[CS-FSLUG] Ballmer Blames Software Piracy on Spendy Hardware

[N. Thompson]

This is another one of my late-night half rant posts (where I get myself 
into lots of trouble) so if you don't want to read it just skip to the 
second last paragraph for a summary, btw. since its so long and I have 
to get to bed I didn't spell check much of it, I know before hand that 
its going to have mistakes so you don't have to e-mail me with any 
corrections on my spelling in this post :-) .

Don Parris wrote:

>I think MS should lower its price on Windows to @ $5.00 (to cover the
>cost of the CD & shrinkwrap).  That's about all it's really worth in
>my book.  I mean, honestly, you can't do squat with it.  Think of
>low-income folks who get a computer with Windows (either used or
>donated).  They can't afford to buy Quicken to manage their money
>with.  They can't afford the tools to learn programming if they so
>desire.
>  
>

There are a lot of OSS applications from Linux ported over to Windows: 
the gimp, gcc, windowmaker, the list goes on. The difference is that in 
Windows the programs don't run as well because they are ported over, 
I've been using Inkscape and the Gimp in Windows and while they do get 
the job done they also tend to pop up a lot of console windows which if 
I pay any mind to I can easily crash the program just by bringing into 
the foreground for some reason, probably a GTK bug since the two 
programs share the same thing in common. There are also a lot of 
freeware applications available for Windows, I personally use Mingw and 
Dev-C++ for developing under windows unless I want to use Qt in which 
case I use Qt-Designer (windows version is non-commercial, came with a 
book), if I want to type up an assignment I can use OpenOffice.org 
although to be honest I've been tempted just to switch over the the 
plain text format because the longer I use it the more I simply want the 
simplest solution to typing up documents and essays, give me a spell 
checker in notepad and I'll be happy (KWrite already has one) :-) . In 
Windows for quickly browsing folder of images you can use irfanview, I 
personally don't use the application so I don't know how useful it is 
but it does seem to be popular, so much so in fact that some people use 
it in Linux with Wine. Its true a lot of good software in Windows costs 
money, if I want to develop software that  I can sell in Windows whether 
its GPLed or not I'd have to purchase a Qt license from Trolltech for 
over USD $1500 if I remember the approximate price correctly, Microsoft 
and Borland developer tools tend to be anywhere from the same price as a 
Qt License all the way up to and over USD $5000 and a copy of Microsoft 
Office can be anywhere between CAD $199 for a students license to over 
USD $300 for a full blown commercial version which has all of two 
applications OpenOffice doesn't have, the difference is that OO.o won't 
do some of what my physics teacher wants done on labs without well over 
5 times the work if I can find a way to get the job done which so far I 
have. If you are willing to put up with less than perfect, less then 
stable and less features applications then you can get by with freeware 
and OSS software that was either written for or ported to Windows, 
however you are correct in saying that many programs which are major 
selling points for the operating system also cost more then even a lot 
of people with significant money to burn are willing to spend, in most 
cases once you've gotten a CAD $1000 computer if you were to get 
Windows, MS Office, Copernic, Paint Shop Pro, Visual Studio and other 
programs that you would need in school you would well have double the 
price of the computer by then while many equivalents to these programs 
are available in Linux.

The price you're paying for Windows software usually comes from quality; 
have you ever tried MS Office, sure the format is proprietary and there 
are many lock in features, plus a basic file in MS Office can be several 
MB simply because of the stupid undo history, versioning and other 
unnecessary bloat but its got a lot of convenience features you don't 
even realize are there until you need them and know how to use them, 
then once you've gone back to OO.o you miss them. Visual Studio on the 
other hand is useless, syntax highlighting in there is virtually 
non-existent aside from basic highlighting for comments, String, Integer 
and boolean data there is nothing else, not even highlighting of 
brackets which is extremely useful and necessary imo. Visual Studio 
can't even compare to KWrite despite the later being a mere text editor 
because KWrite has much *much* better syntax highlighting then Visual 
Studio and also takes care of tabs for you when you press enter and 
open/close brackets if I'm not mistaken (as long as you've saved the 
file first and the editor recognizes it as source code which it should 
if your file has the right file extension). IMO Visual Studio is grossly 
over priced, until it has at least half decent syntax highlighting it 
isn't even fit to be freeware, for a company as large as Microsoft you 
would think something so simple would have been implemented as early as 
version 1 and yet as it is right now Dev-C++ is better and even that IDE 
has mediocre syntax highlighting imo.

>To me, GNU/Linux represents that mythical "even playing field" that so
>many claim to want - at least where computers are concerned.  I can't
>claim the computer has made me rich, but I can say I have learned a
>great deal.  I'm actually beginning to offer half-way sound assistance
>to others these days.  Give me a little more time, and I might even
>qualify for a real job - assuming they aren't all in India.
>  
>

Were you here when I got my copy of Xandros Linux, let me tell you about 
that. Xandros Linux cost me very close to CAD $80 with the student 
discount, at that price it was only a little more then what I could have 
gotten the standard edition for without the discount which I don't think 
was applicable to anything other then Deluxe so I went with that. CAD 
$80 for me takes me a long time to save up, at least two months although 
usually much more unless its around a birthday or Christmas when my 
grandparents and a few other people send me some money, Xandros didn't 
have the Open Circulation Edition back then so purchasing it was the 
only way of trying it but I figured since it was build up from Corel 
Linux it would have to be at least comparable to Windows.

When I got it the back reflected much of what I had read in many of 
their advertisements, they claimed to be compatible with almost all the 
Debian packages and the way they advertised the product on the back and 
in the manuals was incredible, I thought I would certainly have found 
the distribution I would end up sticking with for years to come however 
once I installed it I soon learned the truth. The desktop crashed every 
time I tried to create any kind of icon there, the file manager crashed 
a lot, especially when I was trying to use the built in CD-Burner, I 
couldn't change the default web browser to Konqueror which it should 
have been because of the way they hard coded Opera as the default web 
browser if its installed and mozilla if it isn't, the only way to change 
this would have been to mess around with a lot of the file associations 
and hope that I don't have to fix them again later and when I tried to 
install Debian packages 90% of them wouldn't work and the rest make an 
eye-sore of the KDE menu. To make things worse Xandros which had drained 
me of all my money wanted more money for an up to date copy of the Gimp 
2 which is *Free* software and again they wanted more money for other 
software which was free. When I tried to run a lot of my favorite 
applications I found that many of them were unstable and almost all of 
them were nearly two years old or older and no matter how many times I 
asked them to update the software Xandros would only update KDE desktop 
and other files that had to be updated along with KDE in order to keep 
things working. As if that wasn't bad enough most of the time severs 
would go down for Xandros-Networks, the package manager and update 
client so often when I tried to get software or updates it wouldn't 
work, if legitimately dead package was also selected then I either had 
to go through the packages one by one until I found the bad one or I had 
to give up and forget about installing anything. Xandros was the most 
useless, buggy, expensive distribution I had ever tried and that was the 
last time I would ever try them, from my perspective what I spend on 
that was a lot of money and I'll never *ever* recommend them to anyone 
else who doesn't have free access to a copy already nor will I ever use 
their distribution again. I cannot stress enough how extremely mad I was 
after trying Xandros, when the open circulation edition was released 
only a few weeks or possibly months later that only made me that much 
angrier because had I tried that in the first place I would have learned 
before hand what a terrible distribution it was.

GNU/Linux is not always a free/pure/perfect/etc... operating system that 
people believe it to be, many distributions are starting to make it as 
commercial as they can in order to make a significant profit off of it, 
some companies are adopting and supporting Linux just to get back at 
Microsoft and probably also because they like it (IBM, Novell) while 
other companies like Mandrake simply try to make the most money possible 
off the distribution while still keeping the OSS community happy with a 
very lacking free download edition. It never ceases to amaze me the way 
the people behind these distributions think, Mandrake Discovery Edition 
is USD $39 but comes with almost no software whatsoever while their free 
download version has two more CD's worth of software, what is the logic 
behind that?!. Distributions like Ark try to take on more then they can 
chew and somehow believe they are going to make inroads with a 
distribution so buggy that you have to reinstall it just because you set 
a root password and if that doesn't prove they're crazy look at who Bero 
recruited to be a volunteer packager for them (me) ;-) .

So far aside from Mandrake which I used because it worked (even if not 
the way I wanted it to), Slackware has been the only distribution I've 
been able to stand for a long period of time. SUSE just can't stop from 
making a frankenstein out of OpenOffice.org and in the end I find it 
unbearable, especially since they tinker with the bullet sizes and when 
I bring a file I've been working on in Windows over to Linux and 
continue editing SUSE's modifications make the file just as ugly as 
their modifications to the office suite. Fedora can't help but uglify 
things with their bluecurve theme and various other tweaks to the 
software and desktops, Mandrake and SUSE both make a miserable task out 
of changing the GTK theme to something neutral and not ugly like their 
default themes (Geramik, MDK Galaxy, buggy GTK-QT engine, etc...). 
Sometimes I wonder if the top distributions don't know and specifically 
target all my pet peeves just to make sure at least one person in the 
world likes KDE but can't find a good distribution that has it.

>Point is free software empowers us.  Anyone who desires to take
>advantage of it can do so.  If you want to get out of the slums, and
>your'e willing to put your nose to the grindstone, you can take
>advantage of free software.
>
>Don
>  
>

Taking that into mind, I can't help but wonder whether God had planned 
for me to get recruited by Bero while trying to motivate a new 
distribution in the KDE-Devel mailing list, I wanted to talk the people 
there into getting some of their more experienced developers together to 
start an entirely KDE centered distribution that would match KDE's 
release cycle and have all sorts of stable KDE enhancements, 99% of 
which don't make it into other distributions until some anonymous 
contributor puts a package of the enhancement up on kde-look.org . 
Volunteering for Ark at first seemed like a big mistake after having to 
reinstall it three times, once because I set a root password and the 
next thing I knew the distro wouldn't work, the second time because I 
messed up creating a new user account which led to a train of events 
that caused me to somehow mess up the arklinux user account which was 
the only one I could get to work outside of root. The third time because 
I had mysteriously broken things again, now however its starting to 
become a little more usable in that I haven't had to reinstall it in 
about a week and I've made my first RPM package for it with the help of 
another Ark developer who helped me patch a makefile.

I'm not sure how things are going with Ark Linux since I'm still 
learning who is who, I've more or less learned most of the fundamentals 
of building RPM's for the distribution as well as how to upload them and 
have them built for the distribution. Right now however there doesn't 
seem to be much of a governing body, few of the developers seem to 
communicate amongst each other and Since I volunteered to work on Ark I 
have only met Bero and one other developer who helped me work on my 
first contributed RPM, there have not been any meetings over IRC in 
which people discussed what they were doing, what needed to be done and 
proper introductions were made, as far as I know Ark is more or less 
limited to Bero and a small handful of contributors. Had I volunteered 
for Lycoris as I would have done had I not been asked to join Ark Linux 
as a packager and later on possibly a developer I would have wound up 
getting dismissed a few days ago when Joseph Cheek made the announcement 
that thing had become a mess at Lycoris and they had to get rid of a few 
volunteers and restructure a little. Hopefully God does have a plan for 
my volunteering with Ark since it will provide me with the opportunity 
to add to my skills and learn more about Linux, it would help Ark 
progress albeit just a little faster, and the relief of many of the list 
members I may stop complaining about distributions once I've helped Ark 
become the first free ($0) distribution to be truly great, chances are 
though I'll more likely just be thankful that a distribution works 
unlike the current development release of Dockyard (test release) which 
contributors have to use ;-) .

Anyway long post made short: Windows has decent freeware but can't reach 
its full potential without a lot of very expensive software, some 
freeware is better then the stuff MS tries to sell (ex: anything is 
better then Visual Studio which has virtually no syntax highlighting). 
Some distributions aren't nice and give GNU and Linux a bad name 
although there are also good ones: Xandros bad, Mandrake ok, Slackware 
good. Some distributions have strange logic and high prices and finally 
as a volunteer for Ark I hope to learn a lot about GNU software and 
Linux so I can eventually get trusted with more important tasks, 
volunteering for Ark is a little self motivated but its just as much 
because I want to see the project speed up and because I want to see 
what potention it may have once its stable, if I like it then I want to 
know enough so that I do my best to ensure the distribution's survival 
and progress. Also I'm hoping that by volunteering I'll have the 
opportunity to make a difference rather then complain about distributions.

Just a final thought:
Large, closed source companies: inherited by family member or chosen 
successor of owner or purchased (taken over) by another company, sulk, 
leave or both if displeased. Parting of original leader could destroy 
the company or make it stronger.
Open Source Projects/Distributions: Vote for your leaders or get a 
successor chosen by the previous leader, leave or fork the project if 
displeased. Parting of original leader could make the project stronger 
or lead to its abandonment but never destroy it since the source code 
would always be there for someone else to continue if they want.

Goodnight everyone :-)

--
http://www.geocities.com/ntws01/
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