Hate can be good.. [LWN.net]

Hate can be good..

Posted Apr 8, 2008 15:03 UTC (Tue) by kornak (guest, #17589)
Parent article: GNU/Linux: Too Much about Hate, Not Enough about Pride (LinuxPlanet)

One should never underestimate the motivational power of the negative emotion commonly
referred to as "hate". I think, if well focused it can coalesce into something positive. Many
of us, if we were completely honest with ourselves, would come to realize that we came to
Linux because of our disdain of Microsoft and its third rate software which was forced upon
us. Yes, I hate Microsoft, and I am unashamed to admit it! Too much has happened to ever
change that.

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Hate can be good..

Posted Apr 17, 2008 14:03 UTC (Thu) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link]

I've been asked nearly a decade ago by a customer if I hate Bill Gates - I replied "no, but his software is just too bad". Back then, it was even worse than today - Windows 98 really was crashing quite often, and Word 98 ate your documents frequently (rumors are that the dog-replacement for Clippy is the culprit). Yet, everybody assumed that "Windows is standard" and you had to eat it or die. Linux was unknown, and that you can write texts much better with LyX and LaTeX still seems to be widely unknown. People use OpenOffice.org instead - a Word clone with about the same problems as the original. If I tell people that LaTeX's base was written by Donald Knuth, even self-called programmers ask me wether they should know this person (yes, they should!).

What I hate are uninformed people. What I hate more are people who think because they don't know something it must be bad. Therefore, I hate the typical MS user, because he knows only Windows and Office, and infers that everything else must be bad, just because he doesn't know it. This hate appears to be that I hate MS, too. No, I don't care that much. They annoy me from time to time, and I wish they would just go away, but the problem is not the company, but their sheepish customer base. Once the customer base stops being sheepish (e.g. by using Firefox instead of IE), it only takes a few years and two major releases for Microsoft to develop a somewhat usable browser that follows real Standards. Microsoft is not bad just because they are a bunch of villains, they are bad because they get away with it.