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On 15 May 2004 at 11:20, Jeroen Dekkers wrote:
You still haven't answer my question. Why throw away POSIX, an open standard, for a non-standard, proprietary API?
Whether something is proprietary or not isn't anything like as important as its ubiquity. In fact, most ISO standards start life as a proprietary interface.
POSIX has a long and good history. There are some really rotten parts of the spec but a lot of that comes from its age. However in terms of quantity of usage, the Win32 API vastly overshadows POSIX. Therefore it is more important as everyone can agree legacy compatibility is very useful.
Almost every *application* for DOS runs fine on NT. Games less so I agree, but then Microsoft's WOW team set a target of being able to play DOS Doom in the subsystem and then it'd be considered done. Business apps were their primary concern and these run very well.
You are switching from home users to business users. Can you make up your mind please? Home users play games, business users don't.
It was you who brought up games. I made a sweeping generalised statement that Microsoft places great import in maintaining backwards compatibility with legacy binaries. Someone else claimed this was the case with Linux and I sought to dispute that because it's not true - it's only very recently that an effort has been made to ensure binary compatibility, and I strongly welcome that.
You're totally ignorant about the goal of the FSF. The goal is to provide a totally free operating system. Not a system made for non-free drivers and non-free applications. A windows clone would be just that, encouraging non-free software. Maybe you should read the essay "The Free Software Community After 20 Years: With great but incomplete success, what now?" to get a picture of what the FSF's goal is.
What someone states is their goal usually isn't their goal. I distrust them, and I'm not alone - note how Linus mandates that the Linux kernel is licensed under a specific version of the GPL and not "this or any later version" as the FSF would have you do.
While we broadly agree about the important issues, when you get down to detail we diverge rapidly. Since we share common interests right now we all work together, but a split will eventually happen. It's like capitalism & communism, both nearly the same but diametrically opposed to the other.
I've been demonstrating yesterday and at least they listed to our points of view and it's just waiting what they are going to do with it.
Wow, you're seriously naïve. Professional politicians have the innate ability to make anyone think they're taking you seriously, they really agree with you privately and they'll urgently expedite action favourable to your cause. And ministers don't get to be ministers without being really good at that.
It's possible to influence the council of ministers, through national MPs and by demonstrating for example. Saying it's something we can't influence at all is wrong IMHO. In Germany, Belgium and Denmark it already resulted in that their minister would probably vote no. We only need a few countries more.
The public can get to them on two fronts primarily - through their backbenchers (the parliament) and through the media (adverse publicity). Our ability to lobby like corporate interests (ie; behind the scenes) is very limited.
I've been part of the recreational drugs reform movement for some time which has been running since the 1960's. They can teach a lot about campaigning to anti-software patent campaigners most of whom are very new to this. However, that said, if it makes you feel better to demonstrate outside parliament then it's worth doing.
So? That is that country's problem, it might slowdown Linux development a bit, but that's all. Most development would just move to places without such wrong laws (the EU and India for example). Just like what happened with cryptograhy software when the US had still those strict export laws.
Well we'll see. Cryptography was quite something else because everyone knew the US had to relax it sometime - that means investment will not be wasted. There would be deep uncertainty if patents were used in anger against Linux and while I think it'd be like the chilling of BSD from the AT&T lawsuit, these are different times. Some diehard BSD fans claim that that AT&T suit caused Linux to beat BSD to become the world's favourite Unix but I think that's underestimating why Linux is so popular.
Cheers, Niall