Re: Boycott Microsoft

mdevlin@eltrax.com (T. Max Devlin) writes: >Everybody is trying to make money. The question is whether money is >more important than ethics and fair competition. ^^^^^^ I think we're seeing a major split here on what is considered ethical behavior. >Not precisely, no. If Sun were in Microsoft's position, they would >submit Win32 to a standards body after controlling it long enough to be >sure that it meets their needs and its stabled. After that, they could >care less if they own it, in fact it is better if they don't. Happened >with NIS, happened with SBus (though nobody much used it), happened with >NFS, and it _will_ happen with Java, if Microsoft will stop insisting >that they be allowed to unilaterally make it proprietary. Netscape, of >course, has just GPLd their browser and there are rumors of working with >GPL Linux. 1. There is nothing inherently noble about submitting your work to national or international standards bodies. It depends on what you think makes the best sense. 2. There is nothing inherently evil about trying to thwart the competition. 3. We are all obligated to follow the law as it's written, not what someone behind a podium thinks is the "spirit" or "intent" of the law. >Since they cannot compete fairly, they need relief from the courts. >Weaklings. Just like them to call the cops when somebody is stalking >them with knife... They still have the majority market share in browsers, for god's sake! >Blame Microsoft; it's their fault. Nobody _asked_ them to build a >monopoly with unethical business practices and then try to leverage it >illegally and then cry that the government is somehow doing this so that >_you_ can't buy their fine products, conveniently forgetting that nobody >_cares_ how Microsoft decides to make their products. We just insist >they are not allowed, through their decisions, to prevent anyone else >from making competing products. The Justice department has taken the stand that the public is best served if Microsoft is curbed. This is a public policy decision. The browser wars are being used to implement that decision. The future will tell us who is right. In my own opinion, we have all benefited from microsoft's success. If events had turned out differently and Steve Jobs was in Bill Gate's place, we would be paying more and doing less with our computers. Additionally, the market place for both hardware and software developers would be considerably more constrained. I think that some of the anti MS rhetoric is fueled by academic elitism on the part of people who don't understand that tight elegant code is neither sufficient nor necessary to make a good product. Some more is motivated by envy, and the rest is good old anthropoid piling on. The truth is that no one is being forced to buy anything from MS. There are alternatives for every one of their products. As long as the pressure on MS causes them to continue publishing their apis and as long as the install wizard is available for the price of VB or C++ we don't have much to fear. The contention that contracts requiring IE to be preinstalled on bundled computer systems somehow harm the public good is BS. Perhaps we should make MS pay the end customer for using up 40MB of their precious disk space? That's about $2.