LINUX CAMP batteling M$ for a while now...

now, i have at home three LINUX distro's sneaked in via PC magazines.

however, i do not use them.

here just what i found today (excerpt)

"Apr. 19, 2007

In Beijing, Bill Gates announced this week that Microsoft's "Unlimited Potential" initiative will now include offering a software package, the Student Innovation Suite, to governments and students in emerging countries across the world at a price of just $3.

This suite, available in the second half of 2007, will include Windows XP Starter Edition; Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007, Microsoft Math 3.0, Learning Essentials 2.0 for Microsoft Office, and Windows Live Mail desktop. However, Microsoft has no takers for its offering yet.

Officially, the goal is to help bring social and economic opportunity through new products and programs to as many as possible of the potential 5 billion people who do not yet use Microsoft products.

What a lot of bull feces. The goal is to kill open source off at its roots. Microsoft wants to make sure that young people in developing countries get brainwashed into the Microsoft way of computing."

http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS6409071283.html

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it is a democratic online world, and WINDOWS SERVER architecture can be called "a lot of bull feces". i agree it is a democratic right to express it like that being piece of opinion.

however, i want to rewrite one passage, according to Alfred E. Neumann!

WHAT THEY WRITE: "The goal is to kill open source off at its roots. Microsoft wants to make sure that young people in developing countries get brainwashed into the Microsoft way of computing."

WHAT THEY REALLY MEAN: "We want to kill their (cultural) roots and brainwash the young people in developing countries".

.........................

further, i want to say that personally i consider megabytes of poorly documentated open-source (c++ source code) offensive, anti-innovative, and it would require less time to rewrite it from scratch.

you can say i have no clue of open source scene.

i give you one example of what i think is moderate open source project (in terms of size, which is about 6 megabytes c++ source)

it is http://www.winuae.net , an emulator for the 1980s Amiga console.

at first, they used the GPL license. when MICROSOFT released the express editions of VISUAL STUDIO, they switched to VC++.

maybe without R. Stallmann's propaganda the world would never have seen M$ (i use it ironically as a joke) releasing programming tools for no money charge.

this makes some good points for the FSF.

but the bad think is that no one sane wants to modify VISUAL STUDIO on the source code level. M$ simply can not offer the source as "open source", because it is 100s of megabytes, and the documentation would include 10,000s of pages.

here some bad points towards at LINUX & Co., these documents are simply omitted. i mean, people who do not write programs read the propaganda "open source", "free software". but any real programmer knows that even code he (or she) wrote, becomes unreadable after six months, just because lack of good documentation!

i also want to show one page of source code which includes such documentation.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nike6/2494583571/

my core argumentation against LINUX is that without commercial pressure (or call it feedback), programming teams have no (or little) motivation to documentate clear, and extensively.

thus, open source is doing more harm than any good, apart from that it maybe is stealing real-world jobs. i do not insist that it does. but a commercial organisation such as M$ will:

1. deliver high-tech, state-of-the art technology (what it did with WINDOWS 2008: data execution prevention, MSIL virtual program code, 64BIT core, removal of MSDOS legacy).

2. miss to give people good programming tools, and useable documentation, and disappear within 3 years. Commodore-Amiga missed, and they disappeared (to the grief of quite a few individuals).

Microsoft Visual Studio is state-of-the-art, not outdated or rip-off. actually it is available under free license (allowed for installation without money charge), and the BASIC edition (they call it express edition) is not complicated to install or maintain.

i do not see such a thing within the LINUX camp, and wonder how it could come into existence: it would take them 2000 man years or more to do it.

i think what LINUX camp should do is to accept they can only fill the gap M$ can not, or does not want to fill. LINUX is not intend to, or capable to replace WINDOWS being a consumer OS.

they should not attempt to push low profile UNIX into the third world- because it was a research OS, and is at the technical level of the 1980s and early 1990s. recently they added 3D desktop- who will really use this permanently?

once at the LINUX camp they agree to take this position, people can sleep better again, and can use LINUX based webservices without the fear to feed hackers, script kiddies, file-sharer's, and machine-revolutioniste's.

people simply need a "consumer-style OS", be it delivered by MS or other companies. it is just practical to have a standard for the programming layers, called "microsoft standard", such as there is a so-called "Hitachi LCD controller standard", which is used for virtually all line-dot-matrix LCD's. nowadays they are offered by many companies, not just Hitachi, but everyone calls the think "Hitachi controller".

in the consequence i think at LINUX & Co. at some point of time they must agree to have a "Microsoft device driver core", which is not open source, upon they can build their system.

and MS will not do this step in the reverse (take in the 1980s LINUX core, and abandon the new virtual engine's, such as DIRECTX). that's what i believe.

Steve Ballmer once wrote "LINUX is a cancer". i do not like LINUX myself- but maybe a quite useable cancer- it can do things WINDOWS can not do, or does not want to do! it is, and that is a true thing, simply less attractive for hackers, because UNIX does not offer many meaningful functions, and the few things it can do happen in uncomfortable ways. clearly not a consumer, or home OS!

then this "cancer" called LINUX must understand that WINDOWS is not it's opponent, and it can continue to exist. sooner or later consumers will figure out that LINUX is not innovative- and they should not use stupidity, or naivity, of chinese students, to have a real-world trial if people really will recognize the difference. besides, students have a reputation to be eager to learn to use LINUX, but i think that's the last think they should do. people should not learn a thing such as LINUX below the age of 30 years. that's what i think myself. it is not for script kiddies!