Re: [ba-unrev-talk] Operating systems are irrelevant
Good comments. I would only add that everyone uses "innovative"
and "MS" in the same sentence, I gag. (01)
Thousands of innovative companies have gone out of business as
a result of MS's negotating a purchase with one of the top
contenters -- their primary means of "innovation". (02)
The real killer is:
* They have used the existence of multiple competitors to
extort outrageous acquisition terms -- because only the
acquired will survive. (03)
* Generally, the acquired fail to survive, as well, after a time,
because the terms were *that* good. (04)
blincoln wrote: (05)
> a less than brilliant David Gelernter wrote:
>
> >Some argue for Linux on economic and cultural grounds: Microsoft, people
> >say, has driven up prices and suppressed innovation. But this is a ticklish
> >argument at best: after all, over the decade of Microsoft's hegemony,
> >computing power has grown cheaper and cheaper. Innovation has thrived. Our
> >software is innovative; it has not been suppressed. On the contrary, more
> >and more people get interested.
>
> Of course this completely ignores the fundamental problems of having
> one's communications infrastructure dictate content decisions. Have the
> phone company not only decide who you can call, but what you can say
> after you connect.... "the music playing in the background during your
> conversation has triggered a use fee and has caused the CD in your player
> to self destruct"... If microsoft simply produced an OS that was simply
> a platform on which technology could grow, then I think a much smaller
> group of people would have problems.
>
> Palladium & hailstorm stand out as good examples of the types of controls
> that monopoly power facilitates. The concept of a single, non democratic
> trust authority for all commercial content certainly has the ring of
> "I should care". Or perhaps the issue of granting root privileges on all
> your hardware and software to an unsupervised, profit-based corporate
> entity? Again, sure seems like I would care about things like that.
>
> While it may be true that we _should_ only care about OSes as much as we
> care about the CPU, I think Gelertner should familiarize himself with
> some of the extremely rudimentary arguments made in Code & Other
> Laws of Cyberspace, by larry lessig. From that perspective, the rules
> that govern the OS and the infrastructure are akin to laws of physics
> in the less-virtual world.
>
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>
> I hope everyone is reading their license agreements from their
> OS manufacturer these days..
>
> bcl (06)