From owner-freebsd-chat Mon Apr 17 11:22:45 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from mail.enteract.com (mail.enteract.com [207.229.143.33]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5C11737B8F4 for ; Mon, 17 Apr 2000 11:22:41 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dscheidt@enteract.com) Received: from shell-1.enteract.com (dscheidt@shell-1.enteract.com [207.229.143.40]) by mail.enteract.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id NAA33219; Mon, 17 Apr 2000 13:21:05 -0500 (CDT) (envelope-from dscheidt@enteract.com) Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2000 13:21:05 -0500 (CDT) From: David Scheidt To: J McKitrick Cc: David Schwartz , "G. Adam Stanislav" , chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: M$ anti-trust case In-Reply-To: <20000417183905.D27040@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Mon, 17 Apr 2000, J McKitrick wrote: > Unfortunately, though the judge ruled M$ broke the law, many are arguing > that M$ really hasn't hurt anyone but developers, and has helped consumers. > Unfortunately, it appears that is the case. > I don't see how MS could possibly have helped consumers. One of things that it does is poorly document the Windows API, and make changes to it, willy-nilly. This makes it much harder for other companies to produce software, particularly where they are competing with an established MS prodcuct, like say MS Office. Preventing competition in the consumer application market is not a help to the consumer. The people that say Billy gates brought the computer to the masses, by giving everyone a machine that they could have at home miss that that would have happened, even in his absence. It likely would have involved more than one OS, which would likely be better than windows. IN a competive enviornment, no one would stand for the sort of shit that windows puts out. Printer drivers that stop working for no reason, random crashes, software the installs system files, on top of software that installed other vgersions of the same file? Ick. Windows 2000 is pretty close to having stuff that TOPS-10 had in 1975. David To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message