From: "Paul Ranson" 

"Adam Flinton"  wrote in message
news:3e4781aa$1{at}w3.nls.net...
> Bollox. You earn your living from MS. No MS products to build off &
...what
> happens to tthe value of your skills?

Software development skills are portable. I used to earn a living from
Unix. It would be  nice if Unix could move into the 21st century, but I can
still do vi.

> For me that's great as I want to see proper OS competition as I think we
> (the OS consumers) will all benefit & frankly I care about me much more
than
> I care about MS or any other OS maker.

I'm far from convinced that 'proper OS competition' as you define it is a
good thing, there will always be a tendency to swing to an industry
standard, artificially maintaining 'proper' diversity of an arbitrarily
defined layer of software is likely to be repressive rather than
liberating.

> I would love to see a plethora of PC form factors running a plethora of
> OS'es. I wouldn't want to see a 95% Linux domination any more than a 95%
> BeOS or a 95% Windows domination.

Why?

> Would you view the various laws the Software industry has had pushed
through
> re "copyright theft" etc as "state assistance"? I
certainly would & those
> provisions are still in place.

Obviously the state assistance I was referring to was the use of
inappropriate anti-trust provision against one business by others with the
help of political appointees. But your examples of 'copyright theft' are
good. It's all inappropriate and protectionist.

> Why read & respond to a posting entitled "why IE became
popular" which is
> obviously based in conjecture & where the views are obviously going to be
> subjective?

Because I felt like it. But almost every post Mike and Joe make is negative
spin. It's boring.

Paul

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