I find it interesting and a little disheartening reading the comments from folks here who think copyright is some Johnny-come-lately invention and inherently evil. The very first copyright case documented in history comes to us from Ireland in a case against Columba (later St. Columcille) -- almost 1500 years ago. While it may not have been an integral part of cultural structures since then the way it is now, copyright is far and away not a recently-crafted idea, certainly not an American invention. Copyright as *hard law*, maybe; copyright itself, absolutely not. I consider myself far more on the side of the pirates than the traders in this debate, but history is history.

Another point of contention against several posters: This idea of people simply throwing their works out into the public frame for love of the craft and making no money on it until copyright came along is complete nonsense. Classical composers earned livings off their music (well, some did). So did minstrels and troubadours. Artists all over the historical timeline earned commissions for their works. Contrary to the anarcho-communal worldview, music and art are not such lofty and untouchable deities that no one can or should profit from them. I believe such things should be shared, of course, but I'm also a realist and artists need to put food on the table.

On the other side of the coin, I have no sympathy for any musician whining about lost revenue from P2P filesharing. The money in music is now, has been and always will be by and large in the performance and the merchandise, not the recording. As an amateur musician with many professional musician friends, I say if you're not making money as a musician, then either your music is terrible, you're simply a bad musician or ur doin it rong.

All this said, I'm on TPB's side here and hope they come out free and clear in the end.

He may have meant he hasn't seen a BSOD that was explicitly the fault of Windows or a MS application, in which case his claim is not at all surprising. I've seen exactly one in the last four years that I could positively identify as an OS issue; the vast majority of all the others stemmed from bad hardware (usually memory) or drivers, some were from malware and a scattered few were traced to poorly-written/misbehaving applications or ancient programs for Win9x that weren't meant for the NT kernel.

When our users can't run their apps on it -- not because of any inherent problems with those apps, but with MS's decision to change the codebase significantly such that apps just flat-out break -- it's a failure. When my fellow geeks and I spend four times as long troubleshooting a serious problem on a Vista box that it turns out is caused by some completely unnecessary change in the way Windows works under the hood, it's a failure.

I run XP for games on a dual-core system with a monster video card and 4 GB RAM -- which is more than 32-bit XP can handle, but that's irrelevant because it's also far more than what my games demand. I keep my system patched and have all the bells and whistles turned off except for font smoothing. All my games and a few non-game apps on it work, beautifully. On top of that it is MUCH faster than my Debian/KDE install in almost every way (much to my chagrin). Sit there with a straight face and tell me I'd be wiser to move to Vista.

Line of business apps that you don't just buy off the shelf, don't run natively on Linux and aren't supported in WINE for obvious reasons.

Yeah, all the users I support (roughly 300-400 spread across about 25 different businesses) pirated all their software. They all got together one night and had a massive torrent party and downloaded a bunch of keygens and had white zinfandel and snacky cakes.

Look, I love my Debian and FreeBSD at home, and the Redhat in the few places in my field where I actually come across it, but small business users need to work on their actual work, not their golf swing or their nails while I'm spending four hours trying to get ImportantSoft installed in WINE when it installs and works in Windows XP in about 10 minutes.

Nothing would make me happier than if our shop officially supported Linux and FOSS apps, but my happiness doesn't pay the bills and it's sure not going to spread itself to the end users who know their software's ins and outs and don't have time or money to spend a week or more learning all new stuff. Sad, too, because SMB is a market that's screaming for Linux adoption right now.