On Wednesday 26 March 2003 12:02 pm, Rick Moen wrote:

> On real operating systems, it's not _necessary_ to "test against a whole
> range of applications" when you apply a fix, because of proper
> abstraction between levels of functionality.  

The Microsoft-drone author clearly doesn't know this mantra: "Small tools used 
in combination is Linux' way of making things work." The advantage is that 
only "the particular tool that has problems" must be patched if 
vulnerabilities are found, and not the whole package. Linux's modularity is 
it's strength. This strength may get in the way of convenience, but 
"addressing the problem of administration convenience" is what GUI tools, 
scripting languages, and toolkits are for. 

> Oh, please fork and improve our copylefted code.  We'd love to
> automatically gain back the resulting contribution:
> http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/essays/forking.html

Will this case of beneficial forking give rise to a new, robust, and modular 
XFree86? Will it galvanize a "fluid" community of open-source developers 
where the GATOS/DRI project can finally bloom inside its internals? Will the 
new XFree86 give rise to a 3D technology platform more capable than DirectX?

> With netbooting and automated hardware recognition, the above is no
> longer true.  Again, an IT director acquainted with Linux would know
> that.  A _modern_ IT director would have long since done away with
> attended installations from CDs.  That's what we have networks, "golden
> master" deployment hosts, and rsync for.

Remote terminals using LTSP or kiosk technology also centralizes the 
administration to a few computers as possible, which makes Linux convenient 
to administer. 

> > The removal of Windows will also mean the removal and replacement of
> > all software that uses APIs or DLL files, incompatible with Linux.
>
> As anyone who's ever used WINE, Crossover Office, ReWind, Wine Preview,
> Crossover Plugin, Win4Lin, VMware, WineX, Bochs, VNC, or rdesktop knows,
> this is untrue.

Yup. Windows becomes extremely stable running on a core Linux OS. I love 
running Corel Photopaint 10 atop Windows atop Linux (using Win4lin). Corel 
Photopaint 10 performs impeccably in this setup. I can undo as many graphical 
filters and transparencies applied to several large TIFF image layers and the 
application won't crash at all. If I do that in pure Windows I'd be sick 
rebooting, scandisking, and defragmenting the machine over and over again.

> Surely, this is much more of a problem on MS-Windows.  The list of
> companies driven out of business and their products orphaned by
> Microsoft Corporation's direct action alone would be quite impressive.

Microsoft's "embrace and extend" philosophy really meant "eat and devour". We 
can't have this "Pac Man" running the show if we desire to have fair 
competition in the IT software industry.

-- 
mikol

"What I already believe with faith 
 can be proved by way of logic and reason."
                             --  St. Thomas Aquinas


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