SPUG:Microsoft: Open source threatens our business model

[David Innes]

Hmm.  If I had a choice between a five year old version of Windows and
Linux I'd pick Linux too.  (Actually there's a five-year-old Linux box
collocated in my datacenter and I get at least four post-midnight pages
a year to go out and reboot the thing.  I guess technically it isn't
crashed, since Linux never crashes, but it's unresponsive to net or
console I/O and the screen, though not blue, is black.)

The rest of the machines in our data center rarely crash because they
have modern and generally well-maintained operating systems like recent
builds of Red Hat, Symbian, and Windows 2000, and while I do
occasionally get paged to reboot one of these it's generally due to
hardware (bad memory) or user issues (compiling the kernel with the
wrong flags) and not the underlying OS. 

The longest running, the most heavily used, and most trouble-free
machine in our datacenter, naturally, uses BSD.  (If I had to go back to
a UNIX dialect I'd obviously go there first.) 

And of course (this is a Perl list, after all) all the machines, even
the old one that keeps crapping out, run Perl beautifully.

As for versions of Office?  I guess it boils down to which version first
supports Perl as an embedded scripting language.  We know StarOffice
won't go there willingly since Sun's position is if you don't use JAVA
you belong in a Guantanamo Bay tiger cage.  OpenOffice has a request out
for a UNO bridge for Perl.  I hear MS Office 11 will let you use any
.NET language. (I haven't yet had time to play around with perl.net.  I
guess if I ever do I'll have to give a lightning talk at SPUG.)

Bottom line on the OS and Open/Closed wars?  As long as they all support
Perl it's hard to care.

		-- David Innes

-----Original Message-----
From: spug-list-admin at mail.pm.org [mailto:spug-list-admin at mail.pm.org]
On Behalf Of Marion Scott Warner
Sent: Wednesday, February 19, 2003 1:02 AM
To: spug-list at pm.org
Subject: Re: SPUG:Microsoft: Open source threatens our business model

I have been using Linux exclusively for the past 5 years.
Windoz NT is on that other disc somewhere, but I've sort
of forgotten about it. Does Microsoft make a stable & secure
Operating System yet? Like I really care at this point.
I sort of view MS like the little boy who cried wolf too many times,
and their customers look rather much like the crowd in the story
the Emperors New Clothes.
I seem to recall at my last employer when yet another
Windoz virus showed up everyone seemed to stop working.
I never seemed to have that problem. I never seemed to
experience that other phenomena known as the
BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH either.
IMO, you're really your own worst enemy when you emphasize
marketing over product quality. Linux really shines in that
release dates are not set by a marketing department.

Chuck Langenberg wrote:

> > Now, as far as the argument "Microsoft makes money now, so any
> > other business model is wrong" -- this is obviously absurd.
>
> It's not what I want -- it's what I don't want -- and I don't want
> to be insulted. It really annoys me when MS tells half a story and
> infers that I'm only interested in saving money. They conveniently
> omit the other part of the story...
>
> I was very happy to pay them for every release of their software.
> But then they demanded that I register Windows XP & Office XP. To
> police me, they disable these programs after 50 times unless I
> consent to their bully tactics & register via phone or Internet.
>
> But I did not give in. I loaded Linux and www.OpenOffice.Org on that
> PC. And I use www.OpenOffice.Org every day on my Windows PC (which
> reads and writes Office 95/97/2000 files). MS won't be getting
> anymore money out of me, as I proceed to phase them out.
>
> Honest, I wasn't out looking for free software. But I feel like MS
> drove me away with a stick. They gave me an ultimatum -- and I gave
> them the finger.
>
> My solution is to NOT pay for any software, from anybody, anymore.
> Not because I'm trying to save money. But because free software is
> the only kind that doesn't screw with me.
>
> Chuck Langenberg
>
>
> _____________________________________________________________
> Seattle Perl Users Group Mailing List
> POST TO: spug-list at mail.pm.org
> ACCOUNT CONFIG: http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/spug-list
> MEETINGS: 3rd Tuesdays, U-District, Seattle WA
> WEB PAGE: www.seattleperl.org

_____________________________________________________________
Seattle Perl Users Group Mailing List  
POST TO: spug-list at mail.pm.org
ACCOUNT CONFIG: http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/spug-list
MEETINGS: 3rd Tuesdays, U-District, Seattle WA
WEB PAGE: www.seattleperl.org