Scot Hacker

> LibreOffice team is frustrated that the for-profit model is beating the OSS model

Let's take a look at this "for-profit model" - is it just higher price outweighed by better product? lol:

Microsoft, after getting beat up in the press for making propietary extensions to the Kerberos protocol, has released the specifications on the web -- but in order to get it, you have to run a Windows .exe file which forces you agree to a click-through license agreement where you agree to treat it as a trade secret, before it will give you the .pdf file. Who would have thought that you could publish a trade secret on the web? - https://slashdot.org/story/00/05/02/158204/kerberos-pacs-and-microsofts-dirty-tricks

Back in 2001, Be, Inc. managed to get BeOS pre-installed on one computer model from Hitachi. Just one. On the entire PC market. Microsoft forced Hitachi to drop the bootloader entry to hide BeOS from customers buying it. They enforced their monopoly over the only possible niche BeOS could find on the PC market, crushing Be, Inc. in the process. - https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/mmu_man/2021-10-04_ok_lenovo_we_need_to_talk/

So why aren't there any dual-boot computers for sale? The answer lies in the nature of the relationship Microsoft maintains with hardware vendors. More specifically, in the "Windows License" agreed to by hardware vendors who want to include Windows on the computers they sell. This is not the license you pretend to read and click "I Accept" to when installing…

> How is it different from GNU/Linux or BSDs?

I am risking the one full-time paid developer of Haiku popping up here and shouting at me, because he's done that a few times before and even written to my editor-in-chief to complain. Sadly for him, my former EIC was a hardcore techie -- it's how I met him, long before either of us worked there -- and he was on my side.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/11/haiku_beta_4/

Unix is a 1960s design for minicomputers. Minicomputers are text-only standalone multiuser computers. That is why things like handling serial lines (/dev/tty -- short for TeleTYpe) are buried deep in the core of Unix, but networking and graphics aren't.

There is an absolute tonne of legacy baggage like this in Unix. All Unixes, including Linux kernel 7.0. We do not use minicomputers any more; nobody even makes them. We don't have multiuser computers any more. In fact, we have multi computers per user. Modern servers are just PCs with lots of connections from other computers not from people.

In the early 1980s the Lisa flopped because it was $10K, but the Mac did well because it was $2.5K and had a GUI and no shell. The future, woo, etc.

The Mac was black and white, 1 sound channel, no hard disk, no expansion slots, and in cutting down the Lisa, Apple discarded multitasking.

Enter the Hi-Toro Lorraine. Intended to be the ultimate games console, with a powerful full-16 bit Motorola 68000 chip (a minicomputer CPU on a sdingle die) amazing colour…

Ok, I've read it. I agree it is serious. But I think it's also wrong. Monopolies can be abused in ways that make it almost impossible to compete against them. Let's use Windows as an example. Some companies that sell Windows boxes also sell Linux boxes. (Dell for example.) Of course, the Linux boxes are less popular. But why not sell a computer that can dual boot? People would be a lot more willing to experiment with Linux if they didn't have to install it themselves. Indeed, around 1999 a young company was trying to popularize its new operating system: BeOS. I am quoting from this site:

http://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/

"[...] Be was engaged in enthusiastic discussions with Dell, Compaq, Micron, and Hitachi. Taken together, pre-installation arrangements with vendors of this magnitude could have had a major impact on the future of Be and BeOS. But of the four, only Hitachi actually shipped a machine with BeOS pre-installed. The rest apparently backed off after a closer reading of the fine print in their Microsoft Windows License agreements. Hitachi did ship a line of machines (the Flora Prius) with BeOS pre-installed, but made changes to the bootloader -- rendering BeOS invisible to the consumer -- before shipping. Apparently, Hitachi received a little visit from Microsoft just before shipping the Flora Prius, and were reminded of the terms of the license."

> So, guys, I don’t want to kill your enthusiasm, but this sounds very much like We are just pretending to release a SteamOS version but in fact we advertise the Windows model everywhere instead. Since I am familiar with large companies, I guess the story was like that.

As a Linux user since the last millennium, this dance is so incredibly familiar.

> In his own column, Gassée has written several times about Microsoft's Windows OEM License and the ways in which it limits the freedoms of PC OEMs. In July 2001, I spoke with Gassée to find out why no dual-boot computers with BeOS or Linux installed alongside Windows can be purchased today

https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/

> It's impossible to know precisely how much, but if you do the math and assume that it's $30 per computer from those various sources, that would yield $200 million or more than 25% of Dell's profitability. It could be more or less than this number, but any way that you look at it, Dell is dependent on Microsoft for a massive chunk of their profits.

http://www.michaelrobertson.com/archive.php?minute_id=131

So, uh, good luck. Sure is an amazing coincidence how many PC vendors suddenly have a competitor to the Steam Deck, that happen to run Windows, and especially push their Windows versions.

The CPU monitor program was called Pulse and early versions allowed you to turn all the processors off and crash the machine. I think it was fixed in 3.something or 4.0.

The 8-way PIII Xeon was a Compaq someone tested BeOS on before it went into production. I Remember it being posted on some BeOS news site. There should be another screenshot or two with 25 avi files playing and a crap load of CPU hungry programs running at once. Impressive feat circa 2000. Edit: browse the screenshot directory for the other two. Amazing they survived time, internet, bit rot and my memory: http://birdhouse.org/beos/8way/

The BeOS scheduler prioritized the GUI and media programs so you could load the machine down to 100% and the GUI never stuttered and windows could be smoothly moved, maximized and minimized at 100% CPU. Rather, your programs would stutter. And everything was given a fair chance at CPU time.

Very nice design and the OS was built from the ground up for multimedia and threading for SMP. It was a real nice attempt at building a next generation desktop OS. Had no security even though it had basic POSIX compatibility and a bash shell. Security bits meant nothing.

> don't be stupid. holy cow.

No personal attacks, please.

Personally, I wouldn't put it in certain terms like the GP has, but it is not out of the question for me.

> compatibility is not an EEE tactic. embracing alone is not anything other than embracing.

> where is the extending and extinguishing of Linux? name ONE thing that is possible in WSL that is not possible without it. just one.

> where is the extending and extinguishing of .net? of Yammer? of Teams? where are these extensions to Linux or Android? what's been extinguished?

You are aware that EEE is in /phases/, right? Embracing is just the first one.

> You people really drank the kool-aid didn't you? Think for yourselves for once.

Or maybe we just haven't forgotten history? In case you want to learn or refresh the memory:

- http://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.
- https://www.justice.gov/atr/case/us-v-microsoft-corporation-browser-and-middleware
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT (the patent wasn't released to the OIN until 2019)