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Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce
Bitch about Windows and Bill all you want, but he/it is the reason the nation and much of the world is online.
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What utter foolishness. Without billg we would have had Apple or Amiga or any of a hundred other possibilites. Gates was a superb opportunist, and did what he did better than anybody. But his key skill was being at the right place at the right time and just before anybody else; to say "nobody else could have done it differently" is balderdash. Gawdawmighty, look at how hard billg and friends mocked and resisted the Internet itself before 1994...when they finally realized if they didn't get on the boat they were going to miss it completely and ran out at the last minute to buy Mosaic?
Apple certainly isn't a paragon of openness of course (and keep a sharp eye on the Palladium stuff they've got in OSX-86) but Amiga certainly was. And *crowds* of people were working on user-friendliness.
Go read that link to Doctorow I posted earlier, too.
I can't say I'm thrilled with the EU in a whole host of ways, and some of the stuff that's come through WIPO lately is totally bogus. But DMCA is anathema in that it makes it illegal for anyone to even *try* to reverse engineer an interface, much less compel technical disclosure.
What if your car worked that way? People still seem to be able to drive...