Re: [MLUG] Study: Open source poses security risks (???)

[Mark Haidekker <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

>
> Microsoft has gotten into a situation where nobody much likes them, so
> somebody has to pay for people to say nice things about them.  Part of
> this is because people have gripes about MS, but part of it is also
> probably just due to the fact that, as you'd expect with a monopoly,
> nobody really "chooses" Microsoft.  People get grumpy about not having
> choices.

They _do_ have a choice. It's always hard to say NO to the mainstream, of 
course, but Linux does quite nicely, and Mac OS is there for the timid ones.

I know that a friend of mine is reforming a company in Detroit. His computer 
skills made him a "natural" for system administration. They had a M$ server, 
and he simply brought up a Linux server in addition to that, offering it as 
an alternative. Guess where people went to after they saw the difference in 
reliability?

> Moreover, MS has done some good in supporting interesting research in CS
> over the past few years.  I know in particular that they hired the chief
> scientist in charge of the most popular Haskell compiler to do more
> practical research on functional programming.  And they stepped up just
> when funding from (for example) the US government was drying up a bit.
> But this is Microsoft, of course, so when they finally announced their
> .NET stuff, it turns out that they had made it inordinately difficult to
> support some of the languages and ideas whose progress they had been
> funding...

Isn't this like the old tale of Faust pacting with the devil? He serves you 
all right, but in the end he wants your soul. Once I was defending Microsoft 
against the Unix geeks in the institute, but today I have become a 100% 
advocate of Open Source.

Mark
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