Ballmer on Windows Server 2003, Linux 1282
no_demons writes "Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer, has given an interview to CNet about Windows Server 2003 and Linux. He claims that 'our customers have seen a lot more innovation from us than they have seen from that [open-source] community'. Discuss." Also in the news: two critical security vulnerabilities (MS03-014, MS03-015), and this piece about Windows 2003 mentioning that Microsoft is trying to develop a command-line only server.
He has a funny idea of "Innovation." (Score:5, Insightful)
So just because the basic design is old, it's not "innovative?" I think this guy needs to spend more time with his programmers!
Yup, Michael posted this one. (Score:0, Insightful)
More innovation from Microsoft? (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft is trying to develop a command-line only server.
Isn't this a little backwards?
I wonder why... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:He has a funny idea of "Innovation." (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
What I think, is the open source community needs to work more on marketing, documentation, and support. I believe that's the area that is lacking the most. Probably one of the best ways to education people on linux and open source is to get it in the schools. Kids usually tech their parents how to use computers.
Go calculate [webcalc.net] something
20 years... old or experienced? (Score:3, Insightful)
Gee, so 5 years down the road when M$ is integrating open source software to maintain value in the consumer market, I wonder where this guy will be...
That aside, generally don't things get better with age? With more time on the open market, would that not imlpy 20 years of innovation and development? If not, why is it still alive and more popular than ever? Would that explain the relatively small number of security holes and bugs of the 20 year old system, compared to the "modern" Window$ core?
Ballmer's right (Score:3, Insightful)
They're trying command line only? (Score:3, Insightful)
Good luck with that experiment, Microsoft. But there's much more to a solid OS than a simply a lack of GUI
Oh look, an outright lie too. (Score:4, Insightful)
Forgetting RedHat [redhat.com], Mr. Balmer?
Re:No wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No wonder (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Steve shares nose surgeon with Michael Jackson? (Score:2, Insightful)
There is a project called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which uses primarily Microsoft architecture. It has been very successful, and as bugs come up along the way due to situations in databases which have never been tested, they can call up the company and have a patch for the bug by the next day. I guess their budget is higher than most companies', however, because they have gained a substantial amount of funding from grants. But Microsoft does work permitting that you have money and you know how to use it.
Another informed reader (Score:3, Insightful)
"Are you looking at search?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Gosh, could that be because any not found address put into an IE browser redirects to an MS search page? Could that drive up traffic? Is that innovation? Like Arthur Anderson innovation?
Re:He has a funny idea of "Innovation." (Score:3, Insightful)
What's wrong with using a 20 year old system? (Score:3, Insightful)
"Linux itself is a clone of an operating system that is 20-plus years old. That's what it is. That is what you can get today, a clone of a 20-year-old system."
If it ain't broke...
Re:Innovation (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:No wonder (Score:1, Insightful)
Fact remains, as social animals, we do not exist in an individual isolation. I know it's hard for friendless computer geeks to comprehend this, but it's true. Throughout history humans have worked communally to achieve their goals, and by this method became the most powerful animal on the planet. If we'd not cooperated, our ancestors would've been picked off one by one by sabre-toothed tigers and their ilk.
Sure, there were selfish individualists then too, but if they did not bend to the will of the tribe, they were cast out and consequently died due to predation or lack of food. This is all very basic, even a small child can see this. Communal sharing is a basic premise of humanity. Those who violate it are unhuman monsters, as we can see by the rampant degeneration in the united states of fat pigs (USA).
What we have done, through our hard work, is stopped killing snotty individualists, so now they think they have free reign over themselves and their environment, and think that it is natural, and good. You can always tell a moron from not by using this test. It's the furthest thing from natural, it only exists because the community has created an environment where their shenanigans can be tolerated without much damaged. I think we should go back to culling them, they are slowing the progress of our species.
Re:Oh look, an outright lie too. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:innovation. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:He has a funny idea of "Innovation." (Score:5, Insightful)
Name an application, or a feature of the operating system, that is truly innovative?
The only I can think of is Mosix. The other large areas of development (KDE, GNOME, Mozilla, the kernel) are simply trying to catch up to existing commercial software (Windows, IE, Solaris/BSD).
Re:No wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
Much easier to let Microsoft take care of you and feed you, isn't it. Ignore those other web servers for Windows because Mommy Gates doesn't make them.
Open source was doomed from the beginning. [...] Open source is based on the very principles of communism:
The American revolution was doomed from the beginning. It was based on the very principles of democracy, and look what happened to the Roman republic. It's easy to make a simplistic analysis, but the simple fact of the matter is that open source works.
People ignore the basic fundamentals required (a decent media server),
The basic fundamentals required include a media server? Since when?
MS coders learning from UNIX & Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that all these bright ideas go through Microsoft's "profit maximization machine" at some point and we get "embrace and extend" and other fun phonomena. I'll stop before I get back into that tired rant.
At any rate, here are two lessons learned -- by MS -- from *nixes, quoted from the article [zdnet.co.uk] on the command line server. "Windows core technology guru Rob Short" says...
We'll be able to patch probably two thirds of the components without shutting the system down. That's an area where the Unix guys are ahead of us, because of the way they do redirection -- they can patch a file and then change the symbolic link. That's an area where we've got a problem, and we'll fix it in the near future when possible.
Later a quote on Linux:
[Question] Why is there no command line only version?
[Short's answer] We're looking longer term to see what can be done, looking at the layers and what's available at each layer and how do we make it much closer to the thing the Linux guys have -- having only the pieces you want running. That's something Linux has that's ahead of us, but we're looking at it. We will have a command line-only version, but whether it'll have all the features in is another matter.
Re:Unlikely (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a server platform.. Work it out.
What about the positives aspects of the interview? (Score:5, Insightful)
We created the SMB file server specs, and we didn't have the fastest one around, which was embarrassing. So we took our performance team and said "your mission is to make ours twice as fast as this other one on the market."
I understand this to be the admission that Samba was faster than any SMB server MS had in the past, right? See, this is competition at work. Granted, Microsoft tried to discourage people from competing (in the SMB case, by making small changes to the protocols with each release, I believe. Correct me if I my wrong, please) but the Samba team still came out with a better product.
I expect that by this time next year the Samba team will be saying "yeah, we got a faster SMB server than the one in Windows 2003, but hey, they ASKED for it! Do you remember that S Ballmer interview?"...
Microsoft's Strength (Score:5, Insightful)
They're willing to take ten YEARS to let something come to fruition; they have no problem 'waiting for fullness.'
This is a HUGE advantage that a lot of OSS people simply don't have; whoever's coding NiftyApp gets bored around version 0.64 and drops it, and meanwhile, some other guys is making GniftyApp 0.4 because he doesn't feel like working with the first guy.
On the other side of the pond, Microsoft will let something fail, and fail, and fail, tweak, twist, fix, and then they have something worth having.
Re:Ballmer's right (Score:3, Insightful)
2000 is quite stable; anyone who says otherwise either never tried it, or doesn't know what they're doing.
Re:Steve shares nose surgeon with Michael Jackson? (Score:1, Insightful)
One of these companies, a Fortune 500 is based entirely on
Many large companies don't want open source. They want support, they want assurance, they want compliance with existing standards. For large corporations, ditching Oracle in favor of PostgreSQL would be *extremely* costly, involving training and no small amount of anxiety on the parts of managers. The benefits would be hard to sell. Yeah, yeah, I know, user community, blah, free software, blah, blah. But you'd be surprised by how little weight these arguments carry with executives who do have budgets (and that's many), and who want to spend time furthering their projects, not accommmodating open source changeovers that they don't really understand and that, from their perspective, are only significant to technocrats-in-the-know.
Which is true. The average user doesn't give a rip if he's pulling a query from PostgreSQL or MySQL or SQL Server or Oracle, he just wants the information and then he wants to go to lunch, thank you, bye. This might not include the average *technical* user, but there are many more people out there who just want to open up Word and type their letter than bother about whether their word processor is open source and if Richard Stallman would approve of their choice of office software.
Re:Steve shares nose surgeon with Michael Jackson? (Score:3, Insightful)
I had a senior Cisco sales guy offer me a custom IOS load with some features unavailable to the unwashed masses. I turned that one down because it would be impossible to update.
Although I think no vendor will do feature changes or enhancements unless you're huge or its part of your support contract.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Linux in pieces: (Score:5, Insightful)
What he doesn't point out is that if you want to do anything - *ANYTHING* - with the Windows kernel or the Windows luser interface you either have to work for the company or sign your soul to them.
And he's also plain *wrong*. If you want to change the kernel and the user interface, and ooh, lets add, integrate the filesystem into your new UI/kernel integrated innovation, you can. Just do it. You've got the source. Do it, release it, its done. Linus might not like it, and you might not be able to call it Linux, but call it 'Xinul' or something. Freedom - aaah, smell it.
Baz
Re:He has a funny idea of "Innovation." (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure UNIX is quite old, but it's not like the latest versions of it are that old -- latest releases aren't 20 years old... rather, they've been developed based on technologies that have been constantly DEVELOPED for that long, which is a GOOD THING.
Much better than the vaporware -> 1.0 "market as beta tester" -> "v.3 is actually usable" paradigm that MSFT has historically followed when releasing their OSes.
WINDOWS is going to be pushing 20 pretty soon, too. So what?
Re:Unlikely (Score:4, Insightful)
If it's a server than LOTS of stuff. IIS, SQLServer, MSMQ, etc works just fine without a gui attached to the app. We're not talking desktop here.
Re:No wonder (Score:3, Insightful)
Additionally, arguing stability no longer works: 2000 and 2003 are quite stable, they're both remarkably fast (apache on 2000 is a nice platform), and while I certainly use unix on my servers, there's certainly reasons where windows would be an acceptible solution.
Riiiight - only Windows gets patches... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ballmer makes FUD fun! (Score:3, Insightful)
Rough translation: "We have used our monopoly status to unjustly defeat competition before, even those that were forced to release their software for free. We haven't figured out how to do that to Linux."
2. "Innovation is not something that is easy to do in the kind of distributed environment that the open-source/Linux world works in."
A distributed environment of thousands of creative developers, from volunteers to huge corporate contributors like IBM and Sun can't innovate? Ballmer is confusing innovation with "buying companies that made something new and then calling it ours, and then crafting the software in a manner that insures customers continue spending money (and in greater lump sums)."
3. "Linux itself is a clone of an operating system that is 20-plus years old."
I thought Ballmer was done using that blatant untruth. It is clear that Linux is a completely different operating system then UNIX, and is developed in a completely different way, with entirely different strengths. Ballmer is still a FUD afficianado.
4. "The Linux world in some sense is a lot like the Unix world. There is not much communality. There is this distribution; there is that distribution. There is this user interface, there is that. Some people might see some advantages to that."
Ballmer still clearly doesn't understand the concept of the open source development model, is still not used to the concept of competition.
5. "If you want a fix now, we may need to perform better, but you know where to go. There is nobody to turn to if you as a (Linux) customer...."
That statement is truly laughable. Even people that are only vaguely famailar with the consistency of Windows and Linux software upgrades, patches, and hot fixes would scoff at that claim.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:They aren't necessarily wrong... (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, that HTTP.SYS thing sounds quite similar to the TUX in kernel web server switch. Innovation? Not sure. Check out Slicker. UI research. Is the GNOME2 "less is more" philosophy innovative? ReiserFS is really doing some cool things with filing systems.
The problem with "innovation" is that it's so badly defined. Everybody operates under a different definition. So, I don't see much coming out of the computing industry as a whole that I'd class as innovative right now. There are things. Just not many.
I don't think you can make arguments about whether open source is more innovative than proprietary software. I believe innovation is a function of the individual. Sure, there are innovative environments, but for every argument I've seen saying "open source isn't innovative" there are plenty of good counter arguments.
For instance, I would disagree totally with the idea that paid employees are more innovative by definition. The corporate environment is focussed on increasing the value of the company for shareholders - if you have no need to justify profit, you can work on all kinds of things that traditionally probably wouldn't get the green light, and who cares if you fail?
There are also examples of MS innovation, I mean, really innovative stuff like some of the IE bookmarking enhancements that MSR produced a few years ago, that simply never got into the main product. The researchers attitude was, "well we send the product team a report, but we don't know if they read them or not" which stunned me. At least with open source, if somebody doesn't want to implement your innovation, you can fork.
So I haven't seen any convincing arguments that open source isn't innovative. The majority of open source probably isn't, but then the majority of stuff is not innovative, that's part of what makes innovation special and prized.
Re:No wonder (Score:1, Insightful)
Second: the BSD license is not 'freeware'. It's a statement that the software was written to be used by the community, with a single person receiving credit for the implementation. Microsoft does not steal this code: the people who wrote it, and licensed it, know that it's possible, and probably LIKE IT THAT WAY. The developers usually know their code is being used, and should be honored. Microsoft using pieces of the BSD tcp stack? Good for them, good for the people who wrote it initially, it just verifies that it's one of the best damn TCP stacks ever written.
Finally: I'll remind you that the BSD programmer always has access to his or her own code. Microsoft improving a TCP stack doesn't remove the existing stack from the face of the earth, and it doesn't limit use of the original stack. Once Microsoft improves upon it, that's not your code. Your code is still on your disk, where it was all along.
Re:Steve shares nose surgeon with Michael Jackson? (Score:4, Insightful)
What about paid for technical support directly from the developers? Check pgsql.com [pgsql.com]. Very few places really need Oracle.
Read up on JBoss to see how this kind of business model is doing.
Re:He has a funny idea of "Innovation." (Score:4, Insightful)
IMHO it's an indirect acknowledgment that Linux is getting better.
Re:He has a funny idea of "Innovation." (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft, first to implement CLI on top of GUI (Score:1, Insightful)
Innovation (Score:4, Insightful)
Thinking about this, he seems to be accurate on one point - there hasn't been much UI innovation in the open-source community. (And after all, everyone knows that's all that matters!) There has been a lot of innovation in other areas, mostly places the user doesn't see but which improve the overall experience. Things like operating system internals, file-distribution protocols (BitTorrent), server architecture (look at Apache, and all the stuff they do!), build tools, programming languages, software packaging/installation, software frameworks, compression algorithms, file formats, system administration tools... And that's just off the top of my head.
There's definitely room for improvement. Look at the noises coming out from Microsoft about their next-generation database filesystem. Coders who are interested in filesystems should be looking at that and thinking "how can this be done better?" Or .Net - instead of marching to Microsoft's drum, "we" should be asking "how can we do this better?" And there's always the UI and graphics infrastructure issue...
One problem is that a lot of OSS projects (UI ones, mostly) have moved away from the Unix philosophy: small, simple, dedicated programs that do a job well and can be connected with simple tools to perform complex tasks. Sure, you can feed data from one program into another with modern GUIs, but it typically requires a lot of user intervention and the programs are usually monolithic blobs of functionality. Find a way to escape from that limitation, and develop a graphical equivalent to pipes and I/O redirection, and you'll have some real innovation.
Oh yeah, and there's one little open-source innovation he seems to be forgetting about. Its this minor, inconsequential technology that no-one cares about or uses, called "the Internet".
Yo Ballmer (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry dude, but Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf [welovethei...nister.com] does that schtick that you're doing now MUCH better. Must be in the delivery. Keep working on it, though.
Re:Steve shares nose surgeon with Michael Jackson? (Score:5, Insightful)
All of which FS/OSS offers at competitve prices, which is much better deal than you can get from MS. Btw, you get no assurance with MS software -- all software licenses explicitly deny any assurance. So that's just fuzzy buzzword thinking on the part of stupid executives who don't really know wtf they're talking about.
As for support, that is purchased at competitive rates which are much better than anything you can get from MS. Furthermore, you'll get better support, precisely because there is competition. On a personal note, I get better support for free from Gentoo Forums than I get from Gateway for $300.
The benefits of using FS/OSS also scale very well, in that the more computers you use an FS/OSS product on, the more money you save, compared to using MS NT/2k/XP/2.003k. Oh yea, and there's also the fact that you don't have to worry about hundred-million dollar extortion-attempts from the BSA. These benefits -- though providing the most savings for large companies -- are extremely crucial for smaller companies.
Re:No wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
In Soviet Russia, Linux kernel patches YOU!
OK, that silliness aside, let me get more serious about your comments on OSS and communism. You said:
Open source is based on the very principles of communism: everyone works on it, everyone owns it.
OK, so far this part is correct in a way. You do have a sort of joint ownership of the software in that anyone can contribute to it in some way.
The very thing that led to the collapse of Communism leads to the inability of open source to become popular: workers then tend to migrate quickly, and not work hard, since they can't gain anything from working on one thing hard.
This is where I lose you. What I think you're trying to say is that the reason communism fails is that while communism seeks to guarantee everyone a certain amount of resources and rights, it does not take into account the fact that many people want more than that.
This is not at all apropos in OSS. Everyone working on a particular OSS project is NOT equal. Some inevitably rise to the top, whether by being incredibly prolific, by providing the most useful patches, or some combination of the two. In "pure" communist systems, you don't have this. In fact, it's discouraged. Having more than your neighbor destroys the system.
If I had to use some sort of analogy with political systems, I would have to say that many OSS projects are a kind of constitutional monarchy. You have one or a few that are in charge of the project, but there is some underlying set of rules that prevent the "rulers" from exercising too much power. For example, see how Linus Torvalds is often referred to as the "benevolent dictator". In that example, he wields a little more power than your typical constitutional monarchy, but it can be see from past discussions on the kernel mailing lists that he LISTENS to people.
But here you state something that I do agree with, but I don't see the connection with communism, so I'll treat it as an individual topic:
So, projects die as they become less "hot" to work on. People ignore the basic fundamentals required (a decent media server), and instead work on a 3D GUI for X.
This is indeed a problem. Because OSS is open and free-wheeling, people work on what they want to work on, and less "glamorous" features or projects fall by the wayside. Perhaps we need more companies like IBM, willing to pay developers to work on OSS code that gets released back into the community.
Re:No wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No wonder (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, Open Source is based on enlightened self interest, and capitalism. Simply, put software is NOT productive. Software does not create anything of value in and of itself (excluding entertainment software (games), although is entertainment productive?). The value of software is in its ability to make other activities more productive, and reduce the cost associated with that production.
Therefore, software is solely a cost center for business. So, there are two ways for a business to increase the value from its software. 1) Reduce costs. 2) Increase the productivity gains that software provides.
The reason Open Source software is a good business case, and could be self sustaining is that it helps achieve #1. The ideal model for Open Source software is that the businesses that receive benefit from teh software directly pay for a programmer to increase that benefit. Some, businesses are not big enough to afford a whole programmer, so they pay for a piece of a programmer indirectly. The key goal of this is to eliminate ineffiencies in the closed source model that result in higher costs, such as paying for salesmen, marketers, executives, high profit margins due to low competition, and reduce service costs due to competetion.
Does the Open Source production model work for every piece of software? No. But, for the software it does work for, its sustainability will be driven by capitalism and the drive to reduce the cost of goods and increase profitability.
Dastardly
Sadly, he's right. (Score:3, Insightful)
Back to the topic. Linux innovation hasn't been innovation as much as just getting things to a usable point. KDE has finally gotten very nice, where it's as comfortable to use as Windows 2000. There are finally better drivers for doing things 3D. There are some promising web browser projects that are moving away from the mess that Mozilla has become. But this is not innovation. This is simply what users expect.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has been more daring. They're attempting break free of the Win32 legacy with
For unknown reasons, Linux seems to attract conservative thinkers. Any time replacing X11 comes up, there will be vehement advocates insisting that It Is The Way and that we shouldn't replace something that works. And so it goes. Twenty years from now we'll still be using X11.
Re:Steve shares nose surgeon with Michael Jackson? (Score:2, Insightful)
Very close to nil. Our problem is that this is reality. We've dumped a lot of money in the past two years into MS products and training, only to see we need to continue to spend more money. We're a development shop, generally we could care less about users of Office, etc., (though my first retrieve from an SQL DB and export as XML was less than impressive in the way Excel understood it, hmm) We develop apps to run in a browser, pretty much any browser. They run on the server. Some servers are NT4 others 2000, yet to get an XP server up, but with luck that should be soon.
Our challenge is to support our current customers and grow our product line (a common theme, no?) Often we're stuck because Microsoft doesn't actually provide support for some ODBC driver, yet the damn thing shows up just fine, tables and schema, in Visual Studio .NET, I've researched it about as far as I can go, some company will sell us support, but again we don't have money. If I had the c code to this mess I'd pick a similar driver, find what's missing, code the support in and off we'd go, but sorry, you don't get source with your O/S. It's like trying to swim with your shoes on.
Do people really want innovation? (Score:3, Insightful)
This innovation stuff microsoft constantly throw at us is the stuff that Microsofties bang on about, but that no one uses in production for 5 years because "it'll be much faster/more stable/etc/etc in the next version" (ie - great idea, shit implimentation).
Alex
Re:He has a funny idea of "Innovation." (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes they are. It is true that the research wasn't their own, but if you look at the comparison between the research system and the original MacOS, well, there really isn't a comparison. On the other hand, Microsoft still hasn't reached MacOS's usability. It _is_ a cheap knock-off.
Let's do a real comparison. Compare the _original_ MacOS to Xerox's system. I think it's pretty obvious that MacOS was very innovative, even if they didn't originate the ideas.
Now, let's compare Windows 1.0 to MacOS (whatever version it was at then). In this case YES, it was a cheap knock-off.
When you put out a better product than what's out there, that's innovation. Putting out a lesser product than what's out there and choking off the supply channels of your competitor is not.
Re:No wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
Soviet "communism" was never that, it was Soviet socialism with a bit of fascism thrown in for good measure.
Communism itself is just an idea that has been turned into a bad word by seemingly endless propaganda. I'm actually surprised that Ballmer hasn't thrown in the new buzzword for bashing things you don't like. (You know, the "t" word.)
Re:No wonder (Score:3, Insightful)
I wasn't talking about market share. The fact that there are more Windows machines than Linux machines doesn't make Windows any better. and their market saturation is the reason why they have more drivers and commercial support.
I don't doubt that Windows can be an acceptable solution - It all depends on what you need. But then again, for some situations the C64 may very well be an "acceptable" solution.
False Statement (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry but this is completely backwards and dangerously misleading. Communism (the logical extreme of socialism) is not defined by common goals or teamwork but force, and force alone. At the root of anything and everthing socialism is force: the people are forced to contribute to some goal, product, or service defined by those in power. The motivation, or incentive, is not common interests as the socialist rulers would like you to believe. The motivation is pure force. If you don't contribute, you go to jail.
By contrast, the root of free market economics (capitalism) is voluntary association. The motivation is not force but achievement. The open source movement, therefore, is a product of capitalism, not socialism. Open source software fits perfectly into the capitalist model, precisely because open source software is a voluntary undertaking. It is voluntary association -- not force -- that makes open source work.
Incidentally, this is exactly why I oppose the use of tax dollars to fund open source software: it takes a pristine example of what can be accomplished when people are free to interact voluntarily and transforms it into a product of force.
Re:They aren't necessarily wrong... (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that there is that the open-source community never quite manages to turn any of these ideas into actual, practical products. Most people haven't heard of EROS or Squeak. HURD sits perpetually half-finished on a horrible microkernel that it should have left years ago, and efforts to move it to L4 have stalled. When ReiserFS gets here, it will likely be years, if ever, before Linux actually takes advantage of its filesystem approach and obsoletes a million text files. Open-source frequently even has trouble matching truly innovative ideas that do make it main-stream elsewhere. There is, as far as I know, no real open-source equivalent to the QuickTime multimedia architecture (not talking about the movie format; I'm talking about the API) (Mac System 7), Quartz (OS X) or QuickDraw GX (Sytem 7.5), OpenDoc (OS/2 Warp), V-Twin content searching (Mac OS 8.1), live queries (BeOS), register-based virtual machines (Tao Group; in open-source defense, Parrot is indeed a register-based virtual machine, although still lightyears behind Tao's 1993 design)... I could go on, but you get the point.
There are, I think, two reasons for these shortcomings. First, open-source seems incredibly forcused on replacing existing solutions. If that's going to be your focus, then you don't have room to be innovative; compatibility is all that matters, and compatibility inherently means that your innovation options are limited. You can't throw out X11, Unix permissions and configuration files, and classic GUI programming if you want to replace a Sun box verbaitim. That requires gusto and the confidence to say, "I'm going to do that very differently, but this way is better." So why doesn't the open-source community do that? Because it's hard to get a large number of developers willing to spend time on something so radical when they don't have any marketing. Getting out a new paradigm is hard. People get set in their ways. Selling someone on the idea that applications are an obsolete metaphor, or that instead of using a database package, they should use the filesystem directly, can take years, and because open-source developers work as a hobby, they figure that if no one will use their idea anyway, there's never any incentive to polish off those innovative ideas to the point where they're usable. Hence a chicken-and-egg problem built into the system. The best you can hope for are minor improvements on existing ideas, ad nauseum.
Open-source can be innovative. It's just implementing those ideas that trips things up.
Re:No wonder (Score:4, Insightful)
"I've written this software. It's free to use, it's free to modify, but you have to give back any changes to the community".
I want to requalify that slightly because the community isn't necessarily why some one licenses their code with the GPL (except RMS, maybe).
"I've written this software. It's free to use, it's free to modify, but if you are going to distribute it make sure I can get your changes too."
This is how some one writing GPL software gets economic benefit from the software by receiving the benefit of programming by those who use his programming.
Note, if you modify GPL software and never distribute it, your changes never have to be revealed. Although there is benefit to revealing those changes in order that you don't have to keep adding them in when some one else makes a change that you want.
Commnity tends to develop from this as a means of preventing anarchy and excessive forking.
Dastardly
Re:Another informed reader (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No wonder (Score:3, Insightful)
For who?
Re:No wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
You're first point is that there are too many mediocre applications. You point out there are 23 web servers, one of which Apache was for you a clear choice. Your implied question then is why waist time on the other 22. The answer is choice. Not everyone has the same requirements for a web server, or any other piece of software. By creating multiple overlapping programs the Open Source community gives itself flexibility. This flexibility comes with the cost of inefficiency, so your point is well taken. I would like to point out however that redundancy of design occurs in almost every commercial industry. Most auto manufactures produce an SUV. Would it not by your augment be better to have one manufacture (say Ford) focus exclusively on SUV's while another (say Toyota) made exclusively compact cars? Yet to insure competition and consumer choice all the major auto makers make all the major classes of vehicles.
This leads to you second fallacy; one that I am also guilty of in this essay. The Open Source community is not really a single community. Each software project is its own community. Just the auto industry is not one industrial machine, but each manufacture is it own company.
Your next complaint is in many areas projects are incomplete. As an example you point to the lack of QuickTime support in any of the 4 media programs you tried. This is a real problem. Open Source projects suffer from regulations designed for a commercial software market. If I were an Open Source zealot, I would advise you to use your considerable rhetorical and writing skills to make changes in the government structure. As a moderate, I will instead simply concede that Open Source projects are hampered by proprietary information and ask that this be held as mark against proprietary standards and not as a failing of the concept of Open Source development.
On your final point, that Open Source is doomed by the same economic factors that impede communism. I have been throughout this paper comparing the software and auto industries. At this point I would like to contrast them. When a car is built in Detroit, the factory workers spent there time and effort on a product they themselves will not use. Were the plant workers not able to exchange their product for others, there would be no incentive to continue to make cars. On the other hand, when a software developer writes a program, the programmer is able to use that program him or her self. In addition it is possible with software, unlike cars, to quickly and at virtually no cost, reproduce the work product. Software cannot be thought of as just another consumer good (to spite Microsoft's attempt to make that happen) the nature of software allows for a community to invest time, talent, and treasure into it and not be deprived of any think by giving it away. Therefore, incentive to work on a software product remains while there are people who need to use it.
Here is a concrete example of this. You earlier bemoaned the fact that there was not a good media player for GNU/Linux. It would appear then that you have incentive to make one, or to have one made for you. You do not need the incentive of monetary compensation to have this desire, but only the need for functionality. Were you to make one, or lacking that skill, compensate others for making one, your reward would be the product. You could then allow others to use this software without your self loosing the benefits. But, let us assume that you have neither the skill and time to produce such a media player, nor the resources to properly compensate someone else to. We can assume that there are others with your same desire. By forming a community you can pool the resources necessary to create the desired product and, because software is infinitely reproducible all share in the benefits. Open Source will indeed follow the hot software, but so will Commercial sof
Re:No wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
Frankly, with all this poiticization of "Open Source", I feel a strong desire to distance myself from this "movement". I much prefer the days when Linux was just Linux and people used it 'cause it was useful, not for some ridiculous philosophical or political reasons.
Re:Steve shares nose surgeon with Michael Jackson? (Score:2, Insightful)
Sorry, but what assurances does open source give you? And you are wrong. Go look at some Oracle assurances. If you lose data at the fault of Oracle, you get assurances for free retrieval, as well as different packages to get paid for data loss. Lets see Postgres offer that.
On a personal note, I get better support for free from Gentoo Forums than I get from Gateway for $300.
Enterprise != Personal systems. Most slashdotters don't realize this. Your $300 sale from Gateway doesn't mean shit. A $3M sale, does. They don't give a shit about you. Deal with it.
The benefits of using FS/OSS also scale very well, in that the more computers you use an FS/OSS product on, the more money you save, compared to using MS NT/2k/XP/2.003k. Oh yea, and there's also the fact that you don't have to worry about hundred-million dollar extortion-attempts from the BSA. These benefits -- though providing the most savings for large companies -- are extremely crucial for smaller companies.
Lets see some open source clusters, then. True enterprise level clusters, like what Sun provides. Oh wait, that's right, you can't. What about SAN support? Oops, something else open source doesn't do. You really need to get out into the real enterprise world. It must be nice to be so ideological to just ignore reality... I wish I could do that.
innovation - kerberos, ssl, openssh, etc (Score:3, Insightful)
Hey! Mr. Ballsmear is saying dirty things about how the community that creates Linux is not innovative. Of course, we will overlook the extensive use of BSD code within Windows, or the fact that they can't come up with better authentication and security mechanisms than kerberos.
Sometimes businesses don't want innovation. They want stability,clear upgrade paths, and last but not least, security. My boss still uses CMD.exe to do most of his work, even though he's running windows 2000. Most of the guys here can code in Linux as well as in Windows, the environment really doesn't matter... as long as we've got a text editor and a debugger.
If it works, it's good. If it's got newfangled features that break every now and then or open new holes to someone who likes to break things, then we don't want it.
Now, windows 2003 does have some very interesting and great features. I can't say that they are innovative, because an HTTP listener exists in the Linux kernel, because a separate process VM running an application server has been done, because IL compilers have been made in academic environments...
Nothing that MS does is innovative, to tell the truth. They use stuff that other people have developed, and give it a candy-coated shell to make it palatable. That's the crux of it. I can't believe that Steve is lying outright right here. Someone should cut out his tongue or something... he really doesn't make MS look "good" to IT companies.
Re:He has a funny idea of "Innovation." (Score:1, Insightful)
Oh yeah, and Microsoft licensed a significant amount of VM code from DEC. You forgot that too.
Oh, and also he never said NT was a clone of VMS, so you didn't need to put that in quotes.
BTW, we're forgetting about the inherited parts/characteristics of DOS that have made it all the way to the most current Windows OS families. Let's see, and MS-DOS was based on QDOS, which was based on DR's CP/M, which was in turn, roughly based on various characteristics from OS/8, RSTS, RSX-11, and the TOPS-10 OS (all from DEC). Now, OS/8 was originally PS/8, which dates back to 1965 (or earlier, if you count development).
POSIX standards didn't actually go into effect until about 1990.
Re:Ut-oh, looks like you're not a part of the crus (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No wonder (Score:4, Insightful)
Point by point:
23 web servers
What distro are you using that comes with 23? Or did you just go to Source Forge and search for webservers? I don't know of any distro that ships with 23.
4 media servers, none of which support Quicktime, 3 of which support low-res Real only: unusable.
Apple makes a Quicktime media server that runs on BSD,Linux, Windows, and OSX I believe its free. Logged on to RealNetworks just now. They have a version of their Helix Streaming Server for free and guess what, it runs on Linux as well as a bunch of other platforms.
Very little XML support, which is important because our document retrival system is based upon it.
Funny I develop on Linux using XML all the time. There seem to be several libraries for doing so.
Very buggy when uploading to Windows clients, which is very important
This doesn't even make sense. What are you uploading and how? What are you using on the client side to upload? If its FTP chances are you are using a braindead client that doesn't know the difference between Windows and Unix newline characters.
since Linux is so easy to screw up
Yes if you give clueless people access to commands that can screw up the system. 90% of the time if you don't give someone root they can't do anything to the system that would damage beyond repair. Contrast to windows where by default you are logged in at the 'root' level and can just go delete a bunch of DLLs if you want.
and there's no applications for imaging or like Norton's GoBack.
I believe that 'dd' will do what you want though admitidly I've never tried it on an entire harddrive.
What open source needs to do
Then shut-up and start coding or pay someone to do so. This also refutes the whole communism thing. We aren't forced to work on this stuff (ie communism) we do it because its fun and we release it in hopes that it will be useful to someone else. I don't write stuff for you, I write stuff for me. If you don't have the time/skills to write your own then call up someone who can and offer them money to code what you want them to.
As far as Open Source being doomed: then why has it been happening since the beginning of computing? Closed Source is a Microsoft invention. Companies wouldn't dream of giving out their product (free or for sale) without source.
And finally ask some of the communist companies that are making money off the sale and support of Open source software, you know like IBM. Is IBM doomed because they support linux?
Re:No wonder (Score:3, Insightful)
RedHat invariably does silly things like fail to initialize a network card, and lemme tell you, in a networked environment this is a not so good thing.
RedHat and other mainstream userfriendly distributions have the pieces lined up, but they're not there yet as many MANY people will tell you.
Windows may crash and it may be unrighteous and all that good stuff we like to tell ourselves, but it behaves in a consistent manner on supported hardware, it has a list of supported hardware, a huge list of third party software titles, and it just works by brainlessly clicking things.
You still can't do this even in RedHat 9. You risk breaking KDE, or GNOME, or whichever desktop you chose during the install, because they themselves are also fragile. I can't tell you the number of bugs I've run into with either environment which completely corrupt a new user's preferences.
Then what are they left with? Oh yeah, a STOCK GNOME desktop! D'oh.
Re:No wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
By contrast, communism is based on the lack of ownership. The BSD license is a borderline example of this since it makes it very easy for someone to revoke your right of ownership with even the slightest modification to the source code.
On the other hand, Microsoft is a good example of fascism since you never own but rather license their software under their strict terms. Your are forbidden from doing anything with their software without their express consent.
There's your politics lesson for the day, now go troll elsewhere.
you have a funny idea of "catching up" (Score:3, Insightful)
Name an application or feature on Windows that is "truly innovative".
he other large areas of development (KDE, GNOME, Mozilla, the kernel) are simply trying to catch up to existing commercial software (Windows, IE, Solaris/BSD).
Much of Solaris and BSD are based on open source. Windows uses a lot of open source code (networking, etc.). IE was based on open source software. Commercial software keeps copying original research, often released in open source form. Then, a generation later, open source software takes some tweaks from the commercial software and is accused of "catching up".
Of course, commercial entities can throw huge amounts of money at software development and push out stuff really fast when they have to. Open source development can be very slow in comparison. But with very few exceptions, the commercial software companies are not where the innovation happens. Neither Microsoft nor, for that matter, Apple, have invented much of anything in their corporate history. They have mostly been good at taking research results and turning them into products, sometimes well (Apple), sometimes not so well (Microsoft).
Ballmer shoots himself in foot. (Score:4, Insightful)
Well Steve, considering that Windows/Office can generally make up about 50% of the PC's price...you're right. They haven't budged at at all.
Pretty amazing what a monopoly can let you do eh?
Re:He has a funny idea of "Innovation." (Score:4, Insightful)
NT is "based on" VMS in roughly the same way that Linux is "based on" UNIX: each share a philosophy and feel with their ancestor, but they are actually completely different pieces of software.
But to choose to stop your own logic with this one. POSIX is based on trying to unite SystemV with BSD! Not only that but POSIX itself was started up around 1985, still almost 20 years ago.
The difference is that the people who originally designed the UNIX APIs really did a great job and that their design still holds up after 30 years. Microsoft and Apple throw out their stuff every few years and start over. That's not "innovation", it's just "doing a poor job". And, what do you know, each time they throw things out and start over, they get closer to UNIX.
Ballmer Might be Right about Innovation (Score:2, Insightful)
When the anti-trust suit was getting going, I was forced to think about what Microsoft has done for the technical community. I was taken back to that time, about 10 - 15 years ago, when harware was hard to install and software was even tougher.
The fact that software developers have been able to standardize around a common OS and hardware architecture is a good thing. There is a lot less praying involved that the thing you are spending your money on has been tested in an environment similar to your own and will work.
Think about it: would there be a NVidia or an ATI if average users out there had no demand for their product? Would there be demand for their cards if people thought they would have to pay someone $100 an hour to install them? Would there be games written for them if no one had them? I know this is bordering on the absurd, but that works to my point: without Windows, there would be a lot of things we would not have these days. Someone else probably would have stepped up to fill in the void, but if we had a huge number of OSes and platforms out there all with large consumer bases, it is hard to imagine most companies building out the kinds of products we see today.
I give M$ credit for providing a product to accomplish this standardization.
And I prepare to be flamed.
M
Re:He has a funny idea of "Innovation." (Score:5, Insightful)
Open Source deserves a lot of credit.
KDE and GNOME have additional forms of network-awareness built into them at low levels that aren't present in Windows, CDE, etc. Mozilla allows pretty fine-grained control over cookies, JavaScript, and images (small but extremely useful features), and it is actually standards-compliant, for once. Emacs is pretty darn innovative for its time (Lisp engine and rediculous extensibility). Ghostscript is the only way I know to print PostScript under Windows to cheap printers. Is there a better EPS plot generator than GnuPlot? LaTeX and DocBook are basically the only options for large-scale structured document authoring that allow true version control, output to who knows how many formats, awesome mathematics support (LaTeX, at least), among lots of other things. OpenOffice.org will level the playing field for office software. OpenBSD is the most secure OS I know of. The most popular HPC clustering software is open source (Beowulf, anyone?). Apache+mod_basically_anything. I'd bet NetBSD literally runs on a toaster, somewhere. Open Source will figure out package management, eventually, Microsoft won't. The best TCP/IP stacks are open source. PERL/Python/Ruby. CVS-over-SSH allows distributed development of proprietary software. gzip/bzip. tcp_wrappers. gcc (languages X platforms).
Some of what I list are significant refinements rather than true innovation, but the fact that many best-in-class applications exist in Open Source form is undeniable. There are hundreds of other innovations/refinements that I can't remember or am unaware of (a lot of them get taken for granted).
Re:False Statement (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, I think your understanding of communism comes from US media. In fact communism is a perfect society where accumulation of wealth is not a primary goal. Everybody contributes to the society and everything is free. If you have seen "Star Trek: First Contact", then you remember Picard answer to the earth lady on "how much did it cost to build Enterprise". "Money do not exist in our time. The accumulation of wealth is no longer a primary goal..." - that is as a perfect description of a communist society.
Capitalism isn't a "voluntary association". You pretty much have to work or your lifestyle will deteriorate very quickly.
Open source community is in fact as close as it gets to a communist society. The only reason it works is that duplicating software does not actually cost anything, so many of the community member can get away without actually contributing anything and several individuals doing all the work. Unfortunately, with open soure you usually get what you pay for - the software is the best tailored to the needs of the developer rather than customers.
Re:No wonder (Score:4, Insightful)
This "interview" is nothing but FUD:
Ballmer: Innovation is not something that is easy to do in the kind of distributed environment that the open-source/Linux world works in. I would argue that our customers have seen a lot more innovation from us than they have seen from that community.
Um...okay. So Apache isn't innovative? Distributed/cell computing isn't innovative? TiVo wasn't innovative? Granted, a lot of OpenSource projects are started in response to an idea or single implementation in the private sector (e.g., WordPerfect & Lotus -> OpenOffice, UNIX -> Linux, etc.), but web browsers started as basically open software. Not to mention that the directions taken in OS projects often involve quite a bit of innovation on the parts of the maintainers.
Ballmer: Linux itself is a clone of an operating system that is 20-plus years old. That's what it is. That is what you can get today, a clone of a 20-year-old system. I'm not saying that it doesn't have some place for some customers, but that is not an innovative proposition.
So is XP (NT/DOS). So is OS X (NextOS/BSD). None of these XX-year-old systems have been unchanged over their lifetimes. The only really new OS that has been somewhat popularized recently was BeOS (some the POSIX layer was originally based on MINIX, I think), but MS stomped that out of existence. This statement is pure FUD.
Ballmer: Some people say it is an advantage that Linux gets built in all of these little pieces. The fact is that if you want to do some kind of integrated innovation that touches the kernel, that touches the user interface--there is no way. Maybe Linus (Torvalds) can control the innovation in the piece called the kernel, but there are many pieces.
Wha...? Who...? WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?! Anyone can make changes to the kernel or user interface or both. TiVo did it. Embedded devices do it all the time. Hell, they could even do it without even talking to Linus.
Ballmer: The Linux world in some sense is a lot like the Unix world. There is not much communality. There is this distribution; there is that distribution. There is this user interface, there is that. Some people might see some advantages to that. On the other hand, in terms of putting a clear, simple proposition in front of the customer, I think we have a leading edge proposition.
I'm sorry. I have no idea what "communality" is, but I've got to assume that you either mean commonality or community or both. I'm sorry, but I have to call bullshit on both of these as well. The fact is I have a choice between distros (which is good), which basically give me access to much of the same core software. It's not like RedHat vs. Debian vs. Mandrake is going to leave me completely out in the cold with my choice of software. They all run the Linux kernel. They all have Apache. They all have the GNU tools. They all have Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, libpng, OpenSSL, zlib, on and on and on. Hell, they all provide reasonably similar desktop tools (but we are talking about Windows 2003 Server, right?). That doesn't even acknowledge that if there is something missing that I want, I can either (usually) download a binary for my distro, or, no matter what I'm using, I can often download the sources and type
FUD is another term for lies, and this interview is full of them. I'd go on, but it's not a very challenging excerise.
open source? (Score:3, Insightful)
There is nobody to turn to if you as a (Linux) customer says, 'I need this.' You can't turn to IBM. They don't write the thing. It's not like IBM can support Linux the way they support the mainframe operating system. They don't write the code for it.
Of course, because they need access to the source code before they would be able to do any improvements... :-P
no, it's not (Score:5, Insightful)
Open source software has a much longer history than 20 years. Software, in a sense, started out open source as hardware companies didn't view it as being very valuable.
I think it may be fair to say that there's been more technical innovation from Microsoft.
And what would that "technical innovation" be? Just about every single product category, UI idea, feature, or technology Microsoft is using and touting was invented elsewhere: the GUI, the spreadsheet, WYSIWYG word processing, speech recognition, handwriting recognition, databases, networking, web browsing, etc.
I'm no Microsoft fan, but they *have* introduced some real innovations. Cheap, shared-SCSI-bus clustering comes to mind,
I'm sorry, I don't get it. People have been sharing disks via disk interfaces since the 1960's. Microsoft puts a feature into their system that allows this to be done over one specific disk interface (which, not coincidentally, was actually designed to support this). Where is the innovation here? Sounds like engineering to me, driven by marketing ("hey, guys, we need to compete with the mini computers and mainframes on this disk thing").
as does Active Directory (although AD is certainly inspired by NDS).
Again, where is the innovation? We had Kerberos, YP, and NIS, and before that, we had generations of directory services on mainframes.
While Microsoft certainly followed Apple into the era of the GUI, they've made notable improvements to the GUI.
Like what?
There are others, of course;
Please keep going--you haven't named one yet.
only the most rabid anti-MS zealot could claim that they've *never* done *anything* innovative.
Oh, I'm sure they must have done something "innovative", but whatever it was doesn't seem to be related to their bottom line or have had much of an impact on their products.
Re:No wonder (Score:3, Insightful)
Communisim is the Microsoft business model. The state owns everything and it doles out resources as it deems nescessary for the overall good of the state. In an ideal system, the individual is satisfied, does their job, and is given what they need to be happy.
Socialism is the Open Source model. The concept of ownership is vague, in that while a given resource may be created by an individual, it is also available to any other individual as the need arises. So while you may "own" something, others may freely borrow or use it, so long as it remains available to you and everyone else. In an ideal system, everyone does the work they are best at, and has access to anything they need to be happy.
In communism, workers cannot migrate. The state assigns you a job, and you do that job. If you do your job well, you are given a set pay and continue to work. You may advance in the ranks, but it usually involves being selected to replace upper-level employees who leave. (This isn't so different from most non-growth companies here in the US). If you work poorly, you are penalized (again, not so different). The key is that hard work alone will not gain you an advantage over your peers... you aren't competing with your peers, you are competing with your superiors.
Otherwise, I agree with you. Choice is good, but only informed choice. When you get a dozen projects that all claim to do the same thing, but which really don't (yet)... it isn't a viable alternative to the you-must-use-this-but-it-works principal. 12 broken open-source alternatives don't equal one working proprietary product.
In a dream world, all the people doing open source would sit down and LOOK at each others code. They 'd then go talk to each other and agree on common API's where the functionality overlaps. Then future development would have a chance to make something real without re-inventing the wheel again. It's a nice dream.
Re:No wonder (Score:3, Insightful)
This "interview" is nothing but FUD:
You're preachin' to the choir here about the interview. I was referring to prompt modding down of the parent because it was in some ways critical of the open source movement. And I'm claiming that parent post was spot on in its criticism of open source....
Re:Not really. (Score:3, Insightful)
I said "relatively speaking," and I even emphasized *relatively*. Microsoft is using new spins on old inventions to benefit the user. "Benefit" is the key. Arguing that X11 was a great architecture for 1985 does not benefit the user.
Perhaps, perhaps not. We see the fact that people do not comprehend the reasons for X and its design, and rather look to things like having transparent windows as a more useful "feature" than network transparency.
A perfect example. X11's key design feature is something that does not apply 99% of the time. It was a total and utter mistake from the days of many users connected to one mainframe or minicomputer. It is a non-issue for desktop use. Microsoft and Apple understand this. You design for the common case.
Re:Linux missed a MS innovation in copying... (Score:3, Insightful)
Linux frequently dissapoints me though. I like to try new things and will set aside an afternooon to try something new. All too often lately the project only takes a few minutes. My whole afternoon shot. Similar types of projects in Windows have left me with a non-functioning machine and no hope of accomplishing my task.
Linux is for Software Pirates (Score:3, Insightful)
I think this sums up what MS is thinking. It seems very clear to me from reading the interview that they don't see Linux as that big a threat, or at least anything serious. We know that they are running scared in some areas, but untill they can admit to themselves what Linux really is and what it's going to do to them if they don't change, they are in trouble. Good thing they have a few billion in cash to burn while they try to figure out which way is up.
Re:Steve shares nose surgeon with Michael Jackson? (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly, Microsoft is a mature company that is not likely to experience the astronomical growth that they have had in the past. There's nothing wrong with that, Microsoft makes a big fat pile of money.
Unfortunately, Microsoft employees aren't really focused on Microsoft's business, but rather they are focused on the MSFT stock price. You see, a great deal of their personal wealth is wrapped up Microsoft stock, and they want to see that stock go up. To Microsoft management and employees the idea that Microsoft is not a growth company is the highest form of blasphemy. You see, their Price/Earnings ratio still has them pegged as a growth company. If the market decides that Microsoft has stopped growing, then their stock price will drop so that their P/E ratio is much closer to 10.
Microsoft could kill Linux tomorrow simply by dropping their prices. Microsoft has profit margin to give. However, this would almost certainly trigger a market realization that Microsoft is done growing. To most Microsofties this would be the kiss of death for their own personal finances, and it would put a serious crimp in Microsoft's business plan. After all, Microsoft makes a great deal of money investing in their own stock, and they also use MSFT stock as a primary motivator for their employees.
Re:no, it's not (Score:3, Insightful)
You couldn't be more wrong. Microsoft pioneered the use of copyright law to restrict copying of software. They also pioneered the shrink-wrapped EULA.
They've also come up with some pretty innovative contractual innovations with their vendors, although they may have borrowed many of the concepts from what Standard Oil used to do back in the early 1900s.
None of this had benifitted anyone but their stockholers, mind you. But they were indeed innovations for which Microsoft should recieve all the credit they are due.
Sigh .... (Score:2, Insightful)
Linux here Windows there
I am getting tired of all this Microsoft versus Linux discussions.
I am a Unix techie
The thing is to integrate all of these platforms and make em work together, THAT is what matters.
Re:No wonder (Score:3, Insightful)
Then somebody else will pick it up. Unlike Windows/Alpha, Microsoft COOl, MS HomeR, MS "Otto", MS Blackbird, MS PenWindows, MS Bob, Modular Windows, Windows/PPC, Hailstorm, Windows/Mips, european versions of MS Money and other projects which are all lost forever
That kind of thing has indeed happened in the past. It's very dangerous.
Indeed, but it happens much more often in the CSS world, and MS is no exception. They drop projects left and right that become unprofitable or are against the corporate agenda.
Investment safety is a big pro-OSS argument, at least for those who understand it.
Re:No wonder (Score:2, Insightful)
Open Source is, as the parent poster points out, close to ideal communism.
Under what rationale? Open source is as close as you can get to pure capitalism. Remember, all capitalism entails is a lack of central authority governing production. Those who create most open source software projects do it not out of altruism, but because they receive something valuable in return, which is often an aspect that is neglected by the average onlooker.
When someone creates a project, they do it out of a desire for certain functionality. They feel, however, that it is more than a fair tradeoff to relinquish much of the central control offered by copyrights in order to attain the far better quality, innovation, and speed at which open source software is developed. Other beneficial factors involve credit for work and experience. Many open source projects are started when somebody wants to learn about a language, a certain type of program, or the hardware it runs opon. Hell, this was Linus' rationale for creating Linux in the first place.
Re:MS coders learning from UNIX & Linux (Score:1, Insightful)
what about those thousands of MSFT millionaires that don't need to work, but they continue to work because they like what they're doing?
Innovation? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:No wonder (Score:2, Insightful)
IBM, or any other major business would never do this. There is no ROI. Perhaps you need a 900lb gorrilla like IBM to take the whole kit and kaboodle, close the source and then release it as supported software. How many times can it be said? "Normal" businesses will not adopt open sores software - ever. There is no accountability. The support you get is in the form of a flame on some newsgroup or IRC channell by a 133t h4x0r. Imagine going to your CIO to explain the recent downtime... "uhhh ya see Mr. PHB, I downloaded and compiled a security subsystem from someone called c0d3munk3y but it didn't work properly. I emailed him and he said he would fix it after he finished his homework."
The point I'm trying to make, is that by closing the source, the consumer of the software is absolved from all responsibility if/when things go bad. The CIO gets to keep his job. He'd rather pay outrageous liscencing fees for "Software Assurance" or whatever than trust his biz operations to something that he would ultimately be on the hook for.
Open sores software is a hobby and it will remain that way unless someone takes "ownership", but that very idea is against the open sores movement. And that is precisely why your collective "business" model is flawed.
Go ahead mod me down as flamebait or a troll. Deep in your heart, you know I'm right.
Re:Not really. (Score:3, Insightful)
Laugh away. That doesn't change the fact that 99% of all desktop usage under Linux and 99.999% under Windows use a display directly connected to the PC.
"Windows Terminal Server" is the correct solution. You design for the common case, you do extra work for the odd case. Period. I know you'll dismiss this, I really do. And that's fine.
Re:I wonder why... (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's a sample size of one: i used linux. Unless you were running kernel 98 (thats ZERO point 98), I used it before you did. I've written two (trivial) unix-only software packages, and i've got a one line bugfix in the openbsd IDE driver. I've sent bug reports to a few differnet open source projects, and I had Alan cox personally tell me that my VM starvation issue that was crashing my production linux webserver would be fixed in the next release of "buy more ram and leave me alone". I was writing multi-thread programs on unix back before linux had a respectable pthreads implemention. I was making my living on unix machines back when i was still telling people i'd quit if some employer asked me to use an NT machine. Suffice it to say, I've had more than enough exposure to linux, and unix in general.
Now, I choose Windows. Not because I don't know about anything else. Because to me it just wasn't worth fighting with *nix any more to make it do what i wanted to do.. why waste my time if Windows already does it ?
There are lots of companies that try lots of things and decide on windows. If thats hard for you to beleive you should try talking to some of those companies. Be sure to leave your blinders at home.
Re:no, it's not (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, that is exactly my point.
We have spent the last 20 years following Microsoft's journey of self-discovery, as Gates and Microsoft employees have slowly come up to speed on computer technology, starting from a state of nearly complete ignorance. The reason why they have been so successful in the market is because their ignorance was a perfect match to the ignorance of the public. That meant that Microsoft's "discoveries" always was a pretty good match for what the public was ready for.
Now, in 2003, Microsoft is finally beginning to approach the state of the art in a few areas.
Re:Wait, what does MS innovate??? (Score:2, Insightful)
But they rarely, if ever, come up with any NEW ideas. In the sense that Ballmer used "Innovative", MS doesn't fit the description any better than OSS does. Both use concepts that are largely derivative but embellished.
I'll draw a parallel that may be a bit flameworthy here: Asian Automobiles in the 70's and early 80's were mostly not innovative at all. They used very available technology, very derivative designs, cheaper components, and so forth. But they improved their process, which, coupled with lower labor and materials costs, allowed them to sell cheaper. The cars weren't better, they mostly didn't do anything new, they simply exploited what was already available and made it CHEAP. So their innovation was in marketting, not in engineering. I think the same is true with MS. They're not really innovators, they're just good marketers who have a dominant mind-share.
As for OS/2, I'll be the first to say that IBM dropped the ball big time. It could have been great, but Gerstner didn't want to put the time and money into marketting it. The technology was superior in most respects to anything MS had to offer, but once again, MS had a hold on mindshare and aggressively protected that hold through marketting and aggressive BUSINESS tactics. They certainly didn't win on the basis of product quality, robustness, etc.
OS/2 Warp 4 was every bit as easy to install as a Win9x release, had every feature that a Win 9x box had, and was generally less likely to crash than 9x at that time. But it was too little too late, and IBM never put a tenth as much into advertising it as MS did with Windows. The whole picture of things could have been changed by IBm making some aggressive marketting stances and taking some risk, but Gerstner wouldn't have it. In marketting, not technology, did OS/2 die.
As far as OS/2's technology goes, Microsoft benefitted, during their partnership with IBM, by access to a lot of IBM's technology. NT would probably have taken longer to come out, and may not have had some of its strengths without Microsoft's access to IBM's engineering.
Re:He has a funny idea of "Innovation." (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, I very much think so. And, in fact, it is profitable not to get it "right": it gets you to market faster and it lets you sell upgrades later.
Good technology and good business often don't align at all. That's just a fact about market economies. You can't blame any individual company for putting out bad products if it makes them money. Microsoft, for example, is behaving rationally. If there is blame to be placed at all, it's with customers, who end up supporting bad products by making uninformed and short-sighted choices.
Stalin didn't bastardize Lenin's work (Score:1, Insightful)