[ILUG] Re: The I.S.A in the Irish Times

[Justin Mason]

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BTW, it's also worth noting that MS themselves produce open-source
software:

    http://sourcefrog.net/weblog/2004/01/08#plapack
    http://www.dashes.com/anil/2004/07/19/microsoft_uses_

;)

- --j.

Tony Groves writes:
> Here's the text of an e-mail I sent to lettersed at irish-times.ie :
> 
> -----
> 
> Dear Editor,
> 
> So Cathal Friel of the Irish Software Association thinks that 
> open-source computer software is "stifling innovation" (page 5, 
> Microsoft supplement, Irish Times, 18 March). This is the same line as 
> is being taken by one of his most prominent members, the global 
> monopolist Microsoft Corporation, who have a long history of 
> aggressively stifling any competition in their pursuit of ever-higher 
> profits.
> 
> The reason that open-source software is becoming so successful is 
> precisely because it is so innovative. It is produced by teams of 
> volunteer and sponsored programmers from a wide spectrum of industry and 
> academia; anybody can download it from the internet and use it free of 
> charge; you can examine its inner workings (if you have programming 
> skills) to make sure that it is not compromising your computer system, 
> and even modify it to suit your own requirements. All of this is 
> diametrically opposite to Microsoft's strategy of high prices, 
> restrictive licencing, paranoid secrecy, and lax security.
> 
> Prominent examples of open-source software include OpenOffice.org (a big 
> threat to Microsoft's lucrative Office suite), Mozilla Firefox and 
> Thunderbird (regarded as far safer and more innovative than Internet 
> Explorer and Outlook Express), and ultimately the GNU/Linux operating 
> system (which includes some features that Windows users can only dream 
> about).
> 
> So, the biggest threat to innovation in software is not open-source 
> software, but those monopolists who would seek to stamp it out.
> 
> -----
> 
> It might not be published, but if enough messages arrive, they will 
> probably publish one or two.
> 
> -----
> 
> On another topic: whatever happened the "message number" headers in the 
> ILUG digests? They're very useful for looking up messages of interest; 
> any chance of getting them back again permanently?
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