-----Original Message----- From: edu-sig-bounces@python.org [mailto:edu-sig-bounces@python.org] On Behalf Of Lee Harr
If "what is a spreadsheet?" is pretty scary. "What is a browser?" is downright terrifying.
Interesting how they cornered the market. A good browser - costing millions of dollars to development - has a retail value of zero, by the rules of the game set by Microsoft. What is actually amazing is that there remains as much substantial competition as there is, and that this is the first area where Microsoft has shown its vulnerability and began to loose market share. Though I don't fully understand what drives the Mozilla project, for example. Is there a business model there? My best sense is that it is supported by industry sources in a brilliant counter-offensive - delivering the message in concrete terms that Microsoft will *not* realize potentials. Setting the stage for other counter-offensives. This together with the fact that Microsoft has never been technological innovators, but consolidators and packagers who have now driven the innovators away from innovating in any way that is vulnerable to their reach - leaving them with little new to consolidate and package - my investment advise is to short Microsoft.
Do I care that I am made to feel that this point of view is somehow radical on a educational forum that is an offshoot of an open source software community.
Hmm... more like "preaching to the choir" isn't it?
One would think. But my disappointment with the Open Source movement is the extent to which it can be literalist and legalistic. When Alan Kay takes the stage from the Disney pulpit as the educator of the new age, he should be universally be booed off the stage - as a matter of principle, principle being a very practical thing. I don't need to read the Squeak license to know that. Others seem to get distracted by that issue. Art