161–170 of 185 posts
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You like the FSF? Point #1 fsf makes is that proprietary = wrong/bad/malware, period. Malware is mostly just a synonym. So if point #1 is too far, you really don't get it.
This is false. E.g. they make perfectly clear that some software (e.g. games) are perfectly fine being proprietary and closed source.
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One more thing, Microsoft is a hypocrite. Microsoft employed a number of marketing campaigns to smear Google. They even went so far as to hire Mark Penn, a political smear campaign hitman, to carry out their plans. Now that we know all of the nefarious activities Microsoft has been up to and tried to conceal from the press their actions are even more despicable. From breaking into their users accounts and rifling thr…
What hypocrisy are you referencing? I'm not really questioning the veracity of your list of items, to be clear. I just don't see anything that fits the definition of hypocrisy.
What bothers me is the dishonest implication that Microsoft is good for privacy, and that the anxiety they wish to arouse for Google shouldn't be placed back on Microsoft.
"Microsoft cut off security fixes for Windows XP, except to some big users that pay exorbitantly. (...) A person or company has the right to cease to work on a particular program; the wrong here is Microsoft does this after having made the users dependent on Microsoft, because they are not free to ask anyone else to work on the program for them." Microsoft did not make anybody dependent on them, and should have zero…
I'm not a fan of pretty much anything on this list, but I do think the thing about phasing out Windows XP does stand apart. I don't know exactly how long you should expect an OS to be supported, but I feel like 12 years falls somewhere on the right side of that line. They add the following disclaimer about that: > A person or company has the right to cease to work on a particular program; the wrong here is Microsoft…
Nice pacemaker you have there, unfortunately, we've ceased supporting the software, and you are too old for a new one to be implanted, so it might break or get hacked and you'll die. How long would you expect us to support it?! And obviously we can't give away our intellectual property! https://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2010/jul/21/software-de...
In terms of outreach and informing new generations of users... I think adopting that style would be a big win. Even non-technical users have a multi-year investment in Windows, and in spite of all the polish of modern distros, the jump to FOSS is still a big one. Help people make it.
https://theintercept.com/2015/04/27/encrypting-laptop-like-m... https://theintercept.com/2015/09/16/getting-hacked-doesnt-ba...
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Do the anti-GNU, anti-FOSS advocates of proprietary software ever see theirs? The facts presented in the submission are being largely dismissed without cause.
These things are dismissed because they are dismissible. For example, the article says: > Windows 10 sends identifiable information to Microsoft, even if a user turns off its Bing search and Cortana features, and activates the privacy-protection settings. And links to an Ars Technica article. If you follow this link, you will find that it says nothing of the sort: Windows 10 doesn't send identifiable information to M…
"For example, even with Cortana and searching the Web from the Start menu disabled, opening Start and typing will send a request to www.bing.com to request a file called threshold.appcache which appears to contain some Cortana information, even though Cortana is disabled. The request for this file appears to contain a random machine ID that persists across reboots."
and
"if Web searching and Cortana are disabled, we suspect that the inference that most people would make is that searching the Start menu wouldn't hit the Internet at all. But it does. The traffic could be innocuous, but the inclusion of a machine ID gives it a suspicious appearance."
That's as personally identifiable as you need when you have an identifier locked to the machine that is sent even across reboots. This is even more identifiable than an IP address, even for static IPs (since you can have multiple machines behind it).
Is that sufficient for the claim or do you still reject it? I'm most concerned that you hold anger at FOSS people's "arrogance" over complaints about a bad software package that many people are unfortunately hooked to.
Anti-FOSS advocates here in these comments are behaving poorly; a conclusion they don't like which is supported by facts that are referenced isn't being taken well.
Here's some examples of where it is going wrong in these comments: attacking the messenger, claiming things are false / unsupported when they are, trying to find any minor flaw in what was stated in order to discredit the whole thing, ignoring facts and misleading people about what the source actually says.
That's some nasty stuff. That's Us vs. Them stuff, not "yeah that is a concern, I'm upset about that too!"
> "Microsoft cut off security fixes for Windows XP, except to some big users that pay exorbitantly." XP has had longer support than any Linux distro out there (aside the rolling release ones, but that's a little different). I know this submission is intended to be biased, and I do honestly favour Linux over Windows anyway. But surely FUD like the above is so painfully transparent that it only undermines the credibili…
> "Microsoft cut off security fixes for Windows XP, except to some big users that pay exorbitantly." XP has had longer support than any Linux distro out there (aside the rolling release ones, but that's a little different). I know this submission is intended to be biased, and I do honestly favour Linux over Windows anyway. But surely FUD like the above is so painfully transparent that it only undermines the credibili…
Hold on a second. You can't just claim XP had longer support except for all those "continually updated OSes" and still have a point left! The submission is not FUD, if it is then please point to any fact it gets wrong. Why are there are so many defensive anti GNU comments here? Do these actual facts that correctly paint Microsoft in a bad light really upset that many Microsoft users / workers / proprietary software p…
Rolling release distros are a different ball game entirely. If you take a copy of Windows 7 you can install every update from the initial release to present day. It might take you a while, but you could do it. Equally with your standard release cycle Linux distros, you could take a 3 year old copy of Ubuntu LTS (for example) and bring it bang up to date. However if you took a 3 year old image of a rolling release distro, you'd find it hugely more difficult to update (if at all possible).
Rolling release distros don't have a set end of life date because they're always incrementally reaching end of life. Particularly as breaking changes become old and unsupported (eg try taking an Arch Linux ISO before the filesystem, glibc and systemd packages and watch just how poorly that ISO updates). So something being "rolling release" doesn't mean it doesn't have an end of life - it just means you don't have to perform OS release upgrades.
> Why are there are so many defensive anti GNU comments here? Do these actual facts that correctly paint Microsoft in a bad light really upset that many Microsoft users / workers / proprietary software proponents?
Why do some people think you must be a fanboy or an employee to defend a product? If you want my honest personal opinion: I hate Windows. Absolutely despise it. Please bare in mind this is just my personal opinion, but I just cannot fathom it's maze of confusing windows, I don't like that it's command line is crippled and that Powershell is about as succinct as War And Peace. I hate the lack of a proper package manager (I could write a novel on how much I hate Windows Update). I hate the poor support for nix networking protocols. I hate the outdated file system support. I don't even find it aesthetically attractive. So there really isn't much I like about Windows.
At work I run Linux and manage Linux and Solaris servers (I'm devops) and at home I run Linux and FreeBSD. I don't own nor run a single Windows system and haven't done so in any serious capacity since the early days XP. I really couldn't be any further from the "pro-Microsoft" pigeon-hole you presumed.
I know there are people who feel the same way about Linux, and that's fine. I wouldn't want a Linux monopoly any more than I'd want a Windows monopoly. And I'm certainly not going to accuse those people of being Microsoft employees :P I just believe in being objective because nothing is perfect and we can't improve things if we look at everything with rose-tinted glasses.
> Also, what is with legitimate comments being ghosted on this site?
Most of the comments that have ghosted are because they were complaining that the article was factual thus couldn't be FUD. But that misses the point of what FUD is. FUD doesn't have to be a lie, it can also be a heavily biased fact that casts the opposition in an unfairly bad light. I personally felt the Windows XP support argument was one example of that; it was factually accurate but conveniently overlooks Linuxes similar issues of long term support
I do have a great deal of respect for GNU and RMS, but that doesn't mean I have to agree with everything posted in their name.
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> they did a lot to put open source on the map Nope nope nope. They've publicly been the biggest voice to erase "open source" from the map since it was coined. All while acknowledging that it has mostly the same goals as the free software movement. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.e...
The unfortunate thing about gnu and the fsf is that they think connotation management and "clever" wordplay are effective marketing strategies.
Words matter. See "pro life" vs "pro choice", see "terrorist" vs "criminal" see "migrant" vs "alleged refuge", etc. etc.
The tech press are mouthpieces for the big corporations, and all of the big corporations do not want free software messing with their profits, so they use and coin words which align with their interests. It's perfectly natural for fsf to use different words.