Have you ever stopped to consider that this site, fuckmicrosoft.com, is far from unique. There are over a thousand, and those from folks who *actually* go to the trouble to put up a web site. Doesn't this tell you something?
You point out that M$ is a very large corporation; this is true, however, did you ever stop to consider just *how* that happened? Is it because their products are so much better?
The fact is that, though M$ and His Gatesness constantly talk about innovation, that's all it is: talk. Bill Gates passes himself off as God's gift to technology, and as the ultimate ubergeek (even though he "thinks" he can factor prime numbers - he said this in public just a few weeks ago). The fact is that he wouldn't recognize a well-written piece of code if it bit him on the ass. Going all the way back to the mid-1970s, Gates admitted: "...the best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating system." This is where he got his ideas: dumpster diving! The pattern never changed one bit:
* MS-DOS: Bought from Tim Paterson
* PC BIOS: Stolen from Gary Kindall's CP/M BIOS
* Windows: An incompetent rip-off of Apple
* Disk Compression: Stolen from Stac Electronics
* Internet Explorer: Hijacked from Spyglass
What they can't steal, hijack, buy, they resort to the use of FUD tactics to destroy.
They have done *nothing* to further true innovation. To the contrary, they have done more harm, delayed more good ideas, and probably set the technology back at least a decade. They destroyed the technically superior DR-DOS by implanting encrypted code that prevented Win 3.1 from working on any system equipped with DR-DOS. Eventually, Caldera was able to sue and receive an out of court settlement, but by then the damage was done.
M$ uses brilliant marketing to convince a general public that is none too tech-savvy that it is normal and natural for computers to crash. There are quite a few folks who've seen my Linux rig and are genuinely surprised to learn that there is no Linux equivalent of the infamous BSOD. M$ has done an outstanding job of convincing the public that bugs are "undocumented features", that insecure systems are the fault of "those hackers" and script kiddies instead of being the result of ill-written, kludgy code. That systems that don't work as advertised are somehow the customer's fault rather than indicating a defective product. Let's face facts here: M$ ran out of ideas six years ago. Windows XP is nothing more than a bloated, kludged up version of Windows 95. And yet, they can still convince an atechnological public that every minor iteration is something grand and glorious.
You mention the trouble you've been having finding printers and sound cards that work with Linux. Here's why. If these companies want to do business with M$, then they are *prevented* from developing drivers for any non-M$ applications. Sure, you can use gcc to develop apps that'll run on any number of platforms and OSs. Can you say the same for Visual BASIC, or Visual Studio? You can't. What M$ has been doing for yaers is virtually giving away to developers programming aids that can be used for writing code that will only run under Windows. Not only that, they also use restrictive licensing to keep developers from supporting anything other than M$. It's similar to how they deal with the OEMs. You want to put Windows on your systems, then you can't offer your customers alternative software. Go into any Circuit City, Best Buy, Costco, etc. and try to buy a Linux rig. This is the source of your problem. It has *nothing* to do with the inherent superiority of Win whatever.
So what can we do? Even the DoJ has proven unable to tame the Beast. We create web sites such as this one in an attempt to wake people up. Perhaps we're just so many voices crying out in the wilderness. However, I seem to recall that another lone voice crying out in the wilderness changed the world.
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Live Free or Die: UNIX
