Date: Sat, 23 Mar 2002 00:51:00 +0100 From: Cliff Sarginson <csfbsd@raggedclown.net> To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Advocacy help for CS professor Message-ID: <20020322235100.GN4940@raggedclown.net> In-Reply-To: <1016835511.3c9badb74132e@webmail.neomedia.it> References: <1016835511.3c9badb74132e@webmail.neomedia.it>
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This question has really lit a spark. To the questioner, show him the variety of answers. Sadly it is not good enough to say Microsoft is the invention of a rich boy with nothing better to do (than pretend he wrote GWBasic, which he did not). It is not good enough to say Microsoft has broken laws, has lied, has made it's OS inoperable, wtihout IE, has tied people's hands together. That it is coroborating with the extinction of your rights. It is not good enough to tell anyone that the blue screen of death was considered acceptable by Mr Gates. That Windows NT a stable version of Windows was written by ex-DEC people. That not one line of it's code has anything to do with DOS. That *no-one* in Microsoft has access to the complete source code for any of their OS'es. That the programmers there are working blind to what the other programmers are doing. No-one is telling you that Unix was one man's idea. He wanted an OS he didn't have to fight. He also wanted to publish some stuff. (Ok, let's face it nroff is unforgiveable). no-one is telling you that Unix is free. Not the arsholic versions that Sun have come up with, that seems to require permission from NIS before you blow your nose. Or the HP-UX C Compiler that decides a misplaced cast makes something an lvalue, when it is not. Or the amazing version of Unix that Bull came up with (called Spix..there's a great marketing ploy for you) that I had the dubious pleasure of writing TCP/IP programs for and wondered why FIN-WAITS seemed to hang around for days on end. (Oh and Emacs caused kernel panics as well). On the other hand Unix has attracted some of the most intellignt minds in the computer biz. There are people out there writing this stuff, earning squat from it. Within days of a security alert there is a fix. That is the crucial difference. Microsoft wants shareholders. Open source programmers want the damn thing to work. And if anyone has a firewall that they want to give me. please email me. -- Regards Cliff Sarginson -- <csfbsd@raggedclown.net> To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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