[ILUG] Something to look forward to after Christmas

[kevin lyda]

On Wed, Dec 13, 2000 at 03:29:46PM +0000, hmoreau at digiserve.ie wrote:
> This simply isn't true.  There was a computer industry before Microsoft
> became the giant it is, and before there was much in the way of open

hm, maybe a rant will make me forget the miserable state i'm in at
the moment...

yes, but ms has changed that.  back then you could get access to
entire systems and learn on your own.  back then if you were a college
student you didn't have to pay huge license fees to compile a program.

ms makes a killing on developers.  i worked as a contractor my last
few months in the states and had to have an account do up my taxes.
as a linux/unix developer i was only able to come up with about $500 in
work expenses for the year - mostly books and a some computer equipment.
she said i must be missing something because most developers came to
her with around $5000 in expenses.  and they aren't lying - an msdn
subscription, certifications, books, etc add up to that easily.

and what was the alternative - apple?  who do you think microsoft copied
for their developer relations?

then there's ms's overwhelming desire to get into every freaking market
they can find.  a rec.humor.funny post around the time had an ms salesman
being executed for not selling w95 to the last person on earth who hadn't
bought a copy, and it wasn't far off the mark.  i worked for a company
that ran out of cash after a small army of ms-touting contractors sold
management on the idea of porting their core business to nt.

fair enough for management since no one else seems inclined to do
anything to stop them.  sco and unixware used to fight it out to see
which pc unix vendor could market the most appalling version.  (but i've
admined an interactive unix box so i know they even failed at that
task).  sun didn't seem interested in upgrading their h/w or utilities
and early versions of solaris was a disaster.  digital...  sigh...
digital's biggest mistake was attempting to be a for profit company.
if it had just been advertised as a charity for dysfunctional management
it would have survived quite well.  next was the first company to prove
that unix could be nearly promiscuous with users never mind friendly,
but i think they forgot to hire a sales force or something.  and so on...

so until linus and his merry band, building on rms and the cast of
thousands, showed up unix was dead.  suitable for nothing more then
a stand in for a parrot on monty python.  linux and *bsd (after being
blessed by the courts and at&t) was the only new blood in unix and
net wide collaborative development.  the other real alternatives for the
five years have been windows, mainframes and embedded os's.

lastly, rms has *nothing* to do with open source software.  that's the
kind that makes the concessions you want.  he writes and advocates free
software.  is he weird or freaky?  of course he is, but that doesn't
make him wrong or a "nutter."  he has an opinion that is different from
your own.  good for him and you.  the world would be ever so very boring
if we all agreed.

he's put forth a pretty consistent message for a number of decades,
and he's done a fairly large body of work to back that up.  the world is
full of little people making big talk about what they will do and the way
things should be but they don't really do all that much to back that up.
and even fewer people who actually do the work on projects that actually
benefit people.  when i come across people who actually *do* the work, and
it's for a decent purpose, then i can't help but admire them for their
hard work and ability to withstand the inevitable walls that block their
progress.  it's hard in a whole number of ways and for that i'm willing
to ignore a host of quirks.

i also happen to consider it to be common manners to say thank you to
people who do work that benefits me or others.

but then i'm a yank and i can't even master counting so what the fsck
do i know?

kevin

ps  i can take more asprin at 1630, does it work better when mixed
    with baileys?

-- 
kevin at suberic.net        q: what's the difference between batman & b. gates?
fork()'ed on 37058400    a: when batman fought the penguin, he won.
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