Verily I say unto thee, that Mark Kent spake thusly:
> This is very much to Homer's point about the philosophy of
> open-source versus proprietary stacks.
Although I don't like proprietary software for many reasons (security,
transparency, etc.), that's not to say that *all* companies who make
proprietary software are corrupt. This particular issue is not about
proprietary software per se, but just about two extremely reprehensible
corporations; Microsoft and Intel, who would sabotage a *charity* for
the sake of greed, thus becoming the providers of the IT education
infrastructure that displaces the charity they sabotaged.
Impressionable children might then be inclined to think that such
behaviour was acceptable, that the goal of IT is to monopolise and
destroy, that sabotage and greed are worthy pursuits, that the
underlying politics of right-wing extremist corporate fascism are a
natural and acceptable part of technology, that sharing and altruism are
tantamount to Communism, that GNU/Linux is "illegal", that cooperation
and community spirit is nothing but "loony-bin hippie culture", and
whatever other sick indoctrination du jour Microsoft is peddling.
There's no doubt that proprietary software is just the mother of all bad
ideas in this, or frankly any environment, since these children need
open and accessible tools to learn, not Microsoft training devices. But
the core issue is not that a company makes a profit, or that the
software is proprietary, it is the sheer evil and corruption that Intel
and Microsoft bring to bear in everything they touch. They are not
content to merely compete, they must sabotage, destroy, corrupt and
monopolise; and no one is safe from their greed ... not even a charity
that should *never* even be *considered* any form of "competition". To
do so is just sick and evil. Microsoft and Intel should have left this
project alone. It should *never* be considered a "market"; it is *aid*.
*That's* the issue.
It's like I said before ... like it or not, philosophy and politics are
inseparable from IT - or any other aspect of society. Young children
trained on any given platform *will* be exposed to the philosophies and
politics of that platform, and the particular philosophies and politics
of Microsoft and Intel are downright nasty, at best. As for other
proprietary software vendors, and other hardware manufacturers, some are
better than others, but none are anywhere near as corrupt as Microsoft
and Intel (or the shell companies they hide behind).
--
K.
http://slated.org
.----
| "[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
16:16:30 up 26 days, 13:52, 2 users, load average: 0.06, 0.08, 0.08
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