>Microsoft has one product which is fully backward compatible, and that's Fox.
>
>The rest... well, you run a chance you'll have to upgrade every now and then, the file formats will change, the registry entries will just collide with each other (and really, why can't registry be a text file? It is in Wine)... Even email, which already comes in its own standard text format, has to be stored in a proprietary format. With Mozilla, I can still open the entire archives created with Netscape 4.3 without any problem; if a message was received partially, I could always open the archive in VFP's editor, fix the footer and open it regularly. With Outlook, I had all sorts of problems if anything had happened to the files, and I've lost a bunch of history that way.
>
>And the EULA is basically "we guarantee nothing; in case of any dispute you are wrong and we are right, and if you do any of these things we mention, or refuse the new rules when we change them, we may sue you if we choose to". How very different from GPL.

Linux won't kill Microsoft...Microsoft will kill Microsoft.

Isn't there some snappy saying about history and a certain doom of repeating it? :)