On Mon, 29 Oct 2001 21:32:52 -0800, "John Hokanson Jr." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Monday 29 October 2001 08:25 pm, you wrote: > > And I'm saying, he should make sure that it can be viewed > > properly. Not cop out with uncertainty. > > > > I agree with you, except Franki explicitly stated that he fears > > unless people are drawn away from MSIE, they might not ever > > consider switching to Linux. > > > > ====================================================== > > > > You missunderstood me again.... > > > > I made that point to indicate that if the web becomes IE only (can > > anyone deny that that > > is what M$ want?) people won't have the choice,,, I don't actually > > care if people want > > to use linux or not... I care that people have the choice to use > > whatever they want. > > What they want, and what they can do are two separate things. > Controlling the WORLD wide web would be significantly harder than > their attempts to control the OS market. If the US fails to stop them, > the European Union, Australia, Asia, and other regions get their > crack at them.
The EU is the only body with the clout to stop MS. While they look like being on the brink of fining MS billions of dollars for anti-competitive behaviour in the server market, they are also set to ratify an act which is not unlike the DMCA. > The Internet will not stand to be controlled by Microsoft. There > are too many people running Linux. Macs, Amigas, ect. for this to > happen. MS essentially control the Macintosh platform. Apple have to do what MS wants, or MS will stop making Office for the Mac. That would kill them. Most other OSs, for all practical purposes, are dead. It's sad but true. The latest addition to this list is BeOS, which was recently bought by Palm and is being neglected. Free software represents a real and credible threat to Microsoft's plans. When the W3C considered RAND licensing earlier this month, the outrage from the free software community was so strong that they appointed Bruce Perens and the FSF's Eben Moglen to their board, in an effort to prevent Perens's threat of the community forking the standards from taking place. > The WORST that will happen is that third party browsers will > have to learn how parse Microsoft's proprietary web code. > Afterall, Star Office can read Word documents..... Do you have any idea how long this has taken? Compatibility is still not 100%, even after years of painstaking reverse-engineering. Once MS controls web standards, they are free to do what they like with it. They will push Windows-only technologies like VBScript and ActiveX over JavaScript and Java. I wouldn't be surprised if they introduce binary code, as they have done in the MS Word format. They can keep their standards moving, so that by the time they are reverse-engineered they are already obsolete. Again, the MS Word file format is a prime example here. Try reading this article by Robert X. Cringely: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20010802.html Of notable mention is this: "According to these programmers, Microsoft wants to replace TCP/IP with a proprietary protocol -- a protocol owned by Microsoft -- that it will tout as being more secure. Actually, the new protocol would likely be TCP/IP with some of the reserved fields used as pointers to proprietary extensions, quite similar to Vines IP, if you remember that product from Banyan Systems." It may only be a rumour today, but the fact that so many knowledgeable people actually believe it means that it shouldn't be ignored. > In fact, if it weren't for Linux, the government's case against > Microsoft might have come sooner.... The DoJ has been closely watching MS since at least 1993, when they were found guilty of using stolen code from Digital Research in MS-DOS, and of deliberately making DR-DOS incompatible with Windows 3.1. GNU/Linux has only become prominent in the past couple of years, but DoJ-MS relations have been going for far longer than that. GNU/Linux has absolutely nothing to do with the case, and had no bearing whatsoever on it. If it was, then why was MS found to be overwhelmingly guilty? -- Sridhar Dhanapalan The Information Revolution will be fought on the command line.
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