[svlug] Linus on KDE versus GNOME

[lordSauron]

On 12/13/05, Karsten M. Self <kmself at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> on Tue, Dec 13, 2005 at 01:28:59PM -0800, John Mark Walker (johnmark at johnmark.org) wrote:
> > On Tuesday 13 December 2005 13:13, Richard Mancusi wrote:
>
> > > This last set of emails is PERFECT.  My sentiments exactly.
> > > The KDE -vs- Gnome battles only strengthen MS.  I have sat
> > > in meetings where MS sales folks actually used lug emails to
> > > "prove" how Linux will fail.  They even point to the short
> > > lived "grand unification of UNIX" as another example.  That
> > > one I will never get.  How can something that never really
> > > existed be short-lived?
>
> > As long as MS continues to mistakenly believe that open source
> > software is a social engineering hack foisted upon the world by
> > software-sharing idealists, they are doomed to fail. How can they
> > defeat an enemy they don't even understand?
>
> My read is they do (and generally have) understood it pretty well, going
> back to the first Halloween Documents, vinodv, et al.  If not the Letter
> to Hobbyists.
>
> Their concern is that they don't know how to defeat it, and they've
> pretty much convinced themselves that they can't live with it (some
> possible signs to the contrary may be emerging).  So they FUD it, loudly
> and in manifold ways, trying to figure out what might stick (not much).

They're also falsely advertising.  They're purporting Linux to be more
costly to maintain and deploy.  They support this with the "fact" that
Steve Ballmer sent out in an email displaying rigged statistics that
"windows is better."

In reality, it's not.  I've used Windows for eight long years, from 95
to XP Professional, and it's all a load of unbelievable garbage.  If
MS wants to salvage the Windows name, they need to get a *nix Kernel
and build their whole buggy contraption from the ground up, instead of
super-bloating that which already stands on half of one leg.

> > I love it when they call linux and open source a cancer. I love it
> > when they conflate linux and open source. I love it when they
> > habitually show a fundamental misunderstanding.
>
> IMO you're conflating their understanding with the understanding they'd
> like others to have.

Yes, it is OS cancer.  It's a tumour in their now broken world of
Windows slaves which is rapidly spreading from the server market
(Debian/SuSE/RedHat) to the desktop market (*buntu).  It's slowly
killing MS's OS business like cancer did my grandfather.  The only
problem is that their kiemotherapy (buggy, bloated versions of
windows) only kills themselves, while bolstering the ranks of the
Penguins.