computer world guy misses point

Story: ComputerWorld Employs Ignorant JournalistsTotal Replies: 1
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nalf38

Sep 12, 2006
9:55 AM EDT
He's putting the cart before the horse by completely skipping over the fact that open source users have legitimate gripes about the MS operating system, primarily security and the ability to choose for yourself when your hardware is outdated, not because of vendor lock-in (or lock-out) when MS will no longer support something that's only three or four years old. And then he points to the worst of the open source zealots as being representative of the community in general, and that's not the case.

And on top of that, he's just plain wrong. Every major piece of open source software runs on Windows just fine: OpenOffice.org, Abiword, Firefox/Thunderbird/Mozilla, Apache, ClamAV, Gaim, Ghostscript (I've even written Win2k printer drivers for using GS for unsupported printers), every game console emulator ever written, etc... you name it, if it runs on Linux, there's probably a version for Windows, with the exception of KDE/Gnome specific programs, and even that will change soon with KDE 4.0.

And it's in every open source enthusiast's interests for those programs to work in Windows. When a Windows user is forced to upgrade, it's a relatively easy sell to at least get them to try Linux, because you can assure them that all of their favorite free programs they loved to use on Windows work identically in Linux, with the added bonus of practically no viruses or spyware.
devnet

Sep 12, 2006
11:20 AM EDT
Quoting:"He's putting the cart before the horse by completely skipping over the fact that open source users have legitimate gripes"
Not to mention that many, many thousands of Open Source advocates only run one operating system...and that is Microsoft Windows. I've found tons of programs released under BSD, LGPL, and GPL 2 licenses that run happily on MS Platforms. I'm sure if I got involved with these projects they wouldn't trash the MS platform they were building for would they?

Oh...crap, I just read your second paragraph. I just beat the dead horse too :| *sheepish grin* :D

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