Someone pointed out the link, http://neopoleon.com/blog/posts/1246.aspx, to me in a recent mail to strengthen his arguments against my usage of M$ in place of MS. For those of you not having the pleasures of tabbed browsing or is simply lazy not to follow the link (like me!), I am attaching the contents of the post below.

1. Start a project on that digital graveyard of forgotten software called "SourceForge" - Give it a recursive acronym for a name, and ensure that it never gets beyond version 0.0.6. Invite all your friends to contribute. Produce a few paragraphs of documentation in three different languages and then forget about it.

2. Email all your friends to tell them about how much you hate Outlook and how you think its design is incredibly poor - unusable, even. Make sure that you send the email from Ximian Evolution.

3. Buy "Teach Yourself C in 21 Days," spend three hours getting "Hello world" to compile, and then get really excited the next day when you're telling your friends about how cool it is that Apache is open source and than anybody can just drop into the code to fix a problem. Then spend the rest of your life trying to put your money where your mouth is after learning that, wow, this coding stuff is actually kind of hard, and maybe you were wrong when you said that if grandma didn't like her blatant Photoshop clone that she could just change the bits she didn't like, recompile, and be on her way.

4. Show up for a user group meeting in a Honda, Red Hat distro in hand, wearing your Nikes, eating Doritos, and drinking Coke. Then proceed to talk about how much market dominance makes you sick and how much you want to “stick it to The Man.“ Pat yourself on the back for being such a trooper, light up a Marlboro, and kick back in your Levis - You've earned it!

5. Without having an understanding of security, tell everybody you meet that Linux is always more secure than Windows (I've got money that says you're running SendMail on the out of box install of Red Hat that you did (I've got more money where that came from that says you couldn't disable SendMail if your life depended on it)).

6. Every time you mention that you're running this MS OS or that MS product, apologize for it and fail to realize that you're probably spending 90% of your time using an OS that you claim to hate.

7. Always write "MS" as "M$" and completely fail to comprehend that people would write "Sun" as "$un" if it could get off its ass and make something that people actually wanted to buy (Note that I'm not including Sun in the open source world - but I find that Java and open source OSs often go hand-in-hand).

8. Talk about what a bad user experience Windows provides, and about how it's too complicated for most users. You're right about this, and it's only a matter of time before the rest of the world wakes up to the fact that there are serious advantages to having software that's been coded against five different windowing toolkits, and that the location of applications in the "This-isn't-just-an-obvious-ripoff-of-the-Start-menu" menu change completely from distro to distro, and even change drastically from different versions of the same distro. If anybody tries to tell you that you're wrong, just say "nuh-uh" and don't bother to form any sort of a rational argument.

9. Praise Apple whenever possible. Talk about how you think Windows is way too expensive, and that $129.00 for a copy of OS X is much more reasonable. Nothing says "cheap" like a $3,000 PowerBook that's going to be obsolete in a few months. Apple's really cool, but their stuff isn't cheap, and it isn't exactly open, either.

10. Criticize Microsoft for making money. Obviously, the $24,000,000,000 that the Gates Foundation has slated for charity is unimportant. Taking vaccines away from children in Africa is obviously a small price to pay for getting to compile your word processor before you use it so that you can feel 'leet about your software experience. The African children who will now get Polio don't mind a bit, right? I mean, you're happy and healthy, so who cares about them?

Sorry if I seem a little angry tonight. My neighbors are playing loud country music, and I've been drinking warm salt water through my nose all night in an attempt to stop a cold.

These things get to you, you know?

One must say that his points were well chosen, but I do beg to differ, at least on some of those points.

1. Its indecent to call SourceForge so, when Microsoft itself claims to have 6 projects there! Personally I have no project in SourceForge, did not use recursive abbreviations in my project name (although I like them), we have already made 8 full releases, and the next release of my project would be 1.0. So the 0.0.6 argument does not hold. Moreover, all my documentation is in English only. So the multilingual part does not hold as well.

2. I am neutral to Outlook and Evolution, since I do not use off-line email clients.

3. I never bought those books, and never had such illusions.

4. Thats taking it too far. Nice piece of imagination though. Incidentally I attended my last GLUG meeting wearing a pair of borrowed and soiled jeans, a pair of torn Reebok shoes, and had only my legs to transport myself.

5. Its true that I did run SendMail for the first few weeks I installed GNU/Linux on my system. But then I did not claim an expertise in security, and I do not run SendMail unnecessarily anymore. I can disable/enable SendMail even if my life did not depend on it. (This rhetoric is going too far!)

6. Thats not true in my case.

7. There is a difference in M$ and $UN. After all SUN does not boast of an owner, who prides himself in abusing his competitors and spending millions in charity. By the way, SUN did take part in FOSS.IN and sponsor it, while M$ was nowhere to be seen around it!

8. Now this is strange. Every distro is a whole new OS in itself. Would it not be easy to acknowledge how different flavours of the same system are available? In my opinion this is what makes GNU/Linux so enchanting than Windows' straight jacketed manner.

9. I never really said that ever. However now that this point has been raised, I feel if M$ can claim to have better products lined up, as compared to the FOSS community, then looking at the cost factor it might justify Apple's claims regarding quality at least.

10. I do care about the African children, and strongly feel that polio should be eradicated. But so does Bram Moolenaar, Mark Shuttleworth, and many others. Bill Gates' money seems to have become too loud for its own good. Although they may seem related, money and charity are entirely on the opposite ends of the spectrum. However, I have noticed Americans have a tendency to forget that. A certain George W. Bush is a perfect example.

I would not apologize, if someone thinks I am being angry here, since mindless rhetoric is not something I approve of.

Getting an opportunity to have a peek inside the offices of Microsoft is undoubtedly one of the most cherished dreams of today's young men and women. I was no different. Last Christmas, my dreams were fulfilled when I got the chance to spend a day inside Microsoft Campus in Gachibowli, Hyderabad as part of our departmental industrial tour to Bangalore and Hyderabad. The role of Santa Claus was played by our alumnus, Manuj Bahl who had joined 'the corp' as a Senior Application Developer a few months back.

Standing outside the gates of the campus, I could smell the aura that covered the biggest, richest, and most successful software firm of all time. The nine letters, M I C R O S O F T, emblazoned across the main building had a larger than life appeal that had every soul in the vicinity gaping and drooling. Countless photographs were clicked, and each one of them had those nine letters in some form or the other.

The formalities were soon taken care of, and we stepped in. Our first destination was a audio-visual room where an interaction session was organized for us. We were greeted by Sriram Krishnan and Pratibha Kumar, and what followed was an amazing concotion of gyan-talk, informal gossip, and a sumptuous diet. I also got a chance to paint water colours and pastels on Sriram's tablet PC!

But I was still not satisfied. How could I be? There had to be a flame war. How could a GNU Project maintainer feel satisfied basking in the glory of Microsoft and munching Domino's Pizza's for free?

I did not have to wait too long though, as the topic of discussion soon swerved around to stuff like: "Who had the best search engine? Google or MSN?", "Why Microsoft's policies were justified?", "How Microsoft was being Opensource friendly by having six projects on Sourceforge?", "Why the Windows team deemed ext3 support unnecessary?", and so on. One noticeable point was that although Sriram and company vehemently said "Why do you want to use Linux?", and "Do you know the number of bugs and insecurities uncovered in Mozilla?", Sriram still preferred to keep Mozilla Firefox installed in his tablet PC! Kudos to Bill Gates for allowing him to do so, but I could not help thinking that our hosts were being slightly hypocritical. The trio of Sriram, Pratibha, and Manuj passionately pointed out how Microsoft Maps was superior to Google Earth; how Hotmail is going to be a far better email service; how MSN's search engine throws out better search results than Google; how Windows Live was a fantastic service being offered by Microsoft; and so on and so forth. It was quite a nice performance I must say, although they would have done a far better job if they had put more emphasis on the fact that most of the services they were praising were still in beta stage and only available to Microsoft itself. A visit to Google might just have given a completely different view of things, with Google beating its drum at the expense of Microsoft's. However time was running short, and our discussion ended with a quick photo shoot followed by Sriram's invitation to continue the discussion over email.

The cerebral stuff over, it was now time to flex our muscles. The synthetic lawn tennis court, the basketball and volleyball courts, the pool tables, and the XBoxes were the centres of attraction. After trying my hand at tennis for a couple of hours, during which Sanket ended up giving tips to some M$ employees regarding the finer points of the game and I sent the tennis balls flying out of the court, I hurried off to lay my hands on the XBox. What an experience it was? The force feedback gamepads were one of the uncountable first time experiences that I had at Microsoft.

At the end of it all, I could only feel a sense of immense gratitude towards Manuj sir for giving such a memorable Christmas present. Thank you Santa!