Marcus Campbell

Marcus, become a user and maybe even make an icon (I made a funky upload/crop feature). It'll give you more of an identity, and all the features of the user system too

yep, notice "unofficial" - if you want more powerful features like pagerank display and Google Compute, the official IE version is preferable

Marcus: "companies making money from open-source = bad ..?"

To repeat what I said about companies making money from open-source: "form your own opinions on that"

Marcus: "companies making money from closed-source = good?"

I'd say it IS good on the whole. "Companies making money" is rather important to the economy, wouldn't you agree?

Marcus: "The money is still there, whether Microsoft is collecting it or not"

Naive assumption. Imagine if online documents and communication took over completely from paper-based media. I'm sure you'd say "the money would still be there" in the printing industry, the lumber industry etc etc. But I question how far ahead you're looking. If people become vegetarian, the meat industry dies. Good for pigs, cows and sheep - but BAD for the economy.

Old industries like mining are slowly dying out (esp in the North of England anyway). The people who have been made redundant need jobs to support their lives. Perhaps they might look to newer industries like the software industry for example.

However, with open-source giving away free code, it's hardly going to be much of an "industry" to get involved in anymore is it? And with the big players ousted, I don't see a rosy utopian future. I see an under-invested, disincentivised and ultimately cyclic return back to capitalism again.

I think it's quite a strong analogy, especially when you look at the way the open-source movement uses media to attack it's capitalist rival. Also, the "capitalist cronies" point is becoming more relevant every day as open-source ventures go capitalist.

I mentioned Bill Gates' charity, yes, but the main thrust of my point was that it's the economy that will suffer. You perhaps missed that MS will invest $6.8 bn in R&D this year, in conjunction with universities.

I anticipated receiving a pedantic and negative response from you on this thread. I hope others are willing to be more thoughtful and lively in their comments.

I felt compelled to take this analogy to the "front lines" of my journal - please put any further replies there.

What I'm saying is that open-source bears the hallmarks of communism, as defined: "A theoretical economic system characterized by the collective ownership of property and by the organization of labor for the common advantage of all members"

Communism is a nice theory, but historically there have been huge problems with it in practice. Firstly, communists traditionally come to power by the bloody overthrow of capitalists (and goodness knows, how they try to overthrow Microsoft).

Secondly, human greed starts to come into play as the system matures. It's only natural to want more reward for working harder than everyone else (eg Red Hat). Capitalist cronies take power and become strong at the expense of the rest of the communist community (who are working under the illusion that everyone still has equal power).

In a similar situation in Russia, by that stage there was little left to salvage. By focusing the attention of effort on the "bottom" of the social ladder, they cut off the top. That top leads the way. Without it the system collapses.

And what if the "top" of our system is cut off? This year Microsoft will invest $6.8BN in research and development, working alongside goverments and universities. According to this, in January, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation edged past Britain’s Wellcome Trust to become the largest in the world, with assets of $21.8 billion. Even the greatest philanthropists of the past did not give away as much in real dollars over their entire lifetimes as Gates has at the age of 44.

If the open source world diminishes this company then they diminish a lot more than "Bill Gates the Tyrant"

"For example, Microsoft have the gall to charge $499 for an office package"

You are digressing to a discussion of the price of Office. You are not making a case against my alleged "digression."

"Some very large companies have invested in open-source development: IBM, Sun, AOL, Novell, Red Hat, Apple, HP etc."

Open source is the software industry's equivalent to communism. And if it's anything like the political system, then I predict the altruism will not last long now that money has become involved.

Communism looks good on paper, but of course has a bad habit of being implemented after bloody revolutions (against capitalistic or autocratic governments) by unpleasant people who tend to continue the "revolution" for years.

"Does comparing the prices of completely different products actually mean anything?"

It does mean something when the two products are comparable. I was comparing the price of Opera with IE (bundled with Windows XP), and suggesting that IE is actually rather a good deal in comparison. And besides don't you think bringing the price of an Office suite into the argument is a slight digression?

"Consider how much has been invested in Mozilla, OpenOffice.org or Linux"

Yes but how much of what? If your currency is media hype, then yes, I'd agree, open-source software has had a huge amount of investment. However, it's rather more tangible to talk about a corporation's long-term R&D, and team expenditure than it is to talk about the spare time tinkering of disparate open-source hobbyists.

And Marcus, where are you getting your prices from? I found Office XP for $155

"Delivering the next version of Windows on time has become more of a critical goal for Microsoft after it encouraged large corporate customers two years ago to sign long-term contracts that would give them the right to upgrade to the latest versions of the company's software, rather than pay for each available upgrade."
cnn.com

I'm sure that customers on the consumer market will be given a cheaper upgrade path too.

Consider how much money MS has invested in the OS, and the fact that it is continually updated via Windows Update. Even if you have to upgrade every three years you still get quite a lot of OS for your $105.

When you consider that Opera have the gall to charge $39 for a mere web browser it kinda puts things in perspective doesn't it?

"You would only need to spoof the status bar and address in IE, so right-clicking doesn't factor"

There's no simple one-step way to "spoof the address" in IE. This may once have been a vulnerability but I certainly can't find any ways to make it happen in the current version of IE. In Mozilla it's easy, just pop a reference to the core component into your XUL and then you can give it any string you want to display as an address. It's too easy.

With XUL we're not talking about cloning the featureset of DHTML. It's more powerful than that, it's more difficult to distinguish a spoof Firefox browser than a spoof DHTML IE. XUL was designed from day 1 to be the language in which the Firefox UI was written. If DHTML had the same sophistication, why bother coming up with XUL as a new standard?

I have seen many claims that IE's interface can be spoofed. I have seen no evidence. Present something as convincing as this and then we can conclude this thread:

http://www.nd.edu/~jsmith30/xul/test/spoof.html