Thank you. Well said.

It's not so much the prosecutors fault, as it is a system that over zealously values intellectual property, so that the prosperous can be even more prosperous. We, as a society, have lost our bearings. Things are out of whack. I read today an article in the nytimes about sex trafficking, and how border guards in Pakistan, are on the alert for terrorists and pirated DVDs, yet ignore blatant evidence of young girls being sold into slavery. The reasoning? They want to please the Americans whose priorities are terrorism and piracy. We are broken.

Why massa you don't have to develop for shit you don't like, you jus' have to tell us po' boys where the current security holes are. That's all. 2 minutes of your precious time, massa, is all we'uns ask. Your turn butthole.

Wrong (again!). What you meant to say was *WordPress plugins*, that are mostly abandoned open source projects. Your active support, participation, and superior intellect would surely be welcomed.

Rephrase to "everyone you know", because certainly not "everyone I know" is using MS products. Google stuff tends to work cross platform. While I don't often write on a tablet, I do look at a lot of stuff, and Google stuff works just fine. It works (to an extent) anywhere there is a browser, including phones. MS stuff not so much. The vendor lock approach works in some use cases, but not everywhere, and in fact, is start to cause cracks in the monopoly.

and bing too ...

Nah. Its xmas. These articles are like gifts. Ballmer himself is a gift we should learn to appreciate while we still can. A real clown. Enjoy it while we can. Someday MS might do something innovative before anyone else does and actually succeed in the process. Possible maybe, but not very likely.

What a hapless boob. Everything the man touches turns to shit. We are very fortunate he is around, and driving the bus straight off a cliff. How much wong does he have to suck to keep his job?

So who really cares? While I know (in my all knowing way) what you are talking about, I think if I ask around my family and friends (sadly, mostly non-geeks), I doubt seriously they could care less about these features. And probably would not know even what Eclipse is. So its a niche product at best, with some interesting features.

http://en.wordpress.com/cities/. Its as easy to use as anything out there. There are more ways to extend it (without writing code) than anything else out there.

Informative? GMAFB. They are not "developing their own extensions", they coming out ahead of the curve in implementing new features that MS can't be bothered with most of the time. The vendor extensions are an established method of doing this. In fact, MS has the ms- extension they use for just the same situations (its just they don't have as many opportunities to use it since they continually lag so far behind all the competition). And MS never did anything like this years ago. Never. What they did was either outright ignore standards, create their own standards, and implement deliberately buggy implementations that saddled their ignorant user base with for years. What MS was doing was deliberately disrupting web tehchologies in a negative way to slow the adaption of new technologies since their income was all tied to desktops. And deliberately so. What -webkit is doing, is advancing technology. Two ends of the spectrum.

Well, the market changed course years ago. They are too little too late to the party. That's their style though ... wait for someone else's good ideas, use your market dominance to co-opt those ideas, and then make money after the market is already developed. That's worked well for them for many years. This time they might have waited too long for the market to mature, and/or for their reaction to it. They don't innovate, they renovate. Tough noogies. That's the consumer side. They've lost that already and they playing desperation catch up now. The business / enterprise is another matter. That moves much slower and they have no Apple-like competitor. That's going to be theirs for a long time to come. MS won't go away completely (regrettably). They will just become less and less of a factor for consumer products. And we are all better off as a result.

Wrong thread bimbo.

Bazaar does the same, or at least can.

I've been involved in the bookkeeping end of several small businesses. My suggestions .... as to payroll, do not do this in house. Its a PITA, and you will wind up either making mistakes you will come to regret, or spend more time on it that you might be able to use more wisely somewhere else. Keeping up with local tax districts, who lives where, when the govt(s) (assuming you are US) decide to make some subtle change to tax regulations. Penny wise, pound foolish to do this in house for most small businesses. As to basic accounting and booking, I am not aware of anything that does the sheer number of things that QuickBooks can do, or as well. But I haven't tried everything. This sounds to me like the kind of thing that is hard for free / open source projects to compete with. Maybe your needs are very simple? I would suggest some of the SaS products like FreshBooks. These may not meet your critieria of open source projects per se, but many of these have open API's which is a step in the right direction. Also, these are likely built with open source projects, eg Apache, Ruby, PHP, MySQL, Python and so on, so there is some second hand support of open source that way. They also free you from the local installation situation, and can be accessed via mobile or remote locations (ie work from home), with zero hassle. I have used FreshBooks for accts receivable situations, and found it very nice. Compared to QuickBooks, I would opt for FreshBooks for billing and invoicing easily. I have not looked at with acct payables or general ledger in mind though.