cut the crap, that will never happen :p

to destroy Microsoft or to produce quality alternatives that result market shift towards them (and away from MS)?

MS has long used the former. They didn't compete, but rather destoryed. By purposely undercutting competition merely as a measure to win a war of attrition, they gambled successfully on the hope that if competition was eliminated then they could relax and be complacent.

Competition can force you to be vigilant and to constantly improve.

Insecurity is a form of pride, and prideful people spend too much time looking over their shoulders as to not see where they are headed much less be able to formulate a roadmap to follow.

I go with what works. If MS continues to improve as they have but then there is just enough resistance to both force them to improve more and to curb that strong desire of theirs to screw others and make foolish licensing decisions... I will start switching over to MS over the next 3 to 7 years.

Usability is king, and Usabilities kingdom depends on reliability, usability, ease of administration and understanding, consistency, and of course the host of citizens (tools) that work towards making the kingdom something you can live, work and play in.

Is this multi=vendor conglomerate actually working towards that goal or are they lashing out to destroy?

Can I fire up a suse box and get the functionality I need out of the box? Can I develop on it without worry of breaking the toolchains from ghetto bits of glue and string tying together my underlying system? Can I upgrade libraries and rest assured they are quality?

Can I rest assured that the developers and first tier supporting community of Linux and friends understand that instability brings insecurity. Obfuscated and uncooperating configuration elements breed confusion, increase the likliness of mistakes, and require doctorate levels of understanding before you can reasonably use the system and that brings insecurity.

Obfuscated documentation, including relying on forums, usenet, and mailing lists as opposed to smart menu and context driven documentation and manuals, add confusion, also increase the time to learn, and what must be learned, and then increase likliness of mistakes and thus lead to insecurity. (hint: unauthoritative sources of "help" which with OSS are usually off topic, inaccurate and or old, out of context, just plain wrong, or as usually happens are ignored, are a big cause of loss of time and productivity directly through solving problems that OSS is so full of and indirectly through the trickle effect of insecurity throughout a network from bad setups.

But hey! We can always just call the administrator stupid and chide them for not spending even MORE time scraping through the web for more unauthoritative information until they hit that perfect combination or just get sick of it and go with Windows.

Example: Try setting up Sun Jumpstart. Notice how once you suffer through that you are left with obscure methods of actually creating systems, much less modifying them. Using Sun's consistent method of ignoring working technology that everyone else uses, and sticking to half baked and proprietary solutions, you can't cleanly integrate your enterprise build and deploy tools, but must suffer through Sun's reinventing of the wheel in their particular way. Of course with sun, the wheel is broken to begin with, requires you to assemble each part, has a flat tire, doesn't use standard parts for the valve stem, requires modifying the air, only works on certain types of roads, and fits only Sun automobiles.

With Jumpstart, there is no management system that will smartly allow you to get back to work and with a simple change be able to manage your systems. No, you must manually edit pieces of multiple config files and then hope you did it right. This results in massive errors until you have done it so much as for it to become second nature.

They could have used a smart management system, even better make it work with other components, gui or not, and then reduce the amount of manual mucking around necessary to get results. They could have allowed (like HP) the ability to smartly specify multiple OS's and even configurations for each hardware device in a simple and effective manner. But they decided on obscurity and obfuscation.

Not smart. Not smart and all.

The difference between an engineer and a hacker is that the engineer produces usable tools and the hacker creates trinkets that are duct taped together. Coblestone computing sytems are not acceptable anymore.

I went to a theme park (Thorpe Park, Surrey) on 18th July 2005 and I noticed their customers were frequently complaining about rides breaking down. Guess what software was running the park? Windows. And do you know how I could tell? There was a computer terminal showing videos of the theme park rides in action. In between each clip, the Windows "Active Desktop Recovery" screen was visible for a couple of seconds (you know, the screen when Explorer crashes). Also, there were Windows computers in every office of the theme park. I'm sure a migration to Linux would drastically reduce the occurence of ride breakdowns and save theme parks a substantial amount of money.