FSF Campaign against Microsoft's Plan to Enforce "Secure Boot"

[Amit Aronovitch]

On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 6:03 PM, Nadav Har'El <nyh at math.technion.ac.il>wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 24, 2011, Steve G. wrote about "Re: FSF Campaign against
> Microsoft's Plan to Enforce "Secure Boot"":
> > at least  MS are not openly anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic,
> > or anti 'the bad Jews/Israeli'.
>
> Indeed. I still remember very vividly a meeting held 11 years ago in the
> ISOC-IL offices, about the sad state of Hebrew support on the Web.
> The conclusion was that, sadly but truely, Microsoft was the only one that
> bothered fixing its browser (IE 5, at the time) to support new standards
> that will help Israeli users - namely "logical order" Hebrew text
> (Unicode's
> bidi, see http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr9/tr9-1.html).
>
> Our knight in shiny armor, Netscape, did nothing to solve the our
> (Israelis')
> problems, and forced us to use the ridiculous "visual order" method.
>

Yeah, but Netscape was far from being a knight.
 Royalty free browser is fine, support over more than one OS even better,
but that's not free software.
Uncontrolled race of un-standardized/half-baked html "extensions" - as bad
as their competitor, if not worse.
It only donned armor on its deathbed (by freeing the code and forming
Mozilla).
מודה ועוזב ירוחם

Mozilla, the recently announced free spin-off from Netscape, also didn't
> help.
>

Takes time for new FOSS project to digest a large inherited codebase (and
weren't they busy with infrastructure work, such as XUL, at the time?)

IBM, that volunteered to solve this problem in Netscape, proposed a patch,
> but Netscape didn't even care enough about us Israelis to apply it.
> It would take several more years until Isralis finally had a free browser
> that
> supported logical-order (bidi) Hebrew.
>
> So despite all its other flaws, Microsoft does indeed care about Israel and
> Israelis.
>
>
People care. Corporations seek profit for investors. Some people would argue
that this is more a virtue than a flaw.
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