Firefox Founders: "We want to make money..." 10175

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It's possible, and would be tricky to prove. The only real evidence is that Microsoft have a documented past history of this kind of astroturfing. I expect it'll come out in ten years, and we'll find out one way or the other.

The audience which Microsoft pays people to astroturf, is what I had in mind. I suspect it's possible that Cola is one place they don't turf, but as they do so many other places, I'm not so sure.

Don't misunderstand me - I've nothing particularly against comparisons being made, indeed, as you say, it's practically impossible to avoid doing so. It's the trolling which is irritating, serves no particular purpose, is clearly not intended to result in debate, just pointless flame wars. As you say, the Linux people frequently disagree about all manner of things, often heatedly, so there's no need for trolls to help there :-)

That's not really the case in my case. I spend most of my time evangelising new business models based on commodity hardware and free software-new-wave licensing (GPL, that is!), so I'm mostly dealing with people who are familiar with traditional RTU-CAL-based licensing and the business economics buttociated with that, as compared with the COTS-GPL world, where vendor lock-in is totally avoidable, and pricing-costing can be based on actual value-add of the vendor, rather than a taxation model based on vendor lock-in. In most cases where this discussion would take place for me, Microsoft isn't really an issue, as their products are just not close to the Carrier Grade capabilities that I need. Microsoft's stuff is domestic and maybe small-enterprise capable, but not beyond that, so it doesn't feature in my day job stuff.

Probably the only exception to that in my case would be at the school where I'm a governor. I've got the Head fully behind a free software trial, and we're doing same right now, as I indicated in another posting, although you probably didn't see it.

Some actual real discussion on pros & cons would be of interest, naturally, but I think we'd need some intelligent, open-minded, well-educated Windows admins to turn up. I suspect they're probably extremely busy :-) Was tempted to say "... they're both extremely busy... " but managed to avoid such a low form of digging. Almost.

Haha! Not for everyone, for sure.

-- end Mark Kent -- mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum -- "I think that I think, therefore I think that I am." -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"