Piracy

To state or ask clearly, should we love to hate Microsoft?

Though not stated clearyly in his blog post, I guess I was living in a Foss world, (and if he did I am sure there would be a huge list of links), I am sure Mayank did aim the post at me. And just to be sure, he did plug about it in a chat just before.

I guess I know where he comes from when he asks the question. To answer frankly, I do not lote to hate Microsoft. I would love to love Microsoft but it just is not plain possible.

I see that he goes about pointing at few selected comments, from I am not sure who. There is no point in that - but actually, quite goes to show that Microsoft is quite good at market share. There is no denying that. Even if it does, Linux will take a long time to attain what Microsoft has achieved in terms of market share. But again, I would digress if I start quoting people's comments. Comments are good, and they are opinions. They do at most portray the voice of a vocal share of the market. But we should take it with a grain of salt.

That too, comments on a blog post which is some one's opinon or statement. I mean, who is Randall C Kennedy. Until that link in the post, I did not know who that was. (But seems like he is a notable person, at least in terms of Wikipedia. See Randall C Kennedy entry).

To answer another quote, I do not mind paying for software. I am a software engineer by my day job, and I respect another person's labor. That said, it for the same respect that I tend to hate Microsoft. I have been exposed to almost five years of enterprise software development - and I know the results of vendor lock in. There could be huge saving and increase in productivity if people and organizations were free to choose the tools and products regardless of the tools and products they bought earlier.

To explain further, it is the practices that Microsoft indulges in - specifically the anti-competitive practices that makes me avoid using their product as far as I can.

It is because I respect other peoples work, I do not approve of piracy. I know from my recent trip to India, where I had to service three different PCs, and they were crippled. (I ended up installing Ubuntu - it was more than enough for their use case scenarios). They were crippled because of use of priated software right from the OS. What concerned me the most, was that my young cousins would be exposed to only Microsoft products and would not know they had a choice. These kids would grow up to run organizations tomorrow, and they would be the ones in decision making positions. The general public, at least in India, is not concerned about piracy due to lack of education. Microsoft would not want to change that - because when India breeds new generation of software developers and system architects, they are only acquainted with Microsoft tools. And that makes it harder for me.

On another note, to illustrate my point of why I avoid Microsoft, let me point you to another link - Is it OK for Microsoft and others to forbid disclosure of benchmark results? Yes, I discovered that link from the Wikipedia entry of Randall.

So, to answer Mayank, I do not love to hate Microsoft. And I do not even overlook the positives of their product. I do use Microsoft products at my day job, and use Linux at home for general computing and personal projects. I can not say for everyone else, but my opinions are based on my experiences using products from both sides of the proverbial fence.