OT: Microsoft's grinning robots or the Brotherhood of the Mac. Which is worse?

[Christopher Browne]

On Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 2:35 PM, George Nicol <gnicol-PeCUgM4zDv73fQ9qLvQP4Q at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> A very good illustration of why you promote the correct style of
> Linux evangelism that you've always recommended on this listserv.
> To some degree, railing against Microsoft is okay when preaching
> to the choir at TLUG but always counterproductive when we take
> the fight to them and attack them on a battlefield they hold.

I think it's an error to "play the game" of railing against Microsoft.

It's a particularly bad idea as the software that people keep
promoting gets to be more and more conformant with "Microsoft-ish"
approaches, as opposed to "Unix Philosophy" approaches.

Pointer back to Gancarz...
- small is beautiful
- make each program do one thing well
- use software leverage to your advantage
- avoid captive user interfaces
- make every program a filter
- use shell scripts to increase leverage

If we look at applications that people laud rather a lot, we get
pretty much the diametric opposite to these principles with such
notables as:
 - OpenOffice.org
 - Web browsers at large

The recent discussion about OpenOffice.org was pretty much the epitome
of "Microsoft magic", what with the following diagnostics:
 a) "I never could figure out what made it work again"
 b) "There were several .openoffice.* directories to delete"
 c) "Reboot to fix it!"

It seems to me that we're going in absolutely the wrong direction with
both "office software" and web browsers...  In both cases, they
violate the "Unix Philosophy" in *ALL* of the ways described above.

The tendancy to hack modules onto Firefox is just making this *worse.*
http://www.cccs.de/wiki/pub/Main/VorTraege/uzbl-print.pdf

There are, in the case of web browsing, a couple of possible answers...
- uzbl
- surf

These are in somewhat nascent phases, where they're pretty
deliberately unfriendly.  I don't believe that *needs* to be
permanently the case; it's perfectly reasonable for "creature
comforts" to grow around them.

In contrast, the "captive UIs" surrounding document writing software
seem to also be bound up inside scripts that seem intended to make it
harder to get at what something like OpenOffice.org is really doing,
inside.  (Witness the whole "I had to delete all the .openoffice*
directories, and reboot" thing).

It's unfair to bash Microsoft for going down particular roads when we
seem hell-bent on taking the Same Sulphury Path!
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