Hi,
Firstly, I dont think you understand Open Source as a whole, and Linux
in specific.
On 08/25/2009 11:55 AM, Nalin Savara wrote:
I had been exposed to more specific overtures of Microsoft to policy makers
etc-- and that scares me and pushes me to contribute and/or actually
encourage people who are contributing to FOSS in india.
Open Source has nothing to do with Microsoft. eg. There are many many
open source projects that only aim to target usability on the MS
platforms. Apple / Sun / IBM / Cisco etc are all in the same boat. Open
source does not, as an idea, target any commercial product vendor. The
main aim is about choice and the existence of that choice, even when
working with closed vendor solutions.
To give you a more specific example, since you seem very new to the
whole world of open source, is the whole noise around Microsoft Word.
Noone has any problems with MS-Word and what its capable of and what it
looks like or what it does. None is asking for it to be 'open sourced'.
However, the file formats used by Word tend to be focused around locking
a user into the Word 'platform' and also create 'peer pressure' on
everyone to also buy into this. The open source movement wants that to
be taken away - the filefdormats, data exchange formats, should be an
open specification so as to let the user decide on whats a better
solution for their roles. And if MSWord is what they need, nothing stops
them from going out and buying it. Lets not forget, its still a free
world and most people are generally allowed to make choices that work
for them.
Another example that might help clear this up for you is the cifs/smb
suite. Think about it.
I have no agenda, and I know most people here on the list as well as
people involved with open source, dont target a company for what it is,
as long as there is no abuse of their position to impact the choice
users might have. And in many cases, you will find fullstack vendors
like Sun, actually shipping Linux and BSD containers in Solaris ( anyone
remember Solaris Brandz ? )
----
(1) My mail was based on my own career and product development experience--
but your comments were neither about your career nor your products nor
about people you know anything about. Which is why most of your email
was just wasted noise.
that products always take longer than expected to develop--- and if one
starts looking at weaknesses/non-compliances/faults too early--- the
development may never reach critical speed OR critical mass-- and may drag
on forever.
you might want to look up how this process works in the open source
world. Also, version control is fairly competent these days and working
on branches isnt as hard or as alien as it used to be in the dark ages.
It is a well studied phenomena among product develop professionals in
various fields called-- that if you dont have any prototype OR feature
complete product early (no matter how buggy)--- then chances are it is going
to take a order of magnitude more time to converge upon a stable and usable
final shippable product.
Do you even know what BOSS is and what they are doing ? you seem to be
working it a an upstream of debian. What they do is essentially a few
people doing very few package development, and building a distro ( which
is usually just running a script, a script they didnt write )
(3) No offense or insult was intended-- but yes, as I later wrote in a
unicast mail to Karan-- microsoft has unlimited millions of dollars to lobby
policy makers--
If your single agenda is to attack Microsoft - you have the wrong forum,
look elsewhere. Perhaps the Apple communities, they seem to be giving MS
a few nightmares of late.
ps: yes, and in working on a Open Source project to adapt GNU GCC toolchain
What project is that then ? and whats your contribution there ? I
seriously hope for the well being of the project you have no decision
making role to play.
--
Karanbir Singh : http://www.karan.org/ : 2522...@icq
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