Re: USA states' proposal to force port of MS Office to free platforms

[Brian Behlendorf <brian collab net>]

On Sun, 9 Dec 2001, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="Alan Cox">
>
> > It would have no impact either way. It will be
> > 	-	as late as they can avoid getting slammed in court for
> > 	-	unusably buggy (with them blaming the libraries/kernel/gnome..)
> > 	-	incredibly slow (with them blaming the same)
> >
> > and always lag the windows one massively so as to suck users back to windows
> > because "we needed the new release"
>
> The Mac version of MS Office is none of these things... It's actually well
> integrated with the platform, fast, and arguably better than their Windows
> version. [1]
>
> Apart from having an enormously hairy platform to integrate with, what's
> stopping them doing the same for *nix?

...the fact that the MacOS uses a different CPU than Windows, but Linux
uses the same.  MS doesn't have a shot at selling the Windows OS to Mac
users to install on their box, but they sure as heck don't want to risk
making it easier for people to buy Linux instead of Windows for their x86
hardware.

	Brian