"One Bullet is never enough" Paper

[Oleg Broytmann]

Hi!

On Tue, May 21, 2002 at 01:02:55AM -0700, James J. Besemer wrote:
> I'm no big fan of MS but as a businessman I appreciate and respect their
> position in the market.

   I don't. They achived their positoin by using lie, spreading FUD, buying
rivals, forcing (abusing their power) other companies to do thing in their
favor, etc...

> Whether you agree or not, their economic power is something to be reckoned
> with.

   What about their political power?

> It's
> the quintessential American Success Story -- after all they started out
> just 12 geeks in a room, writing software for the 8008.

   Alas, the real story of M$ is not so nice. They didn't wrote MS DOS -
they bought it and resell to IBM. Then they climbed unto success on the
shoulders of IBM, they used IBM, and then threw IBM away like a soaked
lemon.
   If this is typical American Success Story, I don't want American Success
Stories.

> From this standpoint, people who view MS as "evil" or some big scary bogey
> man, ARE simply being childish, neglecting many practical and realistic
> issues.

   Call me "childish", call me "idealist", call me "merely dumb idiot", but
I don't want to take the reality for granted. It are we the people who
created and still are creating and recreating the reality. There are many
thing in the reality I want to change, and M$ is one of those things. To
change the reality I do many "childish", "idealisti", "idiotic" things - I
am writing Free Software, I am using Free Software, I am popularizing Free
Software, I am helping people to understand Free Software, to install it
and use it. And watch the fun - the reality is changing around me!

> You want bogey men?  What about IBM, who spends more in marketing
> each year than MS grosses in revenue?  What about Big Oil, controlling
> about 10% of the GNP?  By last count, 100% of US oil companies today are
> direct descendants of Rockafeller's Standard Oil.  What about Big
> Government?  20-25% of the GNP.  MS's large fraction of the computer
> industry is nothing by comparison.

   If they play the game by rules and laws - I don't care about them. M$ is
abusing their power more and more, and this must be stopped.

Oleg.
-- 
     Oleg Broytmann            http://phd.pp.ru/            phd at phd.pp.ru
           Programmers don't die, they just GOSUB without RETURN.