On Feb 9, 2:14 pm, Doctor Smith <smith.smith5...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Can anyone be more self centered and dishonest than this idiot Roy
> Schestowitz?
> He posts a headline which reads:
> "GNU/Linux Now Used in Desktops of H & R Block"
> Links to an article which says nothing of the sort.
> IOW H&R Block ARE NOT USING LINUX ON THEIR DESKTOPS.
>
> http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/115462/index.html
>
> Once again Roy Schestowitz completely mis-represents the facts in order to
> promote Linux.
Roy must be doing a pretty good job to get all this individual
attention. It seems that the more effective an advocate is, the more
"heat" he gets from the WinTrolls.
I'd probably have to see the entire combination to see if Roy's
"Teaser Line" was the way you quoted it, and if the quote he snipped
(which he always does) was as misleading as you depict.
> What a complete and utter liar and phony Roy Schestowitz is.
> Spend 10 minutes on his Boycottnxxxxx website and you can easily see the
> truth.
I don't agree with many of Roy's positions, but he does a good job of
presenting a LOT of information in favor of Linux and highlighting
tactics being used by Microsoft and other companies to prevent the
spread of Linux.
When Microsoft and Novell cut their deal, it was obvious that
Microsoft was trying to get control of key technology - in this case
it turned out to be Xen, and try to rip it away from Novell and the
OSS community and turn it into Microsoft "ShovelWare". What's amusing
is that Citrix thinks they will get rich off the deal. Remember how
Microsoft used Citrix to jack up the price of remote access to Windows
desktop machines? Then Microsoft started bundling Remote Access as
shovel-ware. Citrix was able to come back with GoToMyPC.com, which
was a very good implementation of little more than VNC, ipsec or
stunnel, and LDAP.
I suppose it would be rude to point out that I had been doing this
using Linux systems since about 1999, with VNC, stunnel or IPSEC, and
LDAP or MySQL.
Microsoft DID add the legal requirement to XP and Vista that the
machine being used to ACCESS an XP system must be LICENSED (not
necessarily running) for XP, and machine being used to ACCESS Vista
must be LICENSED (not necessarily running) Vista.
I haven't really studied the Windows 2003 and Windows 2008 licenses.
Are there requirements that the client machines be licensed for some
minimum version of Windows?
> Shit, I'll even start you off. Here is yet another total lie and
> mis-representation from Roy Schestowitz the dishonest liar.
You're showing your ignorance here.
> http://boycottnovell.com/2009/02/09/moonlight-is-not-free/
The GPL and LGPL are very specific legal agreements between not only
the original developers, but also all of the contributors who provide
bug fixes, enhancements, documentation, testing, and advocacy.
Keep in mind that one of the reasons that Richard Stallman created the
GPL in the first place was because Ed Gosling (of Java fame) had taken
a copy of Emacs which had been in public domain, added some
proprietary printer drivers, and then started selling it for about
$300 per SEAT.
Almost immediately, Stallman got letters from all of the thousands of
contributors to emacs who were furious at this appearant betrayal, and
were threatening lawsuits and demanding royalties. Gosling wasn't
even paying Stallman royalties, let alone expressing any willingness
to negotiate royalties with these other contributors.
In 1984, Stallman came to net.legal and requested some help finding a
way to protect emacs from poachers like Gosling, but at the same time,
make it freely distributable and protect the interests of ALL of the
contributors.
About 30 lawyers and others familiar with copyright law spent about 3
months making suggestions, ranging from specific clauses, to general
concepts, even some composite drafts and eventually the bulk of the
language of the General Public License.
Shortly after the publication of Emacs under the General Public
License, Richard and some other contributors to BSD who had seen their
work appropriated by AT&T asked if they could use the same license to
protect the code they had originally written under BSD. The result
was the GNU (GNU is Not Unix) project and the GNU Public License.
Many of those who contributed to BSD, including UCB students, MIT
students, CMU students, and other students. Other contributors
included the authors of code written for DOD, and other federally
funded project that had been placed in public domain.
Microsoft has absconded with TCP/IP, Web Browsers, CORBA (DCOM/COM+),
Message Queues, and probably 1000 other "innovations" that had been
part of BSD and GNU long before Microsoft "innovated" them.
When Microsoft refers to "innovation" does this mean something like
"We stole it from Linux/Unix but this is the first time it's appeared
in Windows so it's our INNOVATION".?
Microsoft seems to demand the right to profit from their "innovation",
yet they don't feel that anyone else should have a similar right. The
result has been that REAL innovation has been taking place under the
protection of GPL and LGPL and other OSS licenses which protect the
software from poaching by Microsoft.
The only problem is that it doesn't. Microsoft has continued to rip-
off OSS technology, including VNC, ipsec, stunnel, and xen, and turned
them into shovel-ware.
The Mono-Novell-Microsoft arrangement explicitly gives Novell (or
other partners) the right to redistribute all of the patches, bug-
fixes, and enhancements made to the GPL version - to a proprietary
version - without paying ANY of the contributors. In effect, allowing
Novell to do exactly what Ed Gosling did 25 years ago.
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