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Re: [News] [Rival] Microsoft, Approaching Debt, Moves to the (Far) East

____/ Mark Kent on Monday 31 March 2008 07:51 : \____

> Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
>> ____/ Mark Kent on Saturday 29 March 2008 19:20 : \____
>> 
>>> Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
>>>> ____/ [H]omer on Friday 21 March 2008 00:02 : \____
>>>> 
>>>>> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>>> Microsoft office at Kovai
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> ,----[ Quote ]
>>>>>> | COIMBATORE: Software giant Microsoft has opened its office at
>>>>>> | Coimbatore, the 13th office of Microsoft in India...
>>>>>> `----
>>>>>> 
>>>>>>
>>>>
>>
http://www.newindpress.com/NewsItems.asp?ID=IET20080320010258&Page=T&Title=Southern+News+-+Tamil+Nadu&Topic=0
>>>>> 
>>>>> Times are hard. I hear even Sweaty's abandoning America, and taking up
>>>>> residence in Bangladesh:
>>>>> 
>>>>> http://media.slated.org/albums/userpics/Em-Ballmer.png
>>>> 
>>>> About 6 months ago, Gates spoke about moving more operations to China.
>>>> That would save Microsoft some money (they'll use "bad education" as an
>>>> excuse), but it would not make them any more popular. Meanwhile, people in
>>>> America and Europe will be slinging open source code and adapt it to their
>>>> enterprise needs (Moodle is a marvel because you have a huge number of
>>>> universities working _together_ and reusing/sharing GPL code). They will
>>>> also be ensuring that a foreigner does not put back doors in some binaries
>>>> of Windows Vapourware, aka Windows 7. Can you blame the Navy for shunning
>>>> proprietary software at this stage?
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> Isn't it amazing, the idea that Universities around the world might
>>> actually collaborate on the advancement of knowledge, research, science,
>>> technology...
>>> 
>>> What is truly incredible is the period post WW2 during which
>>> collaboration was pretty much brought to a standstill by the ever more
>>> powerful voice of "industry".
>>> 
>>> How many professorships now are "Lucas" or "Microsoft" or "Oracle" etc.
>>> etc?
>> 
>> There were several other stories about universities collaborating on
>> development in the past week.
>> 
>> I still tend to think of Moodle as an excellent example of a project that is
>> developed in a huge number of places simultaneously. It must be scaring
>> Blackboard, which was funded by Microsoft.
>> 
>> WordPress is a similar story with literally tens of thousands involved in
>> development at some level of capacity.
>> 
> 
> Hopefully, the free software world will have embarassed the academic
> world enough to force it back to a spirit of cooperation.  Perhaps some
> of our resident academics might like to comment?

Lack of cooperation would be bizarre, especially now that the Internet enables
exchange of datasets, information, etc. No longer do you need to visit
libraries, wait for some overseas conference and order copies of some papers.
As much as we've progressed, we've also moved back. For similar reason,
journalism is being killed by blogs, which are faster and rely on
_hyperlinks_. The software 'cathedrals' will suffer for similar reasons and so
will drug companies that take pleasure in reinventing the wheel.

-- 
                ~~ Best of wishes

"Fat operating systems spend most of their energy supporting their own fat."
        --Nicholas Negroponte, MIT Media Lab, rediff.com, Apr 2006
http://Schestowitz.com  |  RHAT GNU/Linux   |     PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
         run-level 2  2008-03-19 11:51                   last=
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