On Friday 03 May 2002 22:41, Dr. David H Chan wrote: > Thankyou Douglas! I was beginning to wonder if this forum is all about not > having anything to do with M$!
Bill Gates has declared himself not just not favouring open source, but is actually deliberately trying to destroy it as a method of roducing software, as a phenomenom and as a culture. IBM OTOH have declared their direction, and SUN have implemented OSS solutions on large scales. So MS is different, qualitatively rather than quantitatively, and does need to be treated as such. I don't want to sound as though I am disparaging David's considerable achievements, but the dark side is very insidious and our best interests overall are to be found in avoiding becoming enmeshed in it. I use NT on the desktop myself for legacy applications, and today I spent half an hour programming in VB, and learned a neat trick for driving a console using the Windows API, but I am aware that anything which makes an open source or libre project depend upon any part of Windows without the option of running on an alternate platform is a big hostage to fortune. I know life is a process of solving today's problems but I do think an eye on the event horizon is worthwhile. Philosophically of course, the largest point of the Web is that it is platform and largely program independent. Virtue is to be found in following that nature as far as is possible. Today I also found in my software collection an Adobe SVG viewer whcih appears to be a plugin for Acrobat Reader. -- From one of the Linux desktops of Dr Adrian Midgley http://www.defoam.net/
