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