--- will hill <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: ... > The best way to get free software into a Windoze > network is to show how much cheaper free software is > than the next "upgrade". Can anyone here name one > "service" that Microsoft offers that someone else > does not do better?
Quantify "cheaper" and "better". For the sake of argument, I can name a number of examples. Their development environments (Visual Studio, etc.) are very nice. They _do_ pay attention on how to improve development tools so that programmers will more likely use them (to build apps dependent on proprietary requirements). And Microsoft SQL Server is a nice, robust and easily maintainable RDBMS, compared to Oracle's 8i (don't have working experience with later offerings) and IBM's DB2. However, Microsoft takes every opportunity it can to tie systems to their proprietary technology. Oracle, IBM and other players don't have the luxury of Microsoft's monopoly, therefore must be more open to be competitive. Let's be rational here for a moment. Some people|corporations are willing to trade their freedom for ease of use. I think it is short-sighted, but that's just my opinion. I've just spent a lot more time than I first anticipated trying to make the Postfix mail server (http://www.postfix.org) .deb package work with the tls/sasl (http://asg.web.cmu.edu/sasl/) .deb package, in order to migrate from the Microsoft Exchange mail server to a Linux based mail server. M$-Exchange took very little time to install and setup, comparatively speaking. However, I and my employer was willing to put in the time to make it work because we value the freedom gained versus the time lost. Most other companies don't see that advantage, so they stick with what works. (BTW: the problem was that postfix starts up in a chroot jail and the sasl .deb doesn't, so the /etc/sasldb was not being seen :P . Live and learn.) Computing technology is primarily, for good or ill, influenced by the computing industry, which is primarily influenced by the bottom line (capitalism). Microsoft is a legal entity with the freedom to do business within the confines of the law (and it brushes up against those confines pretty often) in our great United States. Microsoft has come a long way from it's humble beginnings, back when it was seen as the _underdog_ to IBM's monopoly (yes, kids, IBM was considered just as bad if not worse than Micro$oft at one time). Sure, Micro$oft has more often than not used its marketing and advertising efforts to make up for the lack of technological prowess (MS-Bob anyone?). But it is doing something right, according to people that buy Microsoft. What is it? How can we compete against what Micro$oft is doing right? Microsoft does plenty wrong. The past successes of free and open source software easily demonstrate Microsoft's failures; Apache httpd running on Linux for one (http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html). My point is that instead of ranting about the _politics_ of the Microsoft vs. Linux debate, I think our time would be better spent in comparing the technological merits of Microsoft vs. Linux. There seems to be a lot of uninformed ranting (I should know as a previous rantee) about Micro$oft that seems to me to stem from a faddish, political nature within a large section of the Linux community. I think the Linux community in general could take a lesson from the *BSD crowd and just concentrate on making better software. That's the way to compete. Leave the marketing and politics to Micro$oft. Politics happens when people don't know how to inform themselves. We have the source code, we have the HOWTOs and RFCs, we have our on-line community, there is nothing more we need, to learn everything we need to know to make better software than Micro$oft makes, other than the time and the will (no pun intended, Will (: ). John Hebert ===== John Hebert 'cat /dev/random | perl' __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free web site building tool. Try it! http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/
