Warp wrote:

>   You don't understand. MS may one day decide that they want an annual
> fee for every Word document a company has in their computers, and they
> may get away with it. That's because the format is closed, proprietary
> and owned by MS. An open source project just cannot do that. The open
> source project does not own the format and thus cannot impose any fees
> on it.

 From what I've seen this doesn't seem to be the direction MS is going.

I'm sort of fond of MS products. Especially their software development 
offerings. I'm impressed that they basically give for free a 
full-fledged IDE. (I've now seen the professional edition of the 2008 
tools, aside from having heterogeneous projects, some extra refactoring 
and testing stuff, everything's the same (Visual C++ is a big exception 
to this, since VC++ Express does not include MFC nor ATL)

The newer Word format is supposedly more open. It's an XML-based format, 
IIRC. I dunno what sort of proprietary stuff they've crammed into it, 
though.

Windows became notorious during the 3.1 and 95 days. One of the reasons 
for so many exploits on the Windows platform is by creating an exploit, 
you're pretty much guaranteed to cause the most damage, or get the most 
data, or spambot the most computers by targeting Windows. With Linux you 
have a much slimmer chance due to several factors, notably it's relative 
small share in the desktop market, and its users tend to be more 
technically adept. Much easier to compromise a Windows machine without 
the user noticing anything has been compromised, whereas with Linux, the 
user might actually investigate what's taking up resources.

People complain that Windows is unstable. This was true up to ME. After 
Windows XP hit the market, the NT Kernel went mainstream, and Windows 
has been extremely stable ever since. Aside from running updates, My 
Windows XP (Now Windows Vista) machine hardly ever has any down time. 
Heck, With Windows 95, I was pretty well guaranteed to have a bluescreen 
at some point. Windows 3.1 I avoided like the black plague, only running 
it when I couldn't find a DOS alternative. Win 3.1 sucked badly. I still 
get chills when I see that old interface.

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