[ale] OT: newsflash: Microsoft is still the devil...open source beware

[Randy Ramsdell]

Jonathan Rickman wrote:
>
>
> On 8/1/07, *Randy Ramsdell* <rramsdell at livedatagroup.com
> <mailto:rramsdell at livedatagroup.com>> wrote:
>
>     What you fail to understand and fail miserably it the fact that
>     Microsoft's viral ways have caused many many problems in the computer
>     industry that I work in and PJ/Others simply remember that and you
>     simply want to forget and wash over it as if it didn't happen. It is
>     amazing how people like to classify or judge others based upon their
>     emotional level, also. Anyhoo,  do  you remember  how microsoft added
>     hooks to JAVA so that anyone running a UNIX flavored OS was unable to
>     run the application. 
>
>  
>  
> I didn't fall off the turnip truck yesterday. Transvirtual, the
> producer of the first open source java virtual machine created in 1996
> and GPL'ed in 1998 (Kaffe OpenVM) added the Microsoft extensions to
> their virtual machine almost immediately. Microsoft actually funded
> the work on the extensions. Nothing was stopping Sun from doing the
> same, or even including Kaffe's extensions, as it was GPL software.
> Moreover, nothing was stopping YOU from downloading and running Kaffe
> just as I and many others did on Linux and various flavors of Unix. I
> wont get into the subtle technical errors in your argument, other than
> to point out that it was not the "Microsoft version of Java" that
> broke things, but rather a set of extensions they added to their
> development environment that made Java apps produced there
> incompatible with virtual machine implementations that did not provide
> support for those extensions...primarily Sun's.
>  
> Emotion clouds judgement, and apparently alters history for some.
>  
> --
> Jonathan "sell the propaganda somewhere else my friend" Rickman
>  
>
>  
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Good point as you know more than I about how JAVA broke in my case
because none of the other brokers could even come close to a solution
except to say that I must use microsoft's JAVA implementation. Isn't
that, in effect, the subtle technical error that might be the goal. One
does not have to completely break compatibility, only make it difficult
to work around, either by misinformation or play on the masses desire to
just simply use their products instead of fix all the compatibility issues.

Randy "take your head out of the sand my friend" Ramsdell