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From: | Steven D'Aprano |
Subject: | Re: [Pan-users] VDQ Re: Policy discussion: GNKSA |
Date: | Sat, 09 Jul 2011 10:33:22 +1000 |
User-agent: | Thunderbird 2.0.0.5 (X11/20070719) |
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
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