Subject: RE: [open-source] Sun to start charging for Star Office
To: Stephane St Hilaire <ssthilaire@hyperchip.com>
From: Richard Rauch <rauch@rice.edu>
List: netbsd-users
Date: 04/05/2002 00:09:34
Stephane: This isn't an appropriate forum for being an MS apologist.  I
don't know if you are employed to troll the 'net and stir up conversations
yielding more heat than light.  It seems hard to credit that MS would
bother employing even one or two people to do that, and GNU/LINUX would be
a more sensible target if you wanted to waste the time and energy of
non-MS users.  On the other hand, why someone would volunteer their time
to find a discussion list for a relatively obscure OS and choose that
forum to champion MS (even if they honestly believed in the postive
qualities of MS) eludes me.

If you want to defend MS as a company, or their practices, I suggest going
to Usenet and finding one of their .advocacy newsgroups (my impression is
that it doesn't matter which one, though it's your responsibility to
determine that).

I'll stay out of the rest of the conversation, except to observe that
experience tends to teach ``if it ain't broke, don't fix it''.  Plain text
email issn't broke.  If you want a richer format (which may not be
universally grokkable), then you can tell people from whence to FTP a
file, or where to point a web-browser.  When you seperate out the content
that way, you avoid making the mistake of believing that you've
communicated the non-text content to anyone.

(Aside: How hard would it be to get the NetBSD mailing lists to identify
messages with embedded HTML and bounce them with a gentle reminder to turn
off the obnoxious ``feature''?  This would help deal with the occasional
newbie who posts from MS-WINDOWS and doesn't know how to be less
obnoxious.)


  ``I probably don't know what I'm talking about.'' --rauch@math.rice.edu