[luau] MSWindows

[Ben Beeson]

Randall,

	I won't quote the usual open source articles such as the Cathedral and the 
Bazaar, or the Cluetrain Manifesto.  I won't even mention the Halloween 
documents.  Instead I'll point you to a book I read years ago before Linux 
was on anybody's mind.  This book, "Undocumented DOS" did more than anything 
to convince me that Microsoft was run by the kind of people that I did not 
prefer to do business with.  (Go get it from the library and read it.  While 
the material is dated, I think the description of M$ business practices still 
applies today.)  As soon as I could, I switched to OS/2 and used that until I 
couldn't run any of the software that I need to run anymore. After that I 
switched to RH 5.2 and have used Linux at home ever since.   	

	I won't argue that everything that M$ writes or published is evil, some of 
it is pretty good.  I use many of their products daily at my job.  It is only 
recently that offfice-ware products in the Linux world have caught up.  Even 
so, M$ has made it increasingly difficult for folks to keep up with what they 
do without spending lots of $$$$.  I for one had a difficult time explaining 
to my boss why we had to upgrade all of our computers after a shipment from a 
popular vendor delivered machines loaded with a version of software that was 
not backward compatible.  It appears that synchronization of software in your 
environment is part of the M$ scheme...  Suddenly, the new computers could 
talk with each other, the old computers could talk also, they just couldn't 
talk to each other without fouling up all the formatting and losing info etc. 
Not a good thing...   Not only did we have to spend a lot more $$$ so we 
could exchange office products at work and across several other agencies we 
deal with, we had to spend an awful lot of time recreating our historical and 
recyclable documents.  That was very frustrating, and from my personal 
experience, the trend continues.   

	The odd thing is that for the most part, I have yet to find a real 
justification for the cash in terms of productivity that was not achieved 
with the release of Windows 95 and its corresponding office suite.  Windows 
98 and 2K have achieved little more than an incremental resistance to crashes 
and have driven many upgrades and redos in the office in order to keep things 
moving.  I'm not the only one that feels this way either.  The comm folks at 
the base where I work have done some extensive research on what users do with 
their office-ware.  About 95% (of several thousand users) never do anything 
more complicated than authoring documents, using spreasheets, preparing 
briefing slides, and email/net surfing.  A few design and implement web pages 
or databases and occasionally a very few do computer aided design.  We had 
all that with Windows 95.  It is no wonder that folks are looking at thin 
clients and storage area networks very seriously for the future.   

	As a comparison, all the stuff I have created on my linux boxes as far back 
as RH 5.2 still works today, the upgrades are cost effective, and my boxes 
all run for months without crashing.

Hope this helps,

Ben 




On Saturday 26 January 2002 07:14 pm, you wrote:
> Sup guys,
> I'm a heavy Windows user, and a Linux newbie.
> Why are open-source gurus so adamant towards Microsoft? <my opinion
> after surfing around numerous open-source communities.
> Is it because they don't give their software away for free?
> I know Linux dudes say it sucks but why? What makes it better?
>
> I'm not trying to cause a fight with you guys, I like my Red Hat, just
> wanted to hear some opinions.
> Thanks.
> Randall Oshita