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Re: [News] Linux Has A Birthday

Verily I say unto thee, that The Ghost In The Machine spake thusly:
> In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Chris Ahlstrom <linonut@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
> wrote on Mon, 6 Oct 2008 11:19:35 -0400 
> <jYpGk.42793$XT1.19978@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

>> Imagine that!  A "hobbyist" project surviving 17 years under that
>> shadow of Mordorsoft.
>> 
>> Not only surviving... flourishing.
>> 
> 
> It's not dead; I'll give it that (and I hope it never dies;

Free Software only dies when there is no one left who wants it, so for
all intents and purposes, it's immortal (something that keeps Sweaty up
late at night, I'm sure).

> AmigaOS is effectively out of the picture

Nope:

[quote]
It's alive!: Ars reviews AmigaOS 4.1

By Jeremy Reimer | Published: September 22, 2008 - 11:30PM CT
A new version of AmigaOS
[/quote]

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/amigaos41-ars.ars

It's a testament to how great AmigaOS is that it's still being actively
developed, even as a commercial system without sales for years?

There's even new hardware for it too:

http://www.acube-systems.biz/eng/sam.php

> But Windows 95 had a far faster adoption rate, in 1995 or 
> thereabouts.  Of course it had a little help from MS-DOS. I'll admit
> to wondering as to Windows' rate of adoption in the 1985 timeframe,
> when it first came out.

The means by which Microsoft attained that "adoption" is infamous:

[quote]
Last month, the government released documents showing that Microsoft
threatened to cut off its vital Windows 95 operating system software to
any PC manufacturer highlighting Netscape's Navigator on its desktop
instead of Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

...

In the documents issued by the government to bolster its case against
Microsoft, some PC manufacturers said they had been threatened that they
would not be able to bundle Windows 95 with their products if they tried
to install it without Internet Explorer.

Microsoft also tried to bind the manufacturers with secrecy clauses.
Nothing sinister in that, says Microsoft's lawyer William Neukom.
[/quote]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/30265.stm


[quote]
Microsoft today portrayed a senior Intel executive as a disgruntled
"prima donna" who fabricated allegations as part of a vendetta. But
despite the sometimes dramatic cross-examination, Microsoft was unable
to rebuff the executive's most damaging claim--that the software giant
sought to use its dominance to suffocate competitors.

...

According to McGeady, Microsoft vice president of development Paul
Maritz told the chip giant he intended to "cut off [the] air supply" of
Netscape Communications, whose Navigator browser was posing a serious
threat to Microsoft's market dominance.

McGeady also had testified that Maritz said his company's strategy was
to "embrace, extend, and extinguish" competing technologies, such as the
HTTP and HTML Web standards, as well as Sun Microsystems' Java
programming language.
[/quote]

http://news.cnet.com/Microsoft,-Intel-wage-war-of-words/2100-1023_3-217848.html


[quote]
IT MIGHT BE months before a jury begins deliberations in a class-action
antitrust suit against Microsoft Corp. in Iowa. The rest of us can spend
that time reading e-mails company executives never intended to be public.

The case has resulted in the disclosure of large volumes of internal
Microsoft memos and messages -- some recent enough to shed new light on
issues still relevant to the company.

...

Other messages date back to the 1990s. An e-mail by then-Microsoft
executive Brad Silverberg, trying to schedule a strategy meeting,
demonstrated that even ambitions of industry dominance are subject to
the mundane complications of corporate scheduling.

"I'd be glad to help tilt lotus into the death spiral," Silverberg wrote
in October 1991. "I could do it friday afternoon but not Saturday. I
could do it pretty much any time the (following) week."

The documents also include accounts of internal presentations. One
getting attention is a 1996 speech in which James Plamondon, then a
Microsoft evangelist, described independent software vendors -- one of
the Redmond company's most important constituencies -- as "pawns."
[/quote]

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/300590_software22.html


[quote]
Referring to Apple's QuickTime software, Avadis Trevanian says Microsoft
told Apple to "knife the baby" if it wanted to survive in the multimedia
software market.
[/quote]

http://hardware.silicon.com/desktops/0,39024645,11006817,00.htm


[quote]
The States' remedy hearing opened in DC yesterday, and States attorney
Steven Kuney produced a devastating memo from Kempin, then in charge of
Microsoft's OEM business, written after Judge Jackson had ordered his
break-up of the company. Kempin raises the possibility of threatening
Dell and other PC builders which promote Linux.

"I'm thinking of hitting the OEMs harder than in the past with
anti-Linux. ... they should do a delicate dance," Kempin wrote to
Ballmer, in what is sure to be a memorable addition to the phrases
("knife the baby", "cut off the air supply") with which Microsoft
enriched the English language in the first trial. Unlike those two, this
is not contested.
[/quote]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/03/19/microsoft_killed_dell_linux_states/


[quote]
Lukovsky's statement says: "Prior to joining Google, I set up a meeting
on or about November 11, 2004 with Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer to
discuss my planned departure....At some point in the conversation Mr.
Ballmer said: "Just tell me it's not Google." I told him it was Google.

At that point, Mr. Ballmer picked up a chair and threw it across the
room hitting a table in his office. Mr. Ballmer then said: "Fucking Eric
Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I'm going to fucking bury that guy, I have
done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking kill Google."
[/quote]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/05/chair_chucking/


Windows high "adoption" rate is due to it being forced on consumers by
gangsters running a racketeering operation. Period.

-- 
K.
http://slated.org

.----
| "At the time, I thought C was the most elegant language and Java
|  the most practical one. That point of view lasted for maybe two
|  weeks after initial exposure to Lisp."   ~ Constantine Vetoshev
`----

Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) on sky, running kernel 2.6.25.11-60.fc8
 18:59:38 up 51 days, 16:12,  5 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.02, 0.00

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