What's all the FUD about?
,----[ Quote ]
| My favorite, classic FUD comes from Steve Ballmer. "There's no company called
| Linux, there's barely a Linux road map. Yet Linux sort of springs organically
| from the earth. And it had, you know, the characteristics of communism that
| people love so very, very much about it." Here, Ballmer went to the route of
| the American psyche. How many Americans, to this day, still cringe a little
| in fear at the voicing of "communism"? If there's anyway to turn Americans
| off from buying a Linux PC, it's to emblazon the image of a big, red, Soviet
| Flag on the face of Linux, to conjure up an image of FIdel Castro reciting
| his communist propaganda from a speech he'd written on his openoffice,org
| word processor, to strike fear into our hearts at the thought of a Wisconsin
| Senator named Joe McCarthy barging into our houses in the middle of the night
| to send us away to prison for life because we owned an Ubuntu PC. I can't say
| if this FUD actually worked; it was so preposterous, and so few people give
| any credence to what Ballmer says anymore, that people might have just
| laughed at it. But it does show the depths to which proprietary software
| makers will go to keep the Linux and open source software threat out of their
| wallets.
`----
http://linuxhow2.com/Feature_Articles/What_s_all_the_FUD_about.html
Related:
,----[ Quote ]
| The New Soviet Union.
| Microsoft isn't evil for being Microsoft, but because its leadership
| values control above delivering good products or advancing the state
| of the art. Rather than competing in the market, Microsoft's
| leadership has pursued a strategy of repeatedly deceiving the market.
| The result has been decades of productivity losses that negatively
| impact the rest of the world's economy and distract humanity away from
| technical achievement to instead fiddle with shoddy software that is
| weak because it was developed outside of competitive pressure....
|
| However, the iron fist of resistance to outside ideas was as
| destructive to the USSR as the inbreeding of royalty was to Europe's
| empire nations before it. Microsoft is facing the same failure by
| arrogantly pushing old strategies and ignoring the potential of open
| source. Microsoft's anti-open rhetoric even sounds a lot like the
| Soviet's view of free markets, laced with fear-based propaganda that
| promises dire consequences for experimenting with the open source
| ideas that are already proven to work outside of the Red Square of
| Redmond....
`----
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2007/12/13/soviet-microsoft-how-resistance-to-free-markets-and-open-ideas-will-the-unravel-the-software-superpower/#more-1347
|
|
