[Wolves] Sick of M$

[chris at robotninja.net]

I know that this is probably going to be a somewhat controversial viewpoint, but I think that people need to quit needlessly bashing Microsoft.

No offence, Rob, but can you see how it could be seen as at least a little hypocritical for the OSS community to criticise MS for donating hardware and software to schools, when there are a number of OSS projects such as the OLPC which are doing broadly the same thing?

I think that we need to stop using MS as "the enemy". Too many people seem to want to 'beat' MS, which is fine but I'd rather focus on objectively improving the OS and making it the obvious choice.

I agree that MS has a big marketing budget, and that they often engage in business activities which are questionable at best - the recent patent protection racket spring to mind - but I don't see how anyone could spin putting computers in money-starved schools as a bad thing.

(yes, I'd rather they ran Linux in schools - but ideally, I'd want the users to choose their OS. If they'd genuinely rather run Vista, that's fine by me.)

Chris