Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view

Posted Aug 2, 2023 5:48 UTC (Wed) by gfernandes (subscriber, #119910)
In reply to: Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view by rsidd
Parent article: Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view

Microsoft was seen as an enemy not because they had a joke they called an OS - and even that joke was bought, not created by them. And when they wrapped a UI on it, and put in another joke they called the "network stack", one could be hacked in seconds of coming online with Windows 3.x.

Anyway, Microsoft was seen as the enemy because they were. Because of the way they went after any perceived threat (Borland, Netscape, IBM itself, for OS/2, among others).

Anyway, your point still stands. Without an enemy there would be no need to wake up and fight.

Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view

Posted Aug 2, 2023 7:42 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> Anyway, Microsoft was seen as the enemy because they were. Because of the way they went after any perceived threat (Borland, Netscape, IBM itself, for OS/2, among others).

WordPerfect, Lotus, ...

Both DOS and Windows were very picky who their "friends" were. How often were Microsoft products hit by bugs? Compare that to how often 3rd-party products got hit ... IME both WFWG 3.1 and Office 95 achieved a 100% kill rate when installed over WP6.0 ...

Cheers,
Wol