Plea for help: The detriment of using Microsoft products

[oommen at imaginetechnologies.com (Oommen Thomas)]

On Thu, 18 May 2000, Jeffry Smith wrote:

<smith>On Thu, 18 May 2000, Mike Bilow wrote:
<smith>
<smith>> This has little or nothing to do with India in particular.  The gist of my
<smith>> statements was (1) the whole purpose of CMM5 in practice is to satisfy US
<smith>> defense contracts for critical systems software that runs things like
<smith>> military aircraft, and (2) the US does not contract out the development of
<smith>> critical defense tasks to India.  It is entirely irrelevant what the
<smith>> capabilities are of Indian science and technology: the US is simply not
<smith>> going to let India build US military systems.  This is just common sense.
<smith>> 
<smith>> -- Mike
<smith>> 
<smith>
<smith>Again, I direct you to look at the site (www.sei.cmu.edu)!  CMM
<smith>Started with the DoD, but is actually used by many others.  You made
<smith>an assumption that because DoD started it, they're the only ones to
<smith>use it.  I'll point out that a lot of our industry started 
<smith>for the DoD (including COBOL and computers in general).  And, I'll

What about the Internet as such - initially it was DARPA used to connect
various defence units or so. Does this mean that Internet can be used for
only defence related work?

If we think that way, a lot of advances in technology in modern days is
courtesy DoD. But that doesn't mean that all these are restricted to
military activties only.

<smith>point out that the purpose of CMM5 is to generate bug-free code, quickly
<smith>and efficiently.  DoD has a strong interest because of critical
<smith>systems.  Are you saying that no one else wants bug-free code,
<smith>generated in an efficient manner?

Quite right.

I have read somewhere that SAMBA was intially developed by somebody who
wanted his wife's windows machine to connect to his unix system. Does this
mean that SAMBA can be used only at home? In fact it has now matured as
the 'fastest fileserver software'... I myself have benchmarked it and
found far better than competitors, even when used for large production
work.

You can even see in some countries that defence takes interest in medical
research too (including heart transplants). Does this mean that any
standards they setup is only for military activities? No, it will be
available to the whole medical community. Only thing is that if it comes
from the DoD, it is more widely accepted as a strict standard.

-
Oommen

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