Do you think Microsoft will make Linux illegal?

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Plus Steam's decision to start supporting OS X and Linux (and their commitment to simultaneous release on all platforms for all future games) ensures that Opengl is going to become much more prevalent in the desktop gaming market. If you want to write for all platforms, why not just use the cross-platform OpenGL instead of bothering with the restricted DirectX system? This will break the dependency on Windows for games.

Not entirely, but, I think they'll still keep trying. Microsoft is falling. Go APPLE!

IMHO, Apple is worse than Microsoft. They lock you in to their products and restrict what you can do with your computer. The iPhone is proof that you're not allowed to see how it works or put something else on it. They also censors applications from it and books.

I find it funny how nintendo can also censor content that gets released on their platform, and yet everyone still only remembers what Apple did.

There is a consensus that Nintendo is available for children. That adults might enjoy it as well is secondary. A computer on the other hand, is an adult tool, and the fun and games are supplementary.

Apple doesn't censor their computers - just their mobile devices. Which although people like to think as having the functionality of an actual computer, I would argue it is much closer to a console than a desktop.

Actually, Linux has a 1% market share, not a .1% market share.

Um, ever heard of .NET being incompatible with everything but Windows? Ever heard of Microsoft deliberately making Internet Exploder not CSS-compliant to try to lock people into using it? And OS's restrict what you can do with your computer. For instance, you can't run Cocoa applications in Windows.

All of these "Apple is worse than Microsoft" arguments are unbelievably stupid. There is nothing Apple has done that MS hasn't also done in some way, and most of the things people list as reasons are pretty trivial compared to what Microsoft does (eliminating competition, making competing software illegal, suing anyone who competes with them, copying everyone else's ideas, deliberately making their software incompatible to reinforce their monopoly, etc., etc., etc.).

I don't think Microsoft would pursue it unless Linux posed a threat to their market share, and from the looks of things they don't. More people recognize the Windows brand over Linux, more people expect it to be installed on their brand new $1000 piece of crap machine they bought from some big name retailer. It's going to take more than a flashy user friendly interface to turn Linux into a consumer standard.

1) .Net isn't incompatible with everything but Windows. The manufacturer of Windows has built .Net for its operating system. Other vendors have not built the same features into their OS or have built them using their own proprietary standards. C# is a standardized language (ECMA and ISO according to Wikipedia). So why aren't the other vendors followig this standard? I suspect it's because all vendors play stupid games of creating some standards so their fanboys can argue that the other vendors aren't standards compliant.

2) I'd like to see a source for your CSS comment. IE "won the browser wars" back in the 90s, and now has the burden of backwards compatibility vs CSS standardization. I believe IE8 is much better in this regard - they try to be CSS compliant but if they detect certain markup - it offers to show the page in compatibility view. What more do you want? I develop web pages for IE and Firefox and I find them both to be just about as horrible as one another when it comes to CSS standardization, speed, frustration, etc.




I would agree with the first sentence - but I would expand it to the majority of the arguments made in this thread. It seems to me that other companies have done the things you're referencing. It seems to me that your real argument is with the power the goverment gives to corporations and the things the goverment allows them to do. You do realize that the government regulates Microsoft to a much higher degree than the other companies mentioned in this thread, don't you? Apple, Google, and other companies are free to add whatever features to their competing operating systems whereas Microsoft is not.

It's been 8 years since the antitrust settlement was approved. If you don't like how the goverment is handling its regulatory duty, go whine to your local representative. Or get over it already.

Your numbers are a bit off. OSX alone has about 8% of the computer market. Its the real risk to windows. Linux follows that with between 1-3% (10-30% more credit than you give). And both are growing. As OSX is a close cousin to linux, its ascendancy helps promote linux, and vice versa.

Currently windows is losing on the server side, the embedded side, mobile devices and consoles. It purports to lead on traditional personal computing, but even that is slipping. Even were it not, its growth market has vanished, a critical aspect of business that funds development and rising labour costs.

Fuzzy, do you think that computer game companies will start porting more game to Linux? I'm sort of hoping they will if games that make use of Opengl become more common.

Jono, I already know they are preparing to port to OSX. Valve already offers a steam client.

http://www.dailytech.com/Steam+Client+f ... e18365.htm

and as for linux, the answer seems a little more shaky, but there is a beta client for steam as well.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... ript&num=1

Now whats interesting is that the non valve companies will be watching closely for signs of viability in OSX and linux. However, if the results of a recent experiment by wolfire games is any indication, there is a market hungry for games.

http://www.wolfire.com/humble

If you scroll down you can see how the various operating systems break down as far as paying for these games. Despite being a mere 0.1 percent as some people claim, Linux users somehow contributed a quarter of the revenues over week of the event. They should rethink those claims, eh?

10-30x, actually, which would be 1000-3000%.


Not losing, lost. Windows Server is probably used as a desktop OS more often than it is as a server. Embedded devices basically all run some *nix variant. Consoles... is Xbox Windows or something else? I think all the consoles have their own proprietary software environment, even if it is possible to install Linux on a PS2.

Ack. Good eye, thanks.


xbox is some windows beast, yes. as for the consoles, it doesn't matter what they run: its not windows. Its not Microsoft. Thats the point.

I wasn't sure if they had made a port of Windows for the Xbox or if they just made a new environment specially for gaming. Obviously whatever it is comes from MS.


Well, it does somewhat matter. In the desktop and server computing worlds, "not-Windows" means "UNIX/Linux." Not so in the console world. And whatever software the Wii uses, I'm pretty sure it's not GPL. We still have to regard that as a loss, even if it is also a loss for MS. The enemy of your enemy is sometimes just another enemy.