[CS-FSLUG] Proprietary Software: Capitalism or Greed?

[Alan Trick]

On Thu, 2006-03-23 at 01:17 -0800, Jukka wrote:
> On 3/22/06, Alan Trick <alantrik at yahoo.ca> wrote:
> > You're confusing Free Software with Open Standards.
> 
> No I don't think so.

I guess I read things wrong (it wouldn't be the first time). My point
was that you could have open standards in a closed source world.

> My point was that _operating systems_ should should be part of the
> infrastructure which is open/available for everybody. Without such
> operating system it is not possible to ensure that software runs
> optimally and as it should.

Well there is POSIX, the problem is that AFAIK, no Operating System is
fully compliant as too date. Linux is pretty good, but still not there.
Windows has claimed to be compliant since NT but it's all a big lie
(basically, it was a requirement for government use, so they said they
would, but then conveniently forgot about it). Most of the other OSes
are either a bit better or worse than Linux.

It's a lot like HTML/CSS if you've ever done webdesign. There're a lot
of browsers that have decent compliance, then there's IE. So you end up
with a great standard that has awesome potential, but when it comes to
the real world, and making websites you have to fill them full of _'s,
oddly places comments, * html, etc.

The really agrivating thing is that in both of these cases, the worst
offender by far is MS, and it's not like they're incompetent since they
make more money in a day than I'll make in 100 lifetimes.

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com