Imagine if the battle between Linux and Windows were a soccer match...
The Linux team is owned and managed by a conglomerate of companies and
the Windows team is owned and managed by Microsoft.
The players are Linux developers on one side and Windows developers on
the other.
The field is the IT industry.
Surrounding the field are soccer fans, with Linux fans on one side and
Windows fans on the other.
Ostensibly this seems like a fair game. However, it is rigged in many,
sometimes subtle ways.
Of all the vicious; clandestine; boiler-room deals that Microsoft uses
to fix matches, the one that has the most obvious manifestation is the
presence of soccer hooligans in the terraces. These thugs throw coins
at the referee; blast horns at inopportune moments, trying to disrupt
the match; shout abuses and make obscene gestures to the opposing team
and their fans; whilst singing racists and sectarian slurs.
For years Linux was the underdog, with Microsoft continuing to rig the
game with almost complete impunity. But in recent years, the Microsoft
team's vice-like grip on the game has been slipping, their popularity
is waning, and they are losing supporters at an accelerated rate. More
recently they seem to be having financial trouble too.
As Microsoft's reign of terror weakens, the voices of their fake fans,
the soccer hooligans, become ever more shrill, and ever more debase.
Now consider this...
The Football Association maintains league tables of all the teams, the
final scores in each game, and various other statistics.
Should the FA maintain and publish statistics of how many coins soccer
hooligans threw at the referee, or the precise number of toilet rolls
that littered each field, at the end of each match?
Should the FA record and publish the racist songs sung during matches,
or the sectarian chants used to taunt the opposition?
Is the FA guilty of censorship by refusing to publish such statistics?
No?
Then why should anyone expect me to publish statistics, and details of
the Trolls' thuggery in COLA?
--
K.
http://slated.org
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| "[Microsoft] are willing to lose money for years and years just to
| make sure that you don't make any money, either." - Bob Cringely.
| - http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2007/07/cringely-the-un.html
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Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) on sky, running kernel 2.6.23.8-63.fc8
23:39:22 up 58 days, 21:15, 5 users, load average: 0.02, 0.06, 0.01
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