Thank you for giving better clarity Thiagu
-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Arun Khan Sent: Thursday, June 24, 2010 10:41 AM To: ILUG-C Subject: Re: [Ilugc] Some good news..... On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 7:41 PM, ThiaguWinID <[email protected]> wrote: > Ethically , it is not advisable to scrap a major company in any field. I differ. While I do not advocate shutting a company down, no company should be allowed to do whatever it wants; becomes a monopoly and starts dictating terms to everyone. For this reason, in 1984 AT&T was broken down into independent manufacturing, long distance and local telephone companies. This led to opening up of the Telecom market and thriving competition amongst service providers in the US resulting in more choices (at lower cost) to the consumers. If you recall, there was an anti trust case by the US Justice Dept. which MS settled to $500M. In a similar case by the EU Commission, MS has been fined heavily and they are appealing it - you can find the details of each by Google search. > Because of MS products, you and me are able to communicate. This highly debate able. The fundamental blocks (the TCP/IP stack, Usenet, mailing lists, HTTP protocol) of how we communicate with each other today were first developed on the *nix platforms. MS came in much much later. AFAIK that the TCP/IP stack in their Windows 9x code base was lifted from one of the *BSD code. On the application side, their famous IE is based on NSCA's Mosaic browser (open source funded by the US tax payers). Wordstar, Visicalc, DBase were available from the DOS days. That reminds me their cash cow product DOS was an "purchased" product. While there were other versions of DOS with a lot more features they were unable to capture any market segment due to the lic. practices adopted by MS. AFAIK, Xenix was also a MS product (lic. from AT&T) which later became SCO Unix. Recall the lawsuit by SCO on IBM/Novell for patent infringement? It begs the question, why did MS not make Xenix as it's foundation platform and develop all of it's products on the same. After all, during the DOS days we CLI as the only interface. MS embraces open standards, injects proprietary information in optional fields making the setup un-interoperable (unless you are willing to play by their rules with an NDA) - MS ADS (LDAP+Kerberos plus prop. ext.) is a good example. My two cents. -- Arun Khan _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
