Why Windows Must (and Will) Go Open Source 555
Attila Dimedici writes "Charles Babcock of Information Week published an interesting article suggesting that Microsoft will have to at least to some degree take Windows open source if they want to stay in business. He suggests that the money to be made from the things MS builds on top of Windows (Office, Server, SQL Server, Exchange, Sharepoint, etc.) is so much greater than what can be made from Windows itself that MS will have to give up the revenue stream from Windows in order to maintain these other, more valuable, revenue streams."
There is too much money in Windows (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Nonsense (Score:4, Informative)
That's debatable, but the article (or at least the summary, since no one reads the articles) claims that MS will have to "give up its revenue stream" in the OS (meaning giving it away for free) in order to protect the revenue stream from their other apps. This is a ridiculous assertion given the current climate in the software business in general, and in the OS market in particular.
Re:There already is Open Source Windows (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Nonsense (Score:1, Informative)
Sometimes everyone in the know, knows ex: Eternal September [wikipedia.org]
Re:Not likely (Score:5, Informative)
Windows Market Share Climbing
Windows 7 market share is climbing. From your linked article:
Although the beta of Windows 7 quickly grabbed one-tenth of 1% of the operating system market share last month, Microsoft Corp.'s operating system continued its downward trend...
You can't have a period of substantial increase for alternative OSs without that being indicative of something critical: true choice. If the alternatives are indeed practically viable, then the OS market has reached a tipping point. Expect all hell to break loose.
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Informative)
"Windows market share as of Dec. 1 is 89.6 percent."
"Meanwhile, Mac OS X posted its largest gain in two years, with 8.9 percent market share at the end of November."
"On the browser side, Internet Explorer's market share dropped below 70 percent to 69.8 percent for the first time in more than a decade. IE slid 1.5 percentage points in November, totaling a 5.8 percent market share loss for 2008, according to Net Applications."
From: http://www.cio.com/article/467916/Microsoft_Market_Share_Slips_Pressure_s_On_for_Windows_and_IE_ [cio.com]
Re:Nonsense (Score:4, Informative)
The year of the telephone is 1884.
You got the first long distance call, and you got the biggest change in momentum in uptake as AT&T was gobbled up by American Bell.
The year of the light bulb is 1918.
World War I ended. All those factories that had been set up were then used to deliver electricity to surrounding neighborhoods. It was the clear turning point in the availability of electricity for the masses.
The year of the internet is, sadly, 1993.
Re:Nonsense (Score:3, Informative)
While I applaud you knowledge of that infamous day, that was technically the day the internet began serious decline, not "the year of the internet".
Re:And nobody will care... (Score:5, Informative)
Sparc is dieing.
Hmmm, I thought they made chips on wafers, not dies.
Of course, it doesn't matter since Sparc is dying.
Re:Windows will die one day... (Score:3, Informative)
Obviously new OSes springing forth from Linux will remain open source. (At least, one can hope.)
Barring the entirety of copyright law being thrown out the window (or an SCO-like hijacking), OSs based on Linux must be open source. It is BSD kernels that risk being taken and closed-sourced
Re:... or release Office on MacOS/Linux (Score:3, Informative)
Office is available on OS X....http://www.microsoft.com/mac/ all the appz work the same as their pc counterparts though entourage = outlook, I have no idea why they call it something different.
Re:The year of the Linux internet appliance (Score:3, Informative)
Psst, that's mostly unnecessary, unless you're purchasing music off of iTunes. AFAIK, Amarok [kde.org] can sync with iPods just fine, and I believe Rhythmbox [gnome.org] and various other Linux-native players can too.
--- Mr. DOS
Re:And nobody will care... (Score:5, Informative)
As another poster already pointed out, this isnt really true. Windows NT booted on other architectures, but never really provided working systems on them for most purposes. This was a consequence of the unfree characteristics of the Windows ecosystem - the vast majority of the assortment of third party tools that need to be added to Windows to actually do most things never ported over to NT on other archs. The companies that made them had no motivation to allocate resources to port them, because the markets were not large enough, and the markets never grew because the apps werent ported. If you were lucky enough to have an Alpha machine at the time, for instance, you could boot NT on it and run a mean game of solitaire, but precious little more. MS tried to solve this with an emulator, but this worsened the problem - now you could boot NT and run an app, but once you started the app the emulated performance was comparable to an x86 machine you could have gotten at a fraction of the price, while the app makers were even less motivated to make a proper port because they could just tell you to use the emulator.
THIS is one huge advantage a Free OS with Free ecosystem has - the manufacturer doesnt have to allocate resources to port to new and promising architectures. Enthusiasts who use the apps can pitch in unbidden and do it themselves. This allows a promising new arch a chance to grow to critical mass without getting caught in an unsolvable chicken and egg problem.
Re:Nonsense (Score:3, Informative)
It's not just usenet. 1993 is when AOL let loose the floodgates.
Most AOLers didn't know of the internet beyond AOL's channels, keywords, and chatrooms.
AOL 1.0 was released in late 1992 for Windows 3.x.
In 1993 it was released for Macs.
In under 10 years, AOL had extended it's tubes to over 25 million homes/businesses. The start of the change from niche service for nerds to "have you heard of this "innernet" thing?" began in 1993 when ISPs began to focus on providing specific services and content. Compuserve, AOL, and Prodigy would have a total of over 4 million subscribers by the end of 1993. The first real content began hitting the "web" in a serious manner as newspapers and magazines such as Time struck deals to make their content available to subscribers of certain ISPs. CERN declared that the world wide web would be open to all. The first real price wars for dial up access began. The White House got online. The first major article about the web was written (appearing in the New York times). Bandwidth became an issue in 1993, resulting in 28.8 kbps modems coming out the following year. 9600 baud was all we had for 17 years prior to the emergence of 14.4 k in 1991 (a speed increase of 50%). Yet just 2 years after we got 14.4 k, the users of 1993 demanded so much content that we doubled our connection speeds to 28.8 k in 1994. It would be 4 more years before we got 56 k modems.
Assume anything else?
Re:Nonsense (Score:3, Informative)
His point is that MS may not be content with selling you something and then letting you use it for eight years anymore. So they make it unviable to use one of XP's successors for that long by either switching to some sort of annual licensing fee or EOLing releases sooner so that you have to pay to stay on a supported OS.
Known troll (Score:2, Informative)
If the hyperbole and creative spelling doesn't do it, and if the suspicious [slashdot.org] links don't, either, then this [slashdot.org] might.