Verily I say unto thee, that Andrew Halliwell spake thusly:
> Homer <usenet@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> That's OK though ... it's six thousand fewer lines for me to
>> remove.
>
> What's to remove? It's GPL.
The license is only one of several reasons to be cautious about any
given software. The others are bloat (featuritis and lack of resource
efficiency), security (vulnerabilities and trustworthiness), quality
(errors and design flaws), patents (if any), and last but not least -
politics (which is enough in itself to make me not want anything from
Microsoft).
> OK, microsoft are in general a complete and utter bunch of wankers,
> but when they DO do something right it should be applauded.
Well that is the question, isn't it? How "right" is this contribution,
in technical or any other terms?
Microsoft score a single point for using the GPL, but then lose that
point for the revelation that their /motive/ for using the GPL was
nothing more than begrudging compliance.
What further points might they lose if we actually examined this code in
detail?
Certainly they've defaulted at least one further point without any need
for examination - the political one. Need we be reminded of Microsoft's
long and well documented history of corruption, which as recently as two
months ago resulted in an exciting new GNU/Linux product mysteriously
disappearing from Computex Taipei, only to be later explained as the
result of Microsoft's menacing interference.
But even for those who, for some unfathomable reason, don't seem to care
about such things (like Linus "Microsoft hatred is a disease" Torvalds),
there is still Microsoft's equally long and well documented history of
gross incompetence. And just like their history of corruption, this
isn't just ancient history. Indeed, like their other failings, their
incompetence seems to become further exacerbated with each passing day,
finally culminating in the release of one of the most berated pieces of
software of all time - Windows Vista. What pain-inducing technological
marvels might be unleashed by Windows 7?
How much of Microsoft's "legendary quality" is there in this Hyper-V
contribution? And what else is in there, that we should know about, such
as security vulnerabilities, for example? Again, we don't exactly need
to be reminded of Microsoft's track record on /that/ issue, do we?
Consider Microsoft's contributions to the world of software, in general,
so far, then go through the above list, and ask yourself how much you
really want something like that, from a /company/ like that, sitting
right at the very heart of your system.
Then consider the determined campaign to drag exactly these same issue
to the fore of your system, via Microsoft's .NET technology.
Today's GNU/Linux SUSE is rapidly becoming tomorrow's Microsoft/Linux
.NET. The latter isn't an operating system I'd ever want to use,
assuming that, if this should actually come to pass, I'd even have much
of a choice in the matter. If both the desktop and the core of GNU/Linux
continues to become more and more infested by Microsoft's paradigm ...
and actual technology, those seemingly few remaining people who still
care about their Freedom ... and the integrity of the software they use
... will be relegated to hiding in a cupboard with a poorly maintained
fork of gNewSense.
--
K.
http://slated.org
.----
| "The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which
| the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf
| denounces him for the same act, as the destroyer of liberty.
| Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of
| the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails today
| among human creatures." ~ Abraham Lincoln
`----
Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) on sky, running kernel 2.6.26.8-57.fc8
22:33:09 up 68 days, 2:31, 4 users, load average: 0.24, 0.07, 0.02
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