OT: Two ways Microsoft sabotages Linux desktop adoption

[John Pierce]

On 2/13/06, Mike McCarty <mike.mccarty at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> Temlakos wrote:
> > Mike McCarty wrote:
> > That's no different from what Coca-Cola and Pepsi do. I don't hear
> > you screaming about them coercing people.

No, do not compare apples to oranges.  Pepsi and Coco-Cola have
competition in the market place, Sams Colo, RC products, Dollar
General Brand just to name a few.

Microsoft has no competition in the desktop os market, they put them
out of business or stop them from getting in business.  Remember they
have already been convicted of being a monopoly, now we just need to
stop fining them chump change, 10 to 20 billion dollars in fines would
certainly change their attitude.

Somewhere else in this thread was mentioned windows success, windows
is not successful, Microsoft's monopoly err, marketing is successful. 
As far as requiring registration of the product for it to run, they
could have done that with md-dos, windows 3.0, 3.1, 3.11wfw, 95, 98,
98se, me, nt, 2000, they chose not to.  They wanted people to spread
the discs around, share the os and allow people to become hooked on
windows inferiority.  Now windows xp comes along, you have to license
it or it will not run, change the underlying hardware and it will not
run, vista is going to get worse.

Microsoft offers the os source code in lieu of an api specification
for communicating with networking stack, that's it get people to see
the code and become tainted in the copyright infringement cases.

Hardware drivers, that's a good one.  Let's look at winmodems, I have
a lucent/agere winmodem that has a linux driver in two parts, the
proprietary part from lucent and the open source part from the
linmodem driver project.  Hardware manufactures could solve this
problem and still maintain their proprietary parts.  Place on every
pci carcd, modem, network, sound, video and such an eeprom chip that
contains the specifications necessary to make a driver communicate
with said card.  Adaptive drivers would query the cards internal hpi
(hardware programming interface) and learn what is necessary and how
to communicate with said card.

Imagine a wifi card build in such a manner and when plugged in the os
kernel running says "hey I found a wifi card, I will load my wifi
driver component and that driver component will query the card learn
how to speak to it, its configuration possibilities and start driving
it."

Microsoft has prevented that from happening, as in having the
manufacuturer make a winmodem, give microsoft the api (and no one
else), microsoft has the only driver, buy microsoft windows or you
cannot use this hardware, computer manufacturer put a winmodem in
every machine you make.  Based on that microsoft sells windows, modem
manufacturer sells x units at 7.00 a pop, computer manufacturer gets
their share.

I saw a post the other day concerning the micrsoft malicious software
removal tool, it will remove portions of Nortorn products and a
registry hack is required to get it back.  It would not be the first
time microsoft has sabotaged someone Else's product to make their own
look better or sell better.

Just my ranting.

John
--
Registered Linux User 263680, get counted at
http://counter.li.org