First of all, has anybody on the list seen Revolution OS? It is a
small documentary. I think I have a copy so junta can take it from me
if required.
> Right now they have made a "contribution" of US$30million to Mass.
> government to "help" needy students buy M$ malware. Funny they dont
> offer it to everybody - only those insisting on Open standards. And
> in an attempt to get a future legal handle they are fast racking
> their version of XML in two rubber stamp "standards" organisation.
During the same visit to M$, they talked about a scheme where low-cost
limited edition of their .Net stuff was to be given to colleges for
their students' to use. Forgive me for not remembering what 'low-cost
limited' exactly meant. But then the employees were very proud of the
fact that the Gates Foundation has donated generously for the
betterment of AIDS patients and so on. However on being informed that
a certain Bram Moolenaar- author of vi, does organize donations for
poor children in Uganda the M$ people came up with the "Why at all
Linux" thing.
Secondly the guys at M$ seem to be extremely satisfied with the fact
that most (according to them an overwhelming majority) of the people
are using Winblows. That they say is the clinching factor. They are
even more pleased to note that most of my class-mates are Windoze
lovers, and they are the ones to be tomorrows CEOs. However they do
not mind that atleast 60% to 75% of these users use pirated copies.
And today's pirates would be tomorrow's CEOs according to them.
The thing is proprietary software is a pain in most cases, if not all,
and M$ aggressively pursues it. My friends at BARC's Remote Handling
and Robotics Division experienced a similar problem RMS had faced at
MIT's AI Labs. These fellows at BARC have bought a nice digital compas
from Honeywell. The demo program which apparently demonstrates how to
operate the thing is a mere EXE and the code is not available. In the
absence of it, nobody has got any idea how to program the thing and
use it in a robot. BARC I am given to believe is central to India's
fundamental R&D and this is how the situation is.
The whole impression that people (Winblows users actually) get today
is that Windoze is the 'standard' thing, and that GNU/Linux is the
real trouble. eg., you can not install Windoze after you put on
GNU/Linux, Fedora does not come with MP3 support while Windoze has no
problem, etc.. People seem to miss the point that it is Windoze that
overwrites the bootloader entries while GNU/Linux appends, that MP3 is
patented and M$ pays for it, and so on...
Regards,
Debarshi