code from the repository.  We didn't, because it did exactly what it 
claimed to do.

More financial damage has been done to the planet by Microsoft than good. 
Far too many sysadmin/developer hours were lost because of Microsoft.  You 
can certainly count the hours in lost human lives...  Hell, just add up the 
cost of each virus/trojan/worm outbreak which targets Outlook, Office, and 
Internet Exploiter.

Now don't get me wrong.  I'm not some knee-jerk Linux Good, Windows bad 
clueless geek wannabee.  I started out as a Novell Netware sysadmin. 
(Well, I started out as a coder, but fell into sysadming over time.)

When NT starting taking over, I picked it up and thought it was cool.  It's 
design was certainly revolutionary, and the NTFS was one of the best 
designed file systems I've seen, even to this day.  NT's borrow a driver 
from the server printing was beautiful.  User management via domains? 
Sweet!  Ok, not too much better than NIS, but hey, very nice. Active 
Directory?  Much, much mo'e better.  DHCP?  Great wonderful idea.  Gateway 
for Netware Services and Migration from Netware?  A bit scummy, but hey 
it's free with the server, might as well use it*.  File and Printer sharing 
for Macintosh?  Cool! - well, except for that one bug with the dancing 
icons back a few years ago...

(* Gateway Service for Netware allowed a scummy sysadmin to bypass the 
license limitation of Netware servers.  A single "user" from the NT server 
would login to the Netware server and proxy hundreds if not thousands of 
user requests.  You suffered in performance, but one of it's uses was to 
bypass licensing.  If you read NT's license it says something along the 
lines that you can't use another proxy this way against an NT server.)

Registry?  Hey, wonderful idea.  No, really.  Storing all your machine's 
settings in a single place and having a single editor (ok two of them) to 
control them was beautiful.  Just make sure you (can and do) back it up.

No, I'm not being sarcastic, if you know how the registry works, how to 
back it up, how to restore it, and how to repair it, it's a great thing - 
much better than lots of .ini, .rc or .conf files 
everyfuckingwherethankyouverymuch.  Ok, in unixen everything lives in /etc. 
  But which /etc?  /etc? /usr/local/etc? /usr/local/samba/etc? and the dot 
files in home directories?  ouch!  (A regular thing that I do is to backup 
all of /etc /usr/local/etc just to make sure I can restore them.  With 
Windows, you just run rdisk /s- and copy %SYSTEMROOT%\system32\repair.)

At the last job, we had a dead Exchange 5.5 on NT 4.0 server.  Its hardware 
died.  I worked for a shitty little dot com.  The guy admining it couldn't 
restore it.  We didn't have another motherboard that mached the drivers on 
that box, so we couldn't just move the hard drive over.  Know what I did? 
I merged the hardware related registry files from the sacrificial machine 
on the OS of the dead one to get it to boot, then hand reinstalled the 
network driver and a few other minor things like the video driver.  It's 
not so hard if you know what you're doing, and a registry isn't a bad thing.

All of the above features more or less beat the shit out of all flavors of 
unix when NT 3.5x/4.0 came out.  By the time XP was on, Linux and FreeBSD 
had caught up and then some.  Solaris at this point was trying to get Linux 
compatibility with lxrun, SGI was already gonzo from the art market with 
Mac taking over.

NT was beautiful - in theory, and on paper.  Because a lot of it was VMS on 
steroids.

Remote management tools weren't too horrible.  Ok, you couldn't ssh into a 
box, and the command line tools sucked - even after the resource kit, but 
MMC worked nicely and let you mostly manage boxes remotely if you knew what 
you were doing.  Sure, you couldn't easily launch a program on a remote 
server, but you could run the scheduler remotely and tell it to run 
something two minutes from now.


But, oh man, the bugs were murder.  So were the patches. Things like 
invisible, unkillable processes, hidden data forks in the file systems that 
you can't see to back up, worms didn't help my point of view.  Reboots 
after each of dozens of hotfixes, good luck getting your system to work 
after a service pack.  Hell, you had to reboot after changing IP addresses 
for fuck's sake!

Worse yet, with NT 4.0, it would constantly forget about licenses.  It 
allowed you to set the number to whatever you liked, but in a normal 
environment when you had only 20 users logging on and off, it easily filled 
up those 20 licenses.  Even if you lied and set it to several hundred, it 
would forget that some logged off and seize up with "Out of Licenses!"  At 
one point, I had set it to several thousand and had an AT job (cron for 
unix guys) restarting the license "service" twice a day just to prevent 
users from getting kicked off!

Have a software RAID 5 volume instead of a RAID 1 under NT?  Was your OS 
too hosed to get back up and running? Couldn't restore it with last known 
good or the registry repair?  Good luck restoring those RAID volumes after 
a reinstall!  Wasn't impossible, but wasn't easy either.  Exchange server? 
  Ouch! What a load of overpriced bloatware!  Have fun repairing it's db's 
or even backing it up without special software plugins.

Excel in a financial environment?  Have fun with the Bloomberg plug-in 
crashing several times a day.  Multiply by a few hundred guys on a trade 
floor and welcome to IT HELL!  Thanks, but I'd rather flip burgers than 
deal with that shit again.

Yeah, NT/2K/XP's gotten a lot better after Win2K, but no thanks, I won't go 
to XP.  Ever.  That NSA back door key didn't exactly win my friendship over 
either.  XP's creepy product activation isn't my cup of tea. Windows Media 
Player's reporting back to Mama what I play or what codecs I use is a no-no 
in my book too.  Service Packs where I "agree" that Microsoft has the right 
to stick anything on my machine?  Fuck that noise.

Microsoft is evil.  Cthulhu sized evil.  Ballmer and Butt-head aren't nice, 
warm, pro-liberty guys.  Neither are Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison who 
both attempted to profit from the World Trade Center/Pentagon bombings by 
offering their idea of a national ID.  All of these folks are far, far 
worse than Tim May with Microsoft being as slimy and evil as the Neo-CONS!

You know what?  I'm pro capitalism, pro-freedom, pro-making a buck, but I 
can see how Microsoft deserves far, far, worse than their anti-trust lawsuit.

My  fight against them?  I won't do windows, I won't use windows in any new 
machines I buy, I won't work in environments where I'm forced to babysit it.