Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on October 02, 2003 05:21 AM
> How is the ability to run MS Office bad?
Are you serious???
MS Office is the primary foundation of Microsoft's lock-in monopoly. It is utterly irresponsible for SuSE to be promoting its use.
Like so many of the companies that help keep Microsoft in business, SuSE is putting greed ahead of principle.
> AbiWord, Gnumeric, OpenOffice all support non-GPL MS file formats. So stop using them too?
You sound just like the Microsoft astroturfers, who used to tell us that we should forget our lock-in concerns, and "just use what works."
As was the case then, I have trouble believing that you are really blind to the difference.
It's true that we have managed to figure out Microsoft's current set of secret protocols, but so what?
The difference between using OpenOffice and MS Office is this...
OpenOffice will remain open, will continue to support existing MS Office formats, and will continue to promote its own Open Standard formats.
Upcoming versions of MS Office, on the other hand, will depend on new secret protocols, as well as<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.Net, Palladium, and DRM controls. Any customers that are still addicted to MS Office at that time will become more locked-in than ever before. Plus, they will become unwitting pawns in Microsoft's decommoditization of the Internet.
> Qt has long been available as GPL
So what?
That has nothing to do with YaST, because YaST is not under the GPL license. YaST is forced to use the proprietary-licensed version of Qt.
Trolltech astroturfers love SuSE because YaST locks SuSE users into the _proprietary_ license for Qt.
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Re:Due Diligence
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on October 02, 2003 05:21 AMAre you serious???
MS Office is the primary foundation of Microsoft's lock-in monopoly. It is utterly irresponsible for SuSE to be promoting its use.
Like so many of the companies that help keep Microsoft in business, SuSE is putting greed ahead of principle.
> AbiWord, Gnumeric, OpenOffice all support non-GPL MS file formats. So stop using them too?
You sound just like the Microsoft astroturfers, who used to tell us that we should forget our lock-in concerns, and "just use what works."
As was the case then, I have trouble believing that you are really blind to the difference.
It's true that we have managed to figure out Microsoft's current set of secret protocols, but so what?
The difference between using OpenOffice and MS Office is this...
OpenOffice will remain open, will continue to support existing MS Office formats, and will continue to promote its own Open Standard formats.
Upcoming versions of MS Office, on the other hand, will depend on new secret protocols, as well as<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.Net, Palladium, and DRM controls. Any customers that are still addicted to MS Office at that time will become more locked-in than ever before. Plus, they will become unwitting pawns in Microsoft's decommoditization of the Internet.
> Qt has long been available as GPL
So what?
That has nothing to do with YaST, because YaST is not under the GPL license. YaST is forced to use the proprietary-licensed version of Qt.
Trolltech astroturfers love SuSE because YaST locks SuSE users into the _proprietary_ license for Qt.
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