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

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Wed, 12 Jun 2002, Mark Haidekker wrote:

> > 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.

What I meant was just that MS is the default on Intel boxes, and often
considered a necessary part of a Mac.  If you don't choose (or know you
can choose), you get MS.  Meanwhile, there is *nothing* about the
current Mac OS that makes it only appropriate for the timid ones. :-)
Now, you could say that there is a choice between MS and Mac OS at some
level, but it is confounded with a choice of hardware, and made trickier
by the fact that one hardware choice costs more than the other...

Interestingly, now that Mozilla is pretty much ready for the "prime time",
I do expect to see PCs offered without anything MS on them at all, and as
soon as it really becomes clear that nobody much really cares about this
fact, things will get very interesting.

> > 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.

I'm not arguing that MS is good or likable or anything, just that they
aren't evil.  When they got to be huge, they did lots of R&D, and
funded about as much pure CS as any other company.  And then, just like
many an enormous company of days past, they went off and ignored some or
most of the stuff coming out of the lab...

And, gosh yes, when Peyton-Jones and others signed up with MS Research, a
lot of people accused them *exactly* of consorting with the devil.  The
reply was that they were doing whatever it was that they had been doing
before, only now with the prospect of possibly changing the world.  It
was only part "B" that went down in flames, as it turns out...

jking

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