Can you imagine every bank, government dept. etc., having to supply the source code of their proprietary and commercially sensitive applications to MS or some 3rd party clearing house organisation before they can run them?

How many banks run propritary and commerical sensitive applications under windows? How many government agencies do? In my experience with government, they run Excell, Word, a few major non-microsoft programs (which would quickly be certified by the manufacturers), and little else. For banking, everything I've heard indicates that the heavy lifting is *still* done by COBOL on mainframes. The majority of third party developers would quickly get their old apps certified; and the fringe developers simply don't matter that much.

MS gets to tax all the other developers a small amount to certify their apps; and to the rest of the world, it then looks like a typical upgrade risk ; just one that's more profitable for Microsoft.

anything that purports to sell me something but then curtails my rights to use it as I see fit, is that I simply do not buy them.

That battle was lost years ago, dating at least back to when the Berne Convention was signed. Patents, trademarks, and copyrights have existed for centuries. DRM law is just an extention of existing legal principles, which purport to increase innovation by making sure only right-holders can do it (and thereby, have a profit motive as an "incentive").

People have been boycotting over these issues for as long as there have been monopoly rights; and sadly, it doesn't really work. There are too many monied interests and too much public apathy for the freedom to innovate to ever really prosper. Twenty years ago, as a young and naive boy, I really thought the laws would get reformed, and change for the better. Twenty years later, all I see is change for the worse; and the public at large doesn't even seem to notice, let alone care. Maybe they just all want different rights than you and I do.
--
Ytrew


In reply to Re^6: Future of Perl on Win32? by Anonymous Monk
in thread Future of Perl on Win32? by bowei_99

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