Re: [Pan-users] VDQ Re: Policy discussion: GNKSA

[Steven D'Aprano]

Beartooth wrote:

> 	What will the effect be on how Pan works, who adopts or emulates 
> it, or whatever? (If Pan Triumphant will emulate the horseshoe nail by 
> making the whole Evil Empire of Redmond fall into a cybernetic abyss, 
> Excelsior! say I.)


I'm kinda tired of Microsoft bashing, and I'm saying that as somebody 
who was a Microsoft basher. Microsoft now is not the same as Microsoft 
of 1998, or even of 2005. Thanks in part to the European Union (who did 
what the US Justice Department refused to do and actually put MS over 
their knee and gave them a sound spanking) and in part due to commercial 
realities (Microsoft's customers said "Ballmer, we're using Linux and we 
want Windows to interoperate with it, get over it"), MS has developed an 
uneasy and reluctant but nevertheless genuine attitude that they have to 
Play Nice With Others.

Consequently, we now have entire departments of MS that publicly 
contribute to Open Source projects, the whole "Linux is a cancer" thing 
has been toned down, and there's hardly even any more talk about patent 
threats.

On the other hand, do you know who I fear? Google and Apple. Between the 
two of them, this could very well be the last generation where general 
purpose computing devices are available massively to the public, as 
opposed to specialist hobbyist machines. Between Google putting 
everything on the cloud, and Apple locking down computers and turning 
the operating system into a walled garden where you can barely write a 
shell script without their permission, the future for hacking is looking 
grim.



--
Steven