[luau] MSWindows

[W. Wayne Liauh]

Microsoft is pure evil (or should I say, eee-veeeel).  One of 
Microsoft's most recent activities is to plant a tag in Office XP files 
so that it will give a warning message when imported by a non-Office 
program.  Imaginine your PHB who may be inclined to consider switching 
to StarOffice but suddenly sees this warning?

A few years ago, if Microsoft wanted to knock down a competitor, it 
would simplily make a small change in one the dlls on which its 
competitor depended.  Now Microsoft is so dominant, it need not play 
that trick any more.

However, Microsoft has a distinct advantage: superior (relatively 
speaking) quality control.  Microsoft has an enormous financial 
resource, an army of H1B slave-labored programmers, and tons of 
able-and-willing beta testers.  Most of Microsoft's products are 
thoroughly tested b/f they came out.

No proprietary software companies can compete against Microsoft.  A 
friend of mine who used to be CEO of Corel (but was kicked out after 
bankrupting the company by foolishly trying to develop WINE) once told 
me that product testing constituted 90% of the cost of developing a 
consumer software.

That's why the open-source model (or an open-source/proprietary 
dual-licensing model) is the only way to have any hope of stopping the 
eventual total Microsoft domination.  Theoretically, the open-source 
model can count on the world at large to absorb a big chunk of the 90% 
of software development cost, thereby making software development 
affordable.

In order for the open-source model to succeed, many of us must be 
willing to spend a portion of our time trying those software.

But I am wondering how many of us are trying Mandrake 9.0 beta?  Red Hat 
Limbo?  Or even Mozilla 1.1 beta?