In Redmond, where the Shadows lie

[Eugene.Leitl at lrz.uni-muenchen.de]

Apologies for injecting my bit of noise into a usually refreshingly
technical and civil channel.

Greg Jorgensen wrote:
 
> I'm not defending everything Microsoft does and I don't use their software
> unless I have to, but not everything they do is evil, and some of their
> whiniest critics are guilty of the same bad behavior.

I agree that there's nothing particularly different about the Redmond
guys, all companies are guilty of the same behaviour, in varying degrees. 
Microsoft is just the current instance of evil shadow cast across the land. 
IBM used to do it (they're working at chipping away at their bad karma
portfolio by funding really stellar R&D), Cupertino is doing it, Oracle 
is doing it, but they're all not playing quite in the same class. 
Microsoft is so good, they're almost Scientology grade. 

In fact I got sufficiently sick of this behaviour so that I bailed out
the commercial software scene oh, about 1990, or so. We have a self
support group called Open Source. We do whine, bitch, and moan, and 
stuff but we're not doing one thing: we're not trying to run a business by
selling a product. Support, at best. Call me a pinko commie, I guess.

Python is a great tool for mindshare. It does really erode the boundary
between user and developer. Hats off to you hardcore Pythonistas; you do
really belong to the solution set.

Noise squirt ends here. Take comments, if any, to private comm.