Sparrow's acquisition highlights the dangers of closed source
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 21st Jul 2012 23:06 UTC
In the News Okay, so this is entirely new to me. Sparrow is was an email client for Mac OS X and iOS (and Windows), which brought a decent Gmail experience to these platforms - as opposed to Apple's own not-so-good Gmail support and Google's Gmail iOS application which, well, is just a webpage. Google has now acquired Sparrow, and basically all hell has broken loose, to the point of Rian van der Merwe writing that 'we' lost "faith in a philosophy that we thought was a sustainable way to ensure a healthy future for independent software development, where most innovation happens".
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lucas_maximus
Member since:
2009-08-18

Actually a lot of the best open source software is for Windows or can be run on Windows quite easily.

There is a lot of good software for Windows that can be bought that doesn't include malware or any other bollox.

It frequently overlooked and everything that seems to be a Linux advocate thinks it is still the late 90s.

f--king please.

Stop telling lies for Linux.

Edited 2012-07-22 17:07 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 2

Nth_Man Member since:
2010-05-16

There is a lot of good software for Windows that can be bought that doesn't include malware or any other bollox.

A lot of people think that they "bought" software but it wasn't true :-( . Later they could talk with their accounting department, if they had one, and see that it wasn't a buy, the software was not theirs.

If what you meant is that there is a lot of good free software for Windows that doesn't include malware(*)... yes, that's true. Nobody said the contrary. You'll probably have installed software of this kind.

A different case is, well, you probably know a lot of cases of people that were installing programs and left their computer/data affected because of treacheries. So "Gone fishing" wished good luck to them.

(*) Or is crippleware (after a while, people find that the software is severely limited), uses closed formats to make you dependant on them, causes the inability to audit or improve the software, installs porn toolbars or similar, changes the home page of the internet browser, installs in a way that is difficult to remove it, etc.

Edited 2012-07-22 17:49 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 3

lucas_maximus Member since:
2009-08-18

Bored already.

You might as well just link me the page on FSF.org.

It is utter bollox you can't get trapped into particular file formats, whether they are open source programs to open them or not.

Just look at web browsers with the recent -webkit scenario, other browsers are going to be forced to recognise the -webkit extension.

Everthing was open specifications, however all the web hipsters decided only to target webkit based browsers.

Crippleware is a term made up by Stallman an co to discredit proprietary software makers, because he doesn't like them, It is no more than FSF propaganda.

Edited 2012-07-22 19:41 UTC

Reply Parent Score: -1