Favorite Files

No favorite files added yet

Recent Posts

1. Comment - Microsoft Accuses EU of Collusion

   (Mar 3, 2006 - 5:12 AM)

   Name me one monopoly who has been beneficial for the consumer EVER. Let me say "HA!" before you say Microsoft. Just check the prices of Windows and Office licenses. Have they come down because volumes went up? No.

2. Comment - Microsoft Accuses EU of Collusion

   (Mar 3, 2006 - 5:02 AM)

   Its about time that somebody took on MS, they are monopolizing a whole industry and that is a very, very bad thing for customers, both in the US or the EU.
   
   In fact, I feel that they should be told to release ALL their APIs and protocols free of any license whatsoever. It is the only way to make sure they will not abuse their monopolies and it would certainly create a healthy climate for competition.
   
   These portions of technology should be seen more as ways of communication than as proprietary technologies, because they affect the ways programs interact with each other. Although programs are not humans and protocols are not communication between living beings themselves, its humans who get to use the software and who eventually are the victims of the imposed restrictions of the software vendor. Suppose for a minute spoken languages were being patented? Suppose you had to pay a license fee to MicroLanguage to talk modern English? No sane person would accept such an outrage. Yet we accept the same thing in computers everyday, without even questioning it.
   
   Because law has been slow to adopt the evolutions in computer history, mainly because its massive, and massive entities are bound to react comparatively slow, especially in comparison to such a fast moving target as the computer industry, the computer industry was able to impose way too restricting terms of usage for end users. You can't blame them ofcourse, being corporations, they're bound to make a buck whenever possible and impose those rules that are most beneficial to themselves to the end user, but I think its about time that governments are starting to take notice how much it affects and restricts their citizens and start to restrict the power these corporations have over their users, and submit the whole idea to a sanity check, because this is starting to affect way too many individuals lives in a negative way.
   
   In the end, thats what law is for. To protect the rights of every individual in a society, even the small consumer whose voice is weak compared to the big cash and lawyer artillery of the big corporations.