NT's Not Proprietary? Ha!

In response to a letter on the subject of NT and Unix comparisons (Inbox, July), contributor Robert L. Hummel quoted "a significant part of the market" as saying "NT boxes ... don't lock us into a single-vendor hardware solution or become obsolete when the vendor wants a new revenue stream."

Excuse me, but if you substitute "software" for "hardware" in the above statement, you will find yourself describing Microsoft, whose power in the market is based on being a single-vendor software solution with a deadlock on its customers. Y es, RISC boxes tend to be proprietary, but so is Microsoft's software, a fact that the PC press seems to keep forgetting.

All commercial computing is proprietary; that's the nature of the beast. Please don't make yourselves look unaware of this simple fact by throwing "single vendor" barbs at one camp in defense of another camp. You should know better.

Michael Rasmusson
Systems technologist, Bermuda Microsystems
Hamilton, Bermuda
miker@bdamicro.com