[KLUG Advocacy] Re: Advocacy digest, Vol 1 #11 - 1 msg

advocacy@kalamazoolinux.org advocacy@kalamazoolinux.org
Sat, 04 May 2002 14:06:28 -0400


Wesley Leonard <marshall@pacdemon.org>
> The cross examining of Microsoft's "expert" witness Stuart E. Madnick:
> When government attorney Kevin
> Hodges asked him to name an operating
> system besides those made by Microsoft in
> which the Web browsing software could not
> be removed, Madnick immediately offered up
> KDE as an example.  But KDE is a computer program designed to run
> on top of the Linux operating system, as Hodges pointed out.
> Madnick conceded that was true, and instead suggested GNOME as
> an example.
> http://money.cnn.com/2002/05/02/technology/microsoft/index.htm

This reminds me of a saying attributed to Ghandi: 
                First they ignore you
                    Then they laugh at you
                      Then they become angry at you
                         Then you win

It seems that while the rest of Microsoft is at stage three, this fellow is 
still more or less at stage 1.

On a bit more serious note, my read of the transcript seems to show that the
testimony covers some interesting points; notably that rendering information 
at URLs is built into what are nominally several file/disk management applica-
tions (in both Windows and KDE, for example, and that the lines between the act
we know as "browsing", GUI apps in general, and OS utilities is indeed blur-
ring. A technical point that the proceedings seem to have jumped over is the
degree of modularity inherent in modern OS'es, to the extent that a utility
can call on particular .dll's (or .ld.so's, as the case many be) to bring
large new claases of functionality into play. Also missing is the notion that 
one can run a GUI without a broswer at all...

Something to consider as you read.
							Regards,
							---> RGB <---