Oh noes, evil Microsoft isn't going out of its way to help their competition! the horror! the horror! How dare they even defend themselves at Massa Government's anti-trust trial! Throw them all in prison stat, right next to Hank Rearden and Lysander Spooner!
"Defend themselves" by describing a disfunctional, even deliberately crippled, development model, so bad that the obvious failings of that development cannot be demonstrated to be deliberate even in a kangaroo court?
Not a defense that gives me confidence about their products.
Seriously, how funny is that - an "open source or bust" activist is accusing me of following a "handbook", just for defending the virtues of capitalist (i.e. non-copyleft) software that the vast majority of businesses choose to use in the free market.
Wrong on multiple counts.
1) I'm not "open source or bust", I've said several times that people choosing what works best for them is just fine by me. To deny the choices of others would merely open me to having my choice denied: Hypocrisy.
2) If you don't have a handbook, then you are making the same mistakes, using the same wordings, supporting exactly the same non-proprietary license for the same reasons, as a huge number of apparently coordinated individuals who also post those same errors.
http://blog.linuxtoday.com/blog/2009/06/linux-sucks-as.html You're right, you may very well not be an astroturfer. However, as the saying goes, once is happenstance, twice is circumstance, thrice is enemy action. Me thinkst you do protest far too much.
3) Capitalism is private ownership of property. I don't own my copy of Windows, neither do you own yours. You're just paying for a license to use Microsoft's software, with various restrictions put upon your use of it. (if you didn't just steal it, which you have crowed about in the past)
To compare, I actually do own the copy of Linux I'm using. I can copy it, sell it, give it away, whatever I want to do with it. It's mine.
The programmers who wrote the code own that code, and have released that code under the single restriction that if I redistribute
their code I do so under the same rules by which I received it.
So which is "ownership"? Not the Microsoft model.
4) The vast majority of businesses also run various F/OSS, be it Linux or Apache or Tivo or FireFox or OpenOffice or sendmail or any of many, many thousands of other F/OSS projects. Bully for them.
In reality only about 1% of users run Linux on the client-side, and the majority of them still keep a Windows / Mac OS / BSD / etc partition.
How can you type that and not realize that you're just spewing mindless repetitions of well known Microsoft astroturf FUD?
Please, show me where the Windows partitions are on the top 500 supercomputers in the world. Please.
Oh but of course the astroturf handbook makes sure to always couch those possibly verifiable assertions, such as the "1%", with qualifiers like "client-side", so that when it's pointed out that the overwhelming majority of public-facing web servers run F/OSS, it's possible to say, "But that's not what I was talking about."
You socialist "ubuntu" software nuts don't just plant Astroturf, it seems that you've started to smoke it too!
Now you're just lying. I neither use Ubuntu nor am I in any way a socialist.
Is this really the quality of your research? I hope not, but it would explain the poor quality of your diatribes against F/OSS.
Your experience and advice in terms of software is usually quite good. It's this one subject in which you are either following someone else's playbook (or handbook, as it were), or you're just utterly blind to your own gross bias.
With the advent of Microsoft Stores, I guess now you'll have something other than SUV dealerships and medical research laboratories you can bomb...
Gee. I think I'll just leave your emotional tantrum for everyone to see.