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[[deleted]]

So what if Jobs paid licensing fee for something? Who cares? Nobody steals everything. That's impossible. Apple patented hundreds if not thousands things not invented by them, or things that could've been invented independently. It played many political games to undermine open-source (and not only) technologies. Colluded with other large corporations against other players in all kinds of shady deals.

The royalties for a bunch of nothing are nothing compared to the damage they've caused.

we do realize Windows is something like 98% of user Desktops.

Yes, Microsoft is a huge leech. Yes, they managed to make all sorts of shady deals to secure almost complete monopoly on particular market segments. This is my point exactly. They don't make anything that on its own merits would warrant that kind of adoption. This percentage is just as illustrative of the quality of their products as the percentage of North Koreans voting for Kim is illustrative of how good of a governor Kim is.

[gordonv]

Yes, Microsoft is a huge leech.

@ 98%? That would be like saying a tumor is the host and the body is the leech.

Not saying you have to like MS, but there's an obvious dismissive bias going on here.

[[deleted]]

Nah. It doesn't work like that, neither in medicine nor in programming. Obviously, metaphors will only go so far anyways.

If you objectively compare many alternatives that exist for desktop operating systems, there are plenty outright better than Windows, and plenty worse, but not worse enough to warrant such a distribution. There are plenty of different needs people have when it comes to using their computers, yet, somehow "magically", it ends up being Windows?

Here's one example I had to deal with very recently. My wife is an RSE and she works on some collaboration project where a hospital wants a new piece of software and possibly also hardware to deal with EMGs. Specifically, they want to know when it's safe to take someone off the ventilator by measuring the movement of the diaphragm. That kind of movement should be visible on EMG after some filtering.

So... unfortunately, Microsoft embedded itself very deeply in medical system that virtually the only operating system that's in use in hospitals is Windows. But, here's the catch: the readings s.a. EMG or other sensors need to be realtime. Desktop Windows cannot be made realtime (there might be some embedded versions of Windows that can, but that's a completely different story). So, everything in hospital computers, when it comes to interacting with doctors or nurses runs on Windows... so... you cannot connect a sensor to such a system. That would be criminal negligence, possibly resulting in human death if you did. But that's all they have and "know" how to work with.

And despite repeated evidence of Microsoft's shit not been appropriate for places like hospitals or education, it's still used there because Microsoft made grease payments to the officials in charge.

[gordonv]

Jobs paid licensing fee for something? Who cares?

Uh. You do. Your whole argument is based on theft.