Gates Taking 'Pervasive' Linux Seriously (eWeek) [LWN.net]

Gates Taking 'Pervasive' Linux Seriously (eWeek)

Posted Feb 13, 2003 7:59 UTC (Thu) by jwharmanny (guest, #971)
Parent article: Gates Taking 'Pervasive' Linux Seriously (eWeek)

It's all about standards. Two distributions that both conform to the LSB and FreeDesktop.org standards shouldn't give too much trouble cooperating with each other.

On the other hand, Windows doesn't conform to a single standard I know. It took the Samba and Wine projects years before they knew how to cooperate with the OS of mr. Gates. Of coure, Windows is backwards compatible with itself, but it has always been inconsistent and incompatible with all other OS's out there.

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Gates Taking 'Pervasive' Linux Seriously (eWeek)

Posted Feb 13, 2003 9:20 UTC (Thu) by libra (guest, #2515) [Link]

Not only is Microsoft not trully compatible with standards even when they claim to be (see active directory as an example among others), but they are not always compatible with themselves. Latest funny failure I discovered : web folders of XP professionnal do not work, including with webdav enabled IIS6.

Of course everything would work better if they were following some standards and some common sense in their architectures, but it would prevent them from locking other actors out of their system. The problem is that doing too much proprietary things they start to lock themselves out of their own system nowadays.