On Wed, 19 Apr 2006, John McCreesh wrote:
And China: http://software.silicon.com/os/0,39024651,39158140,00.htm
As an admirer of Thinkpad laptops, I find this news particularly annoying...
Actually we can probably use that. Despite what the headlines have
recently stated saying, MS has benefited greatly from illegal use of its
software in China and, for that matter, everywhere else, too. MS doesn't
gain any money directly on illegal copies, but it does work very
effectively as a means of keeping out competition and keeping users locked
into MS.
MS is even likely to have encouraged illegal copies until competition
arrives. Quoth Chairman Gates in 1998:
"As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to
steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll
somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."
- http://news.com.com/2100-1023-212942.html
So something is happening if Chairman Gates and his flunkies have started
yanking the press' chain about piracy.
Maybe he really has figured out "how to collect" However, given the
activity about F/OSS in China, it's more likely that operating systems
distros like RedFlag are cutting into MS Windows and packages like
OpenOffice.org are cutting into MS Office and formats like OpenDocument
are cutting into MS' proprietary formats. All of that is very bad for MS.
We can use that.
We should also be able to leverage, though tactfully, the observation that
the president of China was detoured from meeting first with federal
officials. Instead he, the leader of a major portion of the world's
population and a growing economic power, was shunted off to meet and
perform symbolic services for a west coast politician at the schedule of
that politician. That's some serious loss of prestige. I can see him or
other politicians from China wanting to dig deeper into that hole -- not.
-Lars
Lars Noodén ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Patents are wrong for software but right for inventions. Write:
http://consultation.ffii.org/Commission_extends_the_consultation_by_12_days
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