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(C) 1998 Andrew C. Stone. All Rights Reserved
Do you like red fish? I like Phish, but the reason I ask is because I smell a red herring. For the record, and for those unfamiliar with idiomatic English, a "red herring" is a planned, possibly ersatz, distraction meant to draw attention from the real issues, and comes from the practice of drawing a smoked herring across a trail to confuse hunting dogs.
It's a well-established fact that the mainstream news in the USA is a heavily censored, tightly controlled mechanism which spews as much misinformation and opinion as it does objective information. And one of these news organizations is tightly controlled by Microsoft.
For example, we keep hearing about the Department of Justice and Microsoft. M$ would love for you to believe that their control of the market is so great that even the world's greatest superpower government is getting nervous. Possibly because the more the government learns about the inner workings of Windozes, the more it realizes what a poor and expensive choice of operating systems it is!
All show, my friends, and I'll tell you who is really nervous, and why. Each month, hundreds of thousands of PC users around the globe are migrating from M$ to absolutely free operating systems, which like Rhapsody, are based on the Berkeley Standard Distribution UNIX. OpenBSD and FreeBSD are not only free, feature-rich and stable, but are maintained and enhanced by an ever increasing number of the world's top programmers. These software artists and engineers have decided that intellectual property is not something that belongs to individuals, but is the commonwealth of all humankind.
If you need a real firewall, forget NT! If you want the best, get FreeBSD with its ability to make files immutable (I hope Apple's Core OS group is listening!). It's free, it's easy to install, and you get the complete source code. FreeBSD also features one of the coolest things I have seen lately: "ports". When you start a compile going in any number of hundreds of software directories, the latest package will automatically be downloaded from the internet, its checksum will be tested, and it gets unpacked, compiled, installed and configured. Talking about User Experience!
Now the good news for the Macintosh faithful is that Apple is on the "right side" of the Free software movement, and has positioned itself to take advantage of this powerful new market force. Because Mac OS X and Rhapsody are also based on BSD 4.4, the improvements made by the free software community are available for Apple to simply "roll in".
Contrast that strategy with the one which pretends free software doesn't exist. Expect another hot summer of boring mainstream news as Microsoft nervously shields our attention from the large and growing free software movement. No wonder MS is moving into banking by coercing Windows users to utilize MS banks and financial services!
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