[vox] Linux As Microsoft's Little Helper

[Bill Broadley]

Well 20 years ago, Microsoft was pretty evil.  They used their position with IE, Office, and Windows
to damage any competition.  They actively tried to destroy various standards like Javascript, Java,
HTML, and others.  They called this "Embrace, extend, and extinguish".  They would only minimally
support other platforms, mostly in the form of Office for the Mac.

The scary thing is it was working, even HTML and the web in general, till Google decided to fight
them on it.  I do remember the dark days when the chances that any complex site was ActiveX was
reasonably high.  Thankfully Microsoft deciding to trojan Nokia and buy them for pennies on the
dollar pretty much cemented the death of Windows mobile.

At the time Apple was pro open source.  They contributed Obj C to the GNU folks, they open sourced a
substantial part of their OS (Darwin), they were supporting CUPS, embraced LDAP, actively courted
developers, and tried to be as friendly to developers and the open source comunity as possible.
They even wrote an X11 port to let unix apps run on OSX.

Now it seems largely the opposite.

These days Microsoft allows Microsoft office to run everywhere, even on chromebooks.  Microsoft now
support Chromebooks, android apps, and have been major contributors to the Linux kernel.  They now
support Linux apps on Windows, joined the OpenSSH foundation. They have helped not only Linux run
under Windows, but also Windows running under Linux.  Generally Microsoft is playing fair and
encouraging interoperability.  They did buy github, but from what I can tell it's as friendly to OS
developers as ever.

Apple on the other hand is heading away from interoperability.  Their chat platform is Apple only,
their apps store is Apple only (except for things like itunes), IOS is completely closed, Darwin is
not longer contributed to, and they are trying to force all apps through their app store which costs
$99.00 a year to access.  Additionally any company that starts competing with apple tends to have a
harder time to get into the Apple app store. Because the app store costs $99 a year, there's much
less open source software available in it.  Even if compiling source code on OSX, they are starting
to restrict certain OS calls to apps installed through the app store.  Even their CPUs are heading
in a proprietary direction.  Monitors, cables, dongles, chargers, docking bays, and accessories are
starting to get DRM so apple can control them.  Additionally people are starting to worry about the
death of general purpose computing, Apple seems to be leading that change.

So basically from an Open source perspective I used to recommend OSX as a decent Linux alternative
if you wanted a turn key/easy to use desktop/laptop.  Today I'd recommend Microsoft.  Additionally
Microsoft used to be a disaster from a security perspective, today Microsoft seems pretty good if
you patch regularly and have decent security habits.

However there's now a 3rd horse in that race.  Chromebooks are secure, easy to use, and support
linux apps.  Additionally they support Android apps, which has a significant open source component,
and there's no charge to add apps to the Android store.  What's more is google has been pretty good
at contributing linux patches upstream and to call something a "chromebook" requires the ability of
the user to enter "developer mode" which allows installing your own OS.  So basically you can buy a
laptop or desktop, not pay the Microsoft tax, and install Linux or Chrome OS (with a linux kernel)
or even a hybrid.

So from an opensource perspective I'd say, in order Linux, ChromeOS, Windows, and OSX.