Index

Microsoft, Schlocksoft, Merdesoft, Cacasoft,…

A Rose by any Other Name

Here is an interesting and well reasoned article about how Microsoft’s lawyers and marketing can screw up even a reasonable operating system.  The only problem is that Microsoft Windows isn’t a real product to start with, so the whole argument falls into so much squid sashimi.

Windoze is nothing more than blatant corporate theft of all of the good ideas that everyone else in the computer science world has come up with, shoved willy-nilly into an incoherent blob of code that is then pawned off on the users through corporate shenanigans that would make the wolf of wall street blush if he were accused of them.

The author starts from the assumption that windoze is worth putting on your computer, a premise that I find a bit tedious if not downright ridiculous.  The only reason that I have it on any system that I touch is that I cannot escape it.  In particular, I have to use it at work, an experience that I frequently compare to government workers taking polygraph tests.

In the corporate idea ripoff race, Apple doesn’t fare much better.  The graphical operating system (ALL of the current variants) was reasonably well implemented for the first time at Xerox PARC, and paying exorbitant prices for the latest ripoffs of that creative work just doesn’t sit well with someone who enjoys creating.  Apple at least earns some of its stripes with cleaner design and a bit more carefully done interface, but they don’t try to pretend that they came up with the engine behind it - they admit that an open source OS is underneath it all.

The nice thing about Linux is that it is worth what you pay for it.  If you need paid support, you can get it, but otherwise you aren’t paying for corporate lawyers whose only job is to make sure that they take every cent from you that they possibly can.  At one time MCI was referred to in the vernacular as a lawyers’ office with a satellite dish on top - a parallel statement about Microsoft would not be far wrong.