06.05.10
Microsoft Lies and Apple Lies
GNU and Linux are both gaining. Not only the desktop is an area that matters and an increasing number of people will sooner or later come to grips with the changing trends.
There are many areas in the world and several areas of computing where Apple simply does not matter. Apple just happens to target several niches where people spend a large amount of money and Microsoft is clinging onto a desktop monopoly, where both Windows and Office somehow fit the bill and the large majority of the income comes from Western nations.
“They are using the same FUD against GNU/Linux, despite the fact that the same components are being (re)used by almost all distributions.”One emerging market is the area of smartphones, which are converging with devices such as tablets. This is an area where Linux is doing extremely well because of its fine footprint, cost, versatility, and other important traits/factors. Microsoft’s former evangelist Michael Gartenberg [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12] has been spreading FUD about Linux for a long, long time, as we last showed here where he made the claim that Android is “fragmenting”. These foes of Android are repeating it over and over again, hoping that it will stick and that trade journals will start parroting the ludicrous claim. They are using the same FUD against GNU/Linux, despite the fact that the same components are being (re)used by almost all distributions.
In any event, Android “fragmentation” is something which Google claims to be a figment of one’s imagination:
Android fragmentation is a conspiracy cooked up by media and pundits, said Dan Morrill, open source and compatibility program manager for Google Android. Morrill noted that people who wrote about the supposed fragmentation problem for Android had different definitions for the term, rendering the description meaningless. Owners of older Android devices who can’t access Google Maps Navigation, Google Gesture Search or Google Earth may disagree.
Here is what McCracken wrote about it. Most journalists accept Google’s claim [1, 2, 3, 4] because describing different versions as “fragmentation” would be like saying that Microsoft Windows is “fragmented” because many people use an operating system from 2001 (XP) while few use Vista 7 and Vista. In short, this whole “fragmentation” FUD does not hold water and it was spread by the Microsoft crowd. For shame.
There are other new examples of Microsoft lies. Here for example is a Microsoft employee repeating the lies which were debunked before:
“Having watched this movie play before, there’s some consistency in the themes,” said Microsoft’s Steve Guggenheimer relating to history of the netbook – which started off as Linux-based devices, but ended up as 95 pct Microsoft.
That’s a lie. It was refuted even by Dell. But it doesn’t prevent Microsoft from repeating it.
Apple is not an honest company, either. It’s hard to forget Steve Jobs' FUD against Theora and lawsuit against HTC (over Android/Linux). Now watch what Apple is doing in its own Web site:
If you go to Apple’s HTML5 Showcase page and click on any of the demonstrations using, say, Google’s Chrome, you’ll be confronted with a pop-up stating you need Safari to see the demo at work. However, if you compare Safari’s and Chrome’s support for HTML5, you’ll see that Chrome has far better support.
Apple is shooting itself in the foot because it got caught.
And now, for more from Apple’s “we’re more open than all of you” campaign. In an effort to showcase how cool HTML5 and open web standards are Apple has set up a demonstration page on its website.
Here are some more lies from Steve Jobs — lies which are exposed as follows:
“You can’t sell, if you can’t lie!” Many businessmen follow this mantra. Steve Jobs is no exception. He created a misleading myth around Flash that it doesn’t work well on Apple mobile devices thus they were banning Flash.
The truth was something else, far from what Jobs wrote in his some 2000 words blog. Flash is more than a rich-content player, it is a platform. It will enable developers and publishers to run many applications on Mac mobile devices without money being pumped through Jobs’ vaults. Jobs doesn’t want that. He wants a tight control on his devices thus he banned Flash.
[...]
WebKit was not ‘innovated’ or created by Apple. The codebase of WebKit comes from the Free Software project KHTML. Apple took the code base developed my hundreds of developers for free and forked it as WebKit, the layout engine for Apple’s Safari.
Most Apple software is based on code taken from Free Software projects like BSD. I think Steve was way wrong when he said “Google was building off of the open-source WebKit engine, which Apple created”.
So Apple is still taking credit for KDE's work. What are Apple’s employees thinking to themselves? They prefer to rewrite history and pretend KDE never existed, just as Linux likes to put GNU in the past and claim to be the genesis of the Free desktop (never mind BSD too). The sad thing about Apple’s lie is that it’s fooling enough people, especially its fans who propagate these lies.
Microsoft and Apple should be more responsible and stick to facts. If they are found to be incorrect, they should publicly correct themselves and retract. █
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