And that's where a lot of us differ from Stallman.

I'm fine with commercial software existing. I just want a level playing-field on which to run it.

The first version of either C or C++ I worked with used a Borland development environment. It doesn't matter that Borland is long gone, I suspect that anything I wrote back then would compile either without issue or with only minor correction on a modern compiler. Admittedly my stuff was very simple as it was student code, but I expect that many of the libraries available from Borland had equivalents from other developers.

I'll believe it if we get another 20 years of the same behavior, or they lose dominance in total OS market share and release Office, even as a paid application, on open source platforms.

I remember OS/2 Warp ads in print magazines. The ads featured a Robinson Projection map of the world, with arrows to specific areas and a blurb about the OS/2 user in that area.

I mused with my friends, "hey, it's a map of all of the OS/2 users in the world!"

So you're saying that they learned from Digital:Convergence and the Cue Cat Scanner debacle?

Once the thing is no longer in one's possession there's a loss of a certain amount of control. Microsoft avoided this becoming epidemic by not handing out Xboxes for free, as most people weren't going to pay several hundred dollars to immediately wipe and install a different OS on it, but absolutely would have if they'd been free. People would have convinced anyone and everyone they knew to get a free one to give to them.

This would have made the Cue Cat fight look like nothing.

Huge technical companies used to run incubator programs in-house to do this kind of development. Most of our now-stable development tools and platforms originated in just such incubators. Palo Alto, Bell Labs, IBM Research, all paved the way for robust tech without forcing it on the public before it had at least been Alpha-tested.

Now Alpha versions are released as something to try to use, and Beta versions are sold. That's just not right.

IBM went through this in the eighties and nineties, when they ultimately lost the PC market. Obviously PCs if we include all devices that run PC operating systems are still going strong despite this. If we include things that aren't considered PCs like keyboard-lacking tablets and phones, then it's absolutely roaring.

Computing will survive Microsoft losing its dominance over multiple simultaneous markets.

Viewing documents is just about the only thing that web browsers excel at. That web browsers have been a critical vulnerability in security against malware and viruses is proof that how they're implemented is terrible.

Clothing produced in Vietnam is a good, once it's sold the original producer has no say over what happens to it.

Software produced by a corporation is intellectual property. It is not usually sold, it is licensed. The original producer usually retains some say over what happens to it, far beyond the realm of simply protecting it from unlicensed duplication.

Python came out in 1991. VBScript came out in 1996. If anything, VBScript is the second coming of Python.

Why do people want to take proprietary languages and libraries and use them on open source projects?

I remember some interest in .net and mono and other Microsoft-derived stuff in Linux a long time ago. Why is there this interest in commingling the Microsoft way with the POSIX way when there are so many POSIX tools already available? I don't understand this choice. It's literally giving ammunition to the party that at one point had a declared interest in trying to replace all UNIX and UNIX-like OSes with its own commercial platforms. Why make it easier for that to happen by developing with their technologies?

Darwinian selection has been observed in one generation in high-order animals like birds where there are limited resources. Selection has also been observed in plants where humans have done nothing more than adjust the available nutrients and other external conditions to dramatically change crop yields without doing anything to the plant itself or its reproductive cycle.

I don't doubt that feeding a human a better diet and removing things from the diet that are outright harmful will contribute to an infant growing up into a more physically powerful, smarter person compared to one fed a malnourishing diet or being fed foodstuffs that are toxic or otherwise tainted, and that this could also apply to brain development.

Mature technologies are proven. They've gone through their growing-pains. They may have limitations, but those limitations and workarounds are usually well known by seasoned professionals. There's a reason why COBOL, Fortran, and RPG are still in use in business applications almost sixty years after their initial development, because they reliably work.

I've tried to work with NodeJS projects for production. It's a nightmare. NodeJS itself is revised too often, the actual project is revised too often, and the dependencies became a nightmare. It's not mature enough and not worth it.

I cannot remember which author said it, but the quote is, "no one born with a hungry mouth is truly innocent." It applies well when people want to go on about the innocent-children in the abortion discussion. After birth these people will need resources. If their parents can't or don't want to provide those resources then that burden falls on society, a society that doesn't want to expend significant resources, unless neglect occurs.

This is a raw deal, and is the primary reason why I support reproductive rights that include the right to not reproduce despite going through the motions. It's a travesty that people both want to take away the tools to prevent pregnancy in the first place and then want to take away the means to end unwanted pregnancy.

There actually is an anthropological theory that posits that ego in the self-awareness meaning is a relatively new phenomenon, and that most of the spiritual leaders of old were more self-aware than their peers.

Given that in the Abrahamic religions, it's established that there other humans besides the progeny of Adam and Eve (there are references to cities) it might follow that compared to the rest of the population, Adam, Eve, and their progeny were significantly more self-aware than the rest of the population. That could help reinforce that Genesis is more of an allegory in the sense that it in-part describes the rise of Man from being simply a primate struggling through existence like all of the other primates to having that sense of ego and awareness. That could even indicate that the act of becoming Man and having ego is the 'fall from grace' in being expelled from the Garden of Eden. That would mean that Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, and everyone else mentioned by name in Genesis is there to be in parable, not literally those individuals, but the rough story of those that came to greater self-awareness in that part of the world first.

Obviously this could be completely wrong too, I'm certainly not an expert on this theory nor do I have the resources to cite sources, but it's interesting to to muse on it. The contents of the Torah/Bible obviously had to come from somewhere.