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And what's wrong with apologetics? What's wrong with defense? All I see is that people are *way* too happy to fire off cannons from their hovering ROFLcopters against any new news about Microsoft. Anyone who may say something nice about Microsoft is also fair game. Anyone who may even come to an amicable agreement with Microsoft (Novell) is dug into with a knife with pointed edges.

And what's worse is that those who fire the shots feel more than justified in their convictions concerning Microsoft.

Microsoft is a company with a great amount of capitalistic foresight into the future, who is willing to try out new things internally, and has a not-invented-here attitude that does not let them use solutions from third parties (even if they're standards), and forces them to come to their own conclusion; and they're willing to push their own products as much as possible, even if it hurts them or hurts others.

To me, that's the average company attitude. Every company that goes into any similar field to Microsoft will act the *exact same way*. Apple has done it throughout their history, with the killing of the Macintosh clones, for example.

Let's get this straight.

This runs directly counter to, and against the thinking of the Free Software movement. As long as its under a Free Software license, every developer is encouraged to stand on the shoulder of giants; Not-Invented-Here is heavily discouraged as detrimental to the Free software community (see "Compiz vs. Beryl", or "Torvalds' reaction to OpenSolaris"). It's less willing to try out new things because of both licensing issues and the belief that "Oh, that sh-t ain't needed. It's gonna cost us our freedom.", but when some company has made it big with some restrictively-licensed technology that has become standard across the board, someone within the community has to create their own reverse-engineering of that standard in order for its benefits to be shared with the community that, otherwise, would've been left out in the cold.

What's worse is that the Free Software community (not necessarily referring to its "leaders", but to many members) is much more keen to downplay and degrade the innovation of the companies (hell, it'll even downplay and degrade its own due to licensing issues, because the licensing is not "free enough". See "GPL vs. Sun's CDDL" or "Debian's issues with the GNU FDL").

Where the Free Software community collides with the Name-brand software company is when the latter decides to get some free labor or input from the former for a particular contingent of their overall star product that they can't take care of all by themselves. Apple does this with both Darwin (for Mac OS X) and WebKit (for Safari).

Where the Name-brand software company collides with the Free software community, however, is over the extent of freedom offered in the licensing of the Name-brand company's applications. Sun received flack over the years from the FSF and OSI over Java's licensing (Read RMS's "The Java Trap" and ESR's "Open Letter to Sun"), even though it was an open standard.

I advocate a particular Linux distribution (for which I even run a blog). I closely follow any news about anything *new* that's being developed for the Linux desktop.

However, this constant bickering by the Free Software community is getting old and repetitive, like a broken record. For them, there's no supplication by the Name-brand software companies of the world, the ones who have made everything that we see on our hardware and software, or set the standards for such. Their models and ways of logic run counter to each other, as different as night and day; we all know that, and we shouldn't have to hear it repeated to us every second.

I dunno, after hearing "x company is evil" so many times in a single day, I'm just jaded.

And yes, I'm Libertarian (and I'm 19). This was my first time voting last month, and I voted as much as possible for each Libertarian or Independent on the ballot. I have a statist streak, though.

I disagree. I think the amount of vitriol that comes from the proprietary computing industry in general, and Microsoft in particular, is way worse than in a lot of industries. Ballmer admitted as much when he announced the Novell deal. The only difference is, he and the FOSS community differ on whether he and MS have stopped it.

EDIT: The silence of anyone from MS on the "Linux violates MS IP" subject since the first time Ballmer mentioned it post-Novell, the fact that MS people reportedly keep avoiding questions related to the subject, suggest that perhaps someone at MS does realise how damaging it is.

Nevertheless, the "Linux violates MS IP" claims he made, without evidence, show that at the time, contrary to his further claims, MS (in the shape of its CEO) had [/i]not[/i] given up on such vitriol.

Or maybe they are just getting their proxies, like Cnet, to do the FUDspreading for them.

Like it or not, if you're going to be accused by someone of being a liar, a hypocrite, a communist, or anything else, you just can't let it stand, lest people think you aren't saying anything to counter the allegation because it is true. That's why people are prepared to sue for libel. It isn't that trash like THE SUN or THE NATIONAL ENQUIRER or THE DAILY MAIL are worth people's time and money; it's that their own reputations are.

Edited 2006-12-16 16:46

There is nothing wrong with being apologetics to a certain extent. But when it comes to a complete and constant non-thinking apology, we have a problem.

I occasionally praise Microsoft - and I also bash them. The same goes for FSF and everybody else. There is always something good, and something not-so-good.

Your post is terribly long, and I'm just too tired to respond to all of it. But you are wrong in regard to accepting new ideas in FLOSS. FLOSS suffers no more from not-invented-here than Microsoft does. Just take a look at ODF-support in MS Office. Oh wait - it doesn't have such support. And that's a real standard, which Microsofts proprietary formats are not. They are merely de-facto standards, and only reverse-engineered as a temporary solution.


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Oh no... a statist streak? You might want to do something about that

Isn't it hard to find a libertarian to vote for?