On 22Aug2011 14:31, Aaron Toponce <aaron.topo...@gmail.com> wrote: | On Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 03:37:50PM +0000, Grant Edwards wrote: | > On 2011-08-22, Aaron Toponce <aaron.topo...@gmail.com> wrote: | > > What is 'M$ exchange'? I've heard of Microsoft Exchange, but I'm | > > unfamiliar with this 'M$' company to which you refer. | > | > You must be joking. People have been referring to Microsoft as "M$" | > for decades. | | Agreed. It's rather unfortunate too. I'm not joking, I'm making a point. | Calling Microsoft as "M$", "Micro$oft", etc comes off as childish and | fanboism. It doesn't represent the Free Software community to be petty and | childish, calling corporations that might not agree with our ideals, names. | That's all.
Speaking for myself, I've been happy to call them 'M$', not because they are a for-profit entity, but because for the last 2 or 3 DECADES they've been supplying expensive and often undocumented and BROKEN software that everyone else has to write special bug workarounds for. And I've had to deal with MS fanboys in the workplace for years who can't seem to see the problem. So: 'M$" not because they're for profit, but because they are trouble making ripoff artists. They have a long long history of issuing deliberately incompatible versions of protocols (and/or tools that should speak those protocols) that force people to run (and of course, BUY) their tools just to achieve some limited interoperation. Email is a classic example. Exchange has long been bug ridden and incompatible. Broken message-ids, broken in-reply-to, doesn't ship with pop or imap enabled by default, etc. Outlook (often pronounced LookOut!) has it own host of issues. To be fair, they have in the last (very) few years started to raise their game in terms of compatibility, but they still practice market-share incompatibility based lock in and upgrade based revenue raising. The whole point of protocols in interoperation, and Microsoft has for years been deliberately breaking them to force people to buy from them alone. Perhaps it is unfortunate, but it is not without cause. Cheers, -- Cameron Simpson <c...@zip.com.au> DoD#743 http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/ Microsoft Mail: as far from RFC-822 as you can get and still pretend to care. - Abby Franquemont-Guillory <abb...@tezcat.com>
