wish i had a clue stick to smack buffet upside the head!

[Christopher Browne]

On 6/25/06, JoeHill <joehill-rieW9WUcm8FFJ04o6PK0Fg at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> In any case, history's been written, and Bill is trying, I guess to repay all
> the money he stole, but I don't think he should be getting medals for it,
> considering how he got it in the first place.

Regrettably, what *isn't* obvious is what the alternatives would have been.

It seems to me that there was a considerable "historical
inevitability" to the emergence, in the early '90s, of a free Unix;
had it not been Linux, it might have been some BSD variant or (less
likely) Hurd.

But in the absence of Micro Soft, a New Mexico company, having grown
into Microsoft of Redmond, it is by no means obvious that the void
would have been filled by Linux or its alternatives.

In effect, Microsoft emerged because IBM was under some peculiar
pressures due to ongoing antitrust lawsuit activities.  At the time,
obvious alternatives for one product or another included Adobe, Apple,
Borland, Digital Research, DEC, IBM, Lotus, Sun and Visicorp.  None of
these are particularly "salt and light" compared to Microsoft; all
have their own bits of "seeming danger to freedom."

A MSFT-free world could easily be just as bad...
-- 
http://www3.sympatico.ca/cbbrowne/linux.html
Oddly enough, this is completely standard behaviour for shells. This
is a roundabout way of saying `don't use combined chains of `&&'s and
`||'s unless you think Gödel's theorem is for sissies'.
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