So I did a little web surfing … and another controversy I have been enlightened with … Seems there’s something to Google and Microsoft … *sigh* … I get tired of this stuff … It just doesn’t make sense the amount of attention this stuff gets … There is so much enthusiasm expressed on all sides … and here is it … Gates on Google … Check out the comments left on this article … There are many different voices of opinions that come out of this … I sort of skimmed through the rest of the article not really interested in what Mr. Bill had to say … It’s a bunch of crap no matter what … It also makes me realize that nothing much will change … No matter what … I get that from reading the comments and knowing my thoughts on the matter … I could see starting a huge debate about this as well, but I’m not really interested in doing so … My last debate didn’t really interest me in the end … All that it shows me is that I have an opinion, and other people have their opinion … I think it all can be summed up with the proverbial statement “That’s why there’s chocolate and vanilla.” …
There are many comment on the article and many things described which sound like they’re great things, but the comment I agree with whole-heartedly is the guy that pointed the finger at Mr. Bill’s statement about Open Source software … Something to the … well here … let me quote it without permission:
Gates: The industry will always be a mix of free and commercial software. So there will be a balance between those. I think that we are going to have a lot of both. There are some zealots that think there should be no software jobs, that we should all, like, cut hair during the day and write code at night. Should you take some of those extreme views, I think it’s easy to say that’s not right. There are things like compatibility and 24-hour support and taking big leaps like IPTV or speech recognition. The painstaking work over a decade that you have to do, that costs hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars. That’s the commercial side. It’s good at hiring people and selling licenses and taking the risks that go with that.
I’ve always believed in low-cost, high-volume. It should be a cost that’s so obvious that you should spend, because it saves you on personnel time, hardware, communications costs, which are gigantic when compared to the price of packaged software. That cost is almost a rounding error. The value you get out of the system is a lot larger than that. I don’t just believe in a single model. There’s a lot of neat things that can be done. But I don’t think that someone who completely gives up license fees is ever going to have a substantial R&D budget and do the hard things, the things too hard to do in a university environment. But that’s OK. There will be a commercial software industry, hopefully, with companies that take the long-term approach and make the investments that drive those new breakthroughs.
So you see, he is given this public forum to make anyone think that Open Source coders are hair stylists … He then goes on to make you think that there’s no money behind Open Source and that it is doomed to failure or cannot produce the great things that his corporation can produce … Maybe Mr. Bill should confess what he’s taken from that non-profitable community … and then admit that there are many corporations supporting Open Source software and many others giving grants for development … Do most people know that Netscape went Open Source and remains profitable, it saved their business … Do many people know that IBM have partnered up with Apache … Do people know that Apache is the most used web server on the Internet? Whatever … I typed more than I wanted to about this guy … Now he’s into it with Google … So Google is hurting MSN … blah blah … same thing, difrerent company … If Google would have just accepted Microsoft’s offer none of this would be out there … Microsoft is working on AOL though … Possibly soon AOL will say “yes” and then the people associated with AOL by having a “@aol.com” on their email address will belong to the online service associated with the Microsoft Corporation …
Don’t know if many people know that in most techie forums, the people in the know don’t hold much credibility to those with an email address ending in “@aol.com” … While some discussions may start off innocently enough, at some point their credibility is questioned due to their email address … Now the techie’s that have realized the inadequacies or Microsoft and their blatant disregard for RFC standards in their products will have an even greater reason to be prejudice against someone with an “@aol.com” mail address … Wonder if Mr. Bill would change the domain? Probably would migrate all those aol.com’ers to msn’ers … I guess … who knows … who cares … As long as I am not affected by any of this and FreeBSD is still FREE, I guess I am happy … Well, as happy as one can be about computers and operating systems …
My wife and I were chatting the other night … after watching “Crash” … I think we were talking about the affluence of some of the characters and our lifestyle … She said to me “You should have stayed in computers.” and I’m like … “Haven’t you looked downstairs recently?” … I guess what she meant was that I should have stayed with a high paying computer job … I used to be a Systems Programmer in the mainframe days … That was a pretty prestigious job at that time … Now I do web hosting from my home … Well, now I have no boundaries and I can make whatever decisions I see fit … I kinda like that flexability … I guess I do miss the money though, and if I were making tens of thousands of dollars a year, I wouldn’t care what operating system my company (the one I worked for) was running … I would go home at night and code Open Source on my FreeBSD computer … Or maybe I would run the Microsoft OS I copied from my company’s MSDN subscription? Who knows?