plague
One can only hope that although Linus might steer clear of the "hating Microsoft" disease that he doesn't fall into the trap of thinking they aren't a plague.
Microsoft is standing by its decision to release thousands of lines of code to the GPL, saying the decision wasn't based on a violation of the popular license. Sam Ramji, senior director of platform strategy, has blogged that Microsoft released the Hyper-V Linux driver code to GPL for the "mutual benefit of our customers, …
but I beg to differ. Microsoft hatred is the only possible rational response to the dishonesty, predatory rapaciousness and (technical) incompetence that has directly resulted in global herds of botnets, oceans of spam, DRM infestation, stifling of innovation and copyright distortion that plagues the IT world.
Gotta hate 'em.
Self interest drives development of open source, I accept this as being true, however, the open source self interest appears to stem from the desire to be free to control your IT space, whereas the self interests of folks like M$ appears to stem from the need to wrest control your IT space from you. There is a world of difference between these two self-interest motivations.
... but I don't hate Microsoft people - only their behaviour.
They have serious form for acting to compulsorily acquire the entire bazaar, using means which sane people cannot call fair. Their leopard spots are all underhanded, sneaky and corrupting.
All I can hope is that eventually the MS leopard is identified as a man-eater, so that the Bwana-hunter can come along and shoot it - for the good of all the villagers in the disctrict..
mike panero writes (punctuation added)...
"Hate is a terrible thing. And the level of hate coming from some of these beards is just sick."
Is that "beards" as in the slang or something else?
"You people need to grow up and act your age."
Which people? Or is that "you people" in the Ross Perot sense?
I don't why the end users seem to think they have a say in all of this.
A zealot dangler in another thread, came up with the remark;
"if you don't like it, don't use it."
being charitable they may have just been talking about the licence, but you can dislike the license and still use it, that is pragmatism, the GPL is useful for sharing projects, but awful for inhouse systems.
If they are talking about the software, well that goes against the GPL, you can dislike the GPL and still you are allowed to use GPL software, in fact the GPL doesn't allow for people to add tag lines such as the above onto it. That right there is a potential GPL violation :)
My bet is most Linux Zealot Danglers are not developers, they are just fan boys, they couldn't code their way out of a moist paper bag, and I also bet most dual boot into windows.
Really, if someone is going to big up Open Source then they should supply a link to their Open Source code that they wrote, then at least we know where they are coming from.
They just wouldn't be the same MS if they weren't.
At least, on the odd chance IBM had been the winner back in the day, I think the government would have been able to do a much better job of controlling everything we do on the net a long time ago. MS's ignorance of the big picture, and blind greed, has actually facilitated the chaos that allows people to snoop on each other right along side the government, and random strangers on the other side of the planet. Guess that would just be a lesser of two evils thing and isn't a very good, "well, it could have been worse", analogy.
Ugh, I hate Microsoft, but it's personal, not the zombie brain eating like all the other zombie kind of hate. I know from a friend that went all MS-hate-the-MS-hating-zombie-zombie... basically the MS employees are trained to believe all the haters are zombies and MS is GRRRRR-REAT! But his first real experience with MS on more than a user level was going to work for them. All the legit MS haters are quite aware of how MS developed their products way back to when it all fell apart with win95. It was the first time in my life I ever saw a complete failure be made out as a success by everyone who could publish an MS blurb, even with their first patch ever making users buy it after the first release of 95 did not work. The first actual user who could run '95 did it in '96. I had a friend who worked at Comp USA back then and he couldn't say enough great things about MS (Pentium Inside!! WHOOP-BANG-ZING!75MHZWOW!!!!BURN RIGHT THROUGH YOUR MOTHERBOARD YEAH!!!), esp now that they were giving him free training to use their products. Recalling those old days is like remembering the birth of a demon child, even in the beginning they make you feel uncomfortable, and it only got worse from there ;P ...until finally they finished windows xp, and had a solid and stable operating system. Since most of the MS zombies are too young to the business to remember the past, it seems the win95 days are literally replaying themselves. Same kind of zombie-anti-hater-haters vs. the zombies who have heard they were needing the hate for their computers flaking out constantly, as MS based computers so often did. To this day the explanations for every virus I've had to clean off someone's computer has all been due to some feature in windows that makes it easy to trick the user into installing it themselves. Click OK to continue; to view the video; to hear the song; to move the file; to install the virus that looks like a song, WOOPS! You should have read the box, you should have known where the file came from, you should have a PHD in kiss my ass!
In all my years of fixing computers, the only OS that has ever needed fixing has been windows, very few novice users ever need to go into any settings and screw things up in any other OS. It's either too hard to find, or it just won't let the user do it. Whenever I have been presented with a Mac or Linux user who needed help, it was usually the common PC thing where they needed something hooked up and/or installed, or a piece of hardware failed. OS independent problems. MS is a nightmare in comparison, always has since Win95. Just because people expect crap from windows now, with the viruses and add-ware, doesn't make XP perfect, just the best MS has done yet, what should have been back in 95/96 in the first place. I personally have to use the crap, but I'm not going to call it roses just because someone says I should. My PC kicks ass with Win Vista 64, but I would be a lot happier if I could do everything on this computer in another OS, but software writers have first been bribed in the 90's, and now brainwashed, into believing MS is what you need to write for to make any money, and it is true. MS has won that position thought less than honorable means. But last I checked, that would make MS a monopoly. Woops, did I say that out loud?
That's my 2p.
"In all my years of fixing computers, the only OS that has ever needed fixing has been windows"
May be true, may be hyperbole - so much of it is in these never ending 'my OS is better than your OS' wars. I'll throw my own tale onto the fire ... Not one Linux Live CD distro has worked out the box on my PC - borking on video usually - whereas all versions of Windows ( 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, XP, 2K3 server ) I've tried have at least made it to the splash-screen then on to the desktop and has made for a usable experience.
Linux is perfect, so I'm told :-)
"I have a question. Has Apple ever released anything under open source? It's just that everyone seems to hate Microsoft but what about Apple?"
Yes. They are a big contributor to CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) which works really well. In fact I think they've now bought it.
Some of the code for X-Windows font rendering also comes from there, to allow various font types to rasterise without further third-party extensions or add-ins.
Neat.