
Linus: "Microsoft Hatred Is a Disease" - mlLK
http://www.osnews.com/story/21887/Linus_Microsoft_Hatred_Is_a_Disease_
======
spkthed
This quote is one of my favorite Linus quotes ever. Bashing on Microsoft is
such an 'in' thing to do and honestly it's so pointless. Many IT folk are
stuck using their products for any of a number of reasons. Many of their
products simply are the best fit for specific applications. It's so irritating
to hear the constant Microsoft Sucks(tm) from people that either honestly know
little about it or that bash unnecessarily. Every OS sucks, none are perfect.

The biggest gripe I have with that attitude is that it destroys the FOSS,
Apple, and Linux movements. People that are new to the IT world don't have
years of backgrounds with projects and are going to be picking up on the
attitudes of the people already there as well as struggling through technical
problems. If they're instantly exposed to a very negative attitude (towards
themselves, others, or really anything) it's going to be a huge turnoff to
whatever project it is. The negative/hateful attitude that a lot of people
have towards Microsoft actively hurts the same cause that they're trying to
help.

The other part of that is that with any social interaction someone that is
constantly putting something down is perceived (usually rightfully so) as
being insecure about their own inadequacies. I don't know about others, but
Linux and Apple have both matured to the point that I'm quite comfortable
quietly evangelizing and building others up, regardless of the OS choice.

It's time to relax guys, we finally have an atmosphere with the freedom to
pick your own OS and to be happy with it. This is a GOOD time to be a nerd,
and a fantastic time to share that passion and excitement with people from
whatever background.

Besides, if there's someone to demonize, it's the people that don't take the
time to secure their boxes. Those come from all distros/OS's and I'll gladly
pass the pitchfork around for them!

~~~
bitdiddle
If one looks at a graph of MS stock from 1986-2000 and compares that to
2000-2009 it shows the stock has basically languished. MS is a cash cow,
slowly dying. They were the first and perhaps only company ever able to
successfully leverage large network effects and create a proprietary lock-in
model that has enabled them to dominate the desktop for a long time. Moreover
it's so dominant that the only thing now worse than Office is Google Docs :)

Their business practices, particularly with respect to extortionary illegal
contracts with hardware manufacturers were only finally stopped with a
government anti-trust suit against them.

Although it may be enticing to spend a few years with a slick point and click
IDE such as VisualStudio and pretend you are programming, as anyone who has
ever done so knows at some point you run into something broken and it's tough
shit because you can't fix it.

But you can relax, you are correct. They were never able to "own" the net and
they don't own the pipes (which I've read is the real reason Buffett never
invested in MSFT, he's a very long investor).

Please don't think ill of those who lived through those years. About three
years ago now I swore off windoze for good and my health has improved
considerably. I truly hope others have that same opportunity.

I might be early, I often am, but if you have the stomach for it I'd say MSFT
is a good short, even if you like the stock it can be just as profitable on
the way down as it was for those on the way up :)

~~~
Tarks
_"Although it may be enticing to spend a few years with a slick point and
click IDE such as VisualStudio and pretend you are programming, as anyone who
has ever done so knows at some point you run into something broken and it's
tough shit because you can't fix it."_

Really? Pretend? Really? That's what you think? I hope what you _mean_ is the
potential for over-reliance on wizards, which is easily countered by, oh, I
don't know, learning what they're doing so you can accomplish it on your own,
just 20-100x slower. Then use the wizard.

I'm sorry to respond to flamebait but I use visualStudio and emacs, compile by
pressing a button and using make. As long as you understand what's going on
it's all good.

I also think it's strange that in the Linux community there seems to be such a
negative vibe around anything that even slightly raises the level of
abstraction on the "tooling" side, yet on the languages side it's mostly a
good thing, in my eyes they're both just tools, as long as understanding is
sound then bring on the productivity boosts, again IMHO.

~~~
bitdiddle
Actually I used all of these tools also but what I meant was if you build a
tool any idiot can use then rest assured every idiot will use one. It's all
good if the goal is leveraging the skills sets of the folks you hire. For
programmers who really love to know things all the way down these tools are at
best boring, and many hackers avoid them because when you really need them for
something and hit a bug you're dead. There's nothing worse than going to upper
management and saying I got stuck because VisualStudio won't let me do X.

This wasn't meant as flamebait.

~~~
Tarks
_" if you build a tool any idiot can use then rest assured every idiot will
use one"_

True, but not making something because idiots would misuse it isn't a good
road to go down either.

 _"For programmers who really love to know things all the way down these tools
are at best boring"_

Do you mean boring in the sense that they just work and once you understand
them they do exactly what you want, or boring as in you don't care it exists
and you'd rather write it yourself, boilerplate included?

For me something that helps speed up a 20 minute job into a 20 second job is
pretty cool, speed increase is one of the fundamental advantages of using
computers.

 _"There's nothing worse than going to upper management and saying I got stuck
because VisualStudio won't let me do X."_

I haven't been hit by that, though I can imagine it leaves a mark.

 _"This wasn't meant as flamebait."_

Roger, remark retracted ^_^

But now I'm curious about ya, When I only knew c++ I would sit and smugly
think about how what the java people were doing wasn't real programming
because they weren't managing their own memory, they were letting some program
do that work. I now consider this a completely silly opinion.

I think control/productivity tradeoffs like garbage collectors are a much
harder decision than, say, using a code generator and tweaking the output, as
you the programmer have a lot more control over the generated code than you do
a VM. What say you?

~~~
rbanffy
"True, but not making something because idiots would misuse it isn't a good
road to go down either."

Erm... I am not sure about that one. Idiots cause a lot of harm.

The speed increase you get when using a wizard that makes code you don't
understand you pay back with time and headaches when you have to fix the code
you didn't write that no longer runs against the current runtime you are
using.

As for Java and C++, they both make writing programs hard. The edge Java has
is that it makes writing the bugs much harder.

~~~
bitdiddle
"The edge Java has is that it makes writing the bugs much harder."

well said!

------
christopherolah
For the most part, I agree with Linus. MS shouldn't be excluded, or hated
solely because it's MS.

But, that doesn't mean they should be welcomed with open arms, either. MS has
done some nasty stuff to us (OOXML, FUD campaigns, patent threats, et cetera).
I recognize that companies are large and fluid, but they should still be held
accountable.

MS has recently decreased their evil_count in my books, but they still have a
long way to go...

With companies I trust, I ``trust, but verify''. With MS, I ``distrust until
verified.''

~~~
shiranaihito
> MS shouldn't be excluded, or hated solely because it's MS.

This will sound too simplistic to many of you, but MS really should be hated
because it's _evil_.

And no, not everyone working there is evil, but the leadership is, and they
control the company.

OOXML, FUD, threats, and so forth are only a small sample of all the evil
things they've done. Read a few articles on www.roughlydrafted.com for
example, to remind yourselves of more.

People just keep forgetting all the nastiness, for some really strange reason.
Possibly because it's an Ah-mmmeeeeeerrrrr-ih-cann company.

~~~
potatolicious
You were doing so well until you decided to trail off on a completely
unrelated racist (nationalist?) hate-fest against Americans...

To address the rest of your comment though: things aren't not as easy as and
black and white as they seem. MS isn't a gigantic living organism with a
single brain - there are a _lot_ of teams in a company the size of Microsoft,
each with different leadership and goals. Some will be friendly to open
source, others will not.

It's easy to paint an entire group of people with a broad brush and see the
world as black and white, but then you'd also be wrong.

~~~
shiranaihito
> You were doing so well until you decided to trail off on a completely
> unrelated racist (nationalist?) hate-fest against Americans...

I take it you're an American? :)

BTW, I expected lots of downvotes for that post, but oh well.

I can't see my remark about possibly being Ah-merr-ih-can as racist though,
but it's always a good accusation to throw around. It's not a hate-fest
either. As you most likely understood, I implied that some people might be
willing to overlook MS's evil because it's an American company, as in, out of
patriotism or something.

As a people, you(?) do seem to be prone to indulging overreacting. Take
"Sodomayor is a reverse-racist" for example. Or the heated discussion around
abortion.

> MS isn't a gigantic living organism with a single brain - there are a lot of
> teams in a company the size of Microsoft, each with different leadership and
> goals. Some will be friendly to open source, others will not.

I believe I addressed this by saying not everyone in MS is evil. But if you
look closely, you'll discover that it's _really_ freaking difficult to deny
MS's actions as a company being evil.

> It's easy to paint an entire group of people with a broad brush and see the
> world as black and white, but then you'd also be wrong.

Right, black and white. The truth/reality is often pretty straightforward
though. As for painting an entire group of people with a broad brush, see my
original comment about not everyone working for MS being evil.

------
scscsc
I think Linus is right in that there is a priori no reason to not accept the
code. However, I think he'll change his mind once he actually sees it.

If any of you had actually looked at the code, you would have seen that it's
crap. Even though they removed the weird Win32 coding conventions with lots of
CAPS LOCK, UINT32 #define's and stuff, the functions are large and they are
simply poorly written. If you look at "native" code, it is much more clean and
written in an organized fashion. The MS code looks to be written in a haste,
without properly thinking about the problem being solved (in this case, the
writing of a driver).

That isn't to say that the code will not be useful, it could be rewritten to
be obviously correct instead of it having no obvious bugs.

~~~
rbanffy
Is there somewhere I can download the code to take a peek into it?

I also remember that coding in C++ for Windows CE was not a pleasant
experience. Beauty is good and writing beautiful Windows code is next to
impossible. C++ code is pretty. C++ code that runs in Windows is, most
definitely, not.

------
teilo
I agree with Linus, for the most part. Microsoft hatred has turned into a
religion, and like any religion, it has its radicals.

However, it should be pointed out that this whole incident has more to do with
Microsoft being forced to comply with the GPL to avoid being sued for GPL
violation. Yeah, they GPL'd code, and turned it into a PR stunt - but they're
not happy about it.

In other words - this incident proves that we need to continue to watch
Microsoft like a hawk. Trust them like you would trust a trained tiger.

~~~
dtf
All I know about this incident is that Microsoft dropped some driver code into
the kernel and chose to license it as GPL (they could easily have chosen BSD
instead). Why have they been "forced to comply with the GPL to avoid being
sued for GPL violation"? Did I miss something?

* edit: I did miss the earlier thing about them mixing GPL with a binary blob in an earlier driver. Though who would be suing them in this case? And is this different from NVIDIA's driver?

~~~
nailer
NVIDIAs Linux driver is the apparently 90% the same code as their Windows
driver, making it not a derived work of the kernel as it doesn't exclusively
require Linux.

------
l0nwlf
Nice Post : However, "There are 'extremists' in the free software world, but
that's one major reason why I don't call what I do 'free software' any more. I
don't want to be associated with the people for whom it's about exclusion and
hatred." -> I find this quote a bit rough. Linus should not care about it.
It's like you do not call yourself a hacker because media don't know the
difference between hacker and cracker.

~~~
mlLK
It might be a bit rough if you're looking in on the issue as an _outsider_ ,
or if you've never been faced with the dilemma of how to license your product,
but you should know that there is an entire spectrum of licenses that could
fall under the umbrella of 'free software' i.e. BSD, MIT, and the GPL.

When Linus says the 'extremists' of the free software world, I think, he's
mainly refering to where the FSF is taking the GPL[v3] and what this new
version proibits.

For more see this post, [http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/11/black-
and-white....](http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/11/black-and-
white.html)

~~~
l0nwlf
Agreed !! Thanks for enlightening me.

------
youngian
Does anyone else find it ironic that an article about Linus saying some level-
headed and pragmatic things carefully selects a quote out of context to serve
as an inflammatory headline? I know you gotta have a hook, but jeez.

------
rbanffy
Just one question: Is the code licensed under GPLv2 or "GPLv2 or subsequent
versions".

This question is all-important because GPLv3 has patent provisions GPLv2 lacks
that can make Microsoft's threats against Linux (and FLOSS) toothless.

If Microsoft licensed them under GPLv2+, it's good. If it's not, I am much
more suspicious on their intentions.

------
StrawberryFrog
Linus' words are spot-on as usual. But hatred of any large group of people is
usually a disease.

------
thenduks
Maybe I don't read enough flame wars but I feel like hatred is a bit of a
strong word. I'm thoroughly unimpressed with almost all of Microsoft's
software, but I really don't see the point of any 'hate'. Perhaps this is
Linus' point :)

------
lehmannro
What happens if they _reject_ the patchset? I could imagine an outcry of
Microsoft zealots slamming the open source community because they refused to
cooperate with Microsoft.

------
lispm
Microsoft is a disease. Their products are buggy, ill-designed and over-
priced.

~~~
glass66
I'm sorry, but I'm going to disagree with you about their products being buggy
and ill-designed. Compare Microsoft Office to Open Office. My experience with
Microsoft Office is that it is fast, well designed, and I've never experienced
a bug while using it. Period. From the little time I've spent using Open
Office, it was far slower, and had an inferior user interface. My linux
friends even admit that Microsoft Office is far better than Open Office.

~~~
lispm
Ever tried to write more than a few pages of text/graphics with Word? It falls
over pretty soon.

Yes, I do own a copy of Microsoft Office. Excel is okay. Powerpoint so so.
Word is terrible. Entourage has good and bad sides - but has lots of problems
when there are non-trivial amounts of data.

There is no excuse for the buggyness of MS Word.

------
Akram
Totally agree... If MS has contributed a lot to bring computer to the
household...

