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-- go! mircosoft


Posted by rizo on Aug-22-2003 23:38:

Unhappy go! mircosoft

taken from slashdot
quote:
WIPO Pressured to Kill Meeting on Open Source

Posted by michael on Friday August 22, @07:23PM
from the thou-shalt-not-speak-its-name dept.
panthan writes "The Washington Post has has an article about a proposed meeting of the WIPO concerning open source having been removed from consideration, apparently due to pressure from the US State Department and the USPTO. 'In short order, lobbyists from Microsoft-funded trade groups were pushing officials at the State Department and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to squelch the meeting. One lobbyist, Emery Simon with the Business Software Alliance, said his group objected to the suggestion in the proposal that overly broad or restrictive intellectual-property rights might in some cases stunt technological innovation and economic growth.'" Lawrence Lessig has some comments.


Posted by malek on Aug-23-2003 00:39:

agh open source... its good for some projects, but diefinatly not good for setting standards such as Operating system. You'll never see Linux catching up on Windows for so many reason, but the reason number one being that there's no concerted effort of development. Its standards wars at the developper/geek level...


Posted by drgoodvibe on Aug-23-2003 07:30:

quote:
Originally posted by ahlamalek
agh open source... its good for some projects, but diefinatly not good for setting standards such as Operating system. You'll never see Linux catching up on Windows for so many reason, but the reason number one being that there's no concerted effort of development. Its standards wars at the developper/geek level...



true.. but the linux kernel is pretty standard.. all the bells and whistles are different if you compare each linux flavour though. but thats whats great about linux.. you can find the flavour that suits your needs best.


Posted by rizo on Aug-23-2003 07:47:

from my experiance linux (and especially bsd) has surpassed windows nt on the server side. hopefully it will surpass the desktop soon, look at what apple did with mac os x (darwin bsd) ill agree theres sevral standard wars, but that also applies to closed source in software and hardware levels.

'In short order, lobbyists from Microsoft-funded trade groups were pushing officials at the State Department and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to squelch the meeting. One lobbyist, Emery Simon with the Business Software Alliance, said his group objected to the suggestion in the proposal that overly broad or restrictive intellectual-property rights might in some cases stunt technological innovation and economic growth.'

whats wrong with having an open source meeting? just shows the how badly the US government is owned by corporations, and microsoft is one of them. it also doesnt stunt technological innovation, just look at samba. has alot more options and better at somethings than microsofts own smb implication. havnt the last few major security risk been for windows? another example is all the avilable gui's for xwindows.

the economic growth, i will agree with it a little, but how much does money does microsoft need! i like mexico's move from windows to linux, it saves them alot of money, close to around $100 a computer per year for the licenses. also oregon's bill to consider moving to open source is a good idea.


Posted by St_Andrew on Aug-23-2003 14:11:

quote:
Originally posted by ahlamalek
agh open source... its good for some projects, but diefinatly not good for setting standards such as Operating system. You'll never see Linux catching up on Windows for so many reason, but the reason number one being that there's no concerted effort of development. Its standards wars at the developper/geek level...


wtf have you been in your life? the open source community support standards, microsoft don't! and linux is catching up with windows...


Posted by malek on Aug-23-2003 15:06:

quote:
Originally posted by St_Andrew
wtf have you been in your life? the open source community support standards, microsoft don't! and linux is catching up with windows...


how about a standard to manage something as simple as fonts, one of the reasons why Adobe Photoshop isn't yet ported to Linux.


Posted by St_Andrew on Aug-23-2003 15:37:

quote:
Originally posted by ahlamalek
how about a standard to manage something as simple as fonts, one of the reasons why Adobe Photoshop isn't yet ported to Linux.


no big problem, just some bad excuse for adobe to not port it for linux... a microsoft example: internet explorer doesn't support w3.org standards. isn't that more sick?


Posted by moncster on Aug-27-2003 07:17:

quote:
Originally posted by St_Andrew
no big problem, just some bad excuse for adobe to not port it for linux... a microsoft example: internet explorer doesn't support w3.org standards. isn't that more sick?




And because of that, site's are breaking w3 standards so they would display properly in IE. It's to the point where some sites would refuse to display (eg redirecting you to a blank page). Does anyone know how to make Moz pretend it's IE?


Posted by Dr. Cfire on Sep-16-2003 15:38:

Microsoft doesnt support standards. They just make up their own and try to bully everyone else into useing it.

For some examples:
quote:

* News.com has an excellent article on Microsoft's holy war on Java. Read it and you will marvel at how Microsoft can ever say with a straight face that they do things for the good of their customers. That article is only the beginning, though. Check out Thomas Winzig's site dedicated to exposing Microsoft's Java strategy.
* Whether it was intentional or merely an act of incompetence is unclear, but several Microsoft products were built to output broken HTML (the language used to create web pages). When viewed with non-Microsoft products, the resulting HTML appears to be filled with grammatical errors. John Walker gives a good explanation of the situation on his page containing a short program to fix the problem.
* Kerberos is a technology created at MIT to make it easy for users to securely prove who they are. As an example, instead of having to enter a password for every program or web page you want to use, you would enter your password once when you begin your session with the computer and then Kerberos would take care of authenticating you everywhere else so that you don't have to re-enter your password over and over. This is a bit of an over-simplification, but suffice is to say that Kerberos is very useful and very well designed.

Kerberos, as with most MIT software projects, was made freely available for anybody to use and integrate into their software. In typical Microsoft style, Microsoft took the Kerberos standard (which they got for free, mind you), integrated it into Windows and then changed it to be incompatible with Kerberos on every other platform. If that wasn't enough, they refused to freely release details of the changes that they made so that other platforms could be made compatible with their Windows "extensions." After much complaining from the tech community, Microsoft eventually released a spec for their changes, but in order to access it you had to agree to a license stating that it was a trade secret (yes, they wanted to claim trade secret protection on something they had mostly gotten for free from MIT)! Some people eventually decided to ignore the license and publish what changes were made anyway, which prompted Microsoft to threaten legal action. (Note: Microsoft did eventually allow public access to their changes after much outcry. Nonetheless, their Kerberos implementation still does not allow appropriate interoperability with standard Kerberos software.) Reference articles: [Slashdot article #1] [Slashdot article #2] [LinuxWorld article] [Salon article]


Posted by rizo on Sep-16-2003 18:48:

just thought ill add that if had to deal with upgrading ms office or loading older ms office documents you would know theres no standard in there either. if you want a real office standard that documents will never break when a new office version comes out i suggest taking a look at the fully cross platform and free openoffice.org



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