Slashdot Mirror
Will Linux Save Microsoft?
Chait writes "Check this article out looks interesting!
Will Linux Save Microsoft? " Its a fairly logical piece, and certainly not
saying anything that any of us haven't thought about. My opinion has always been that as long as the source stays open, I don't care, but it'll definitely be interesting to see what happens.
This is a fine example of how stories can spread on the Internet.
The original story was told by Rex Ballard sometime in '95 in comp.os.linux.advocacy, at least according to dejanews.com searches.
His claim was that as part of the agreement to sell all rights to Xenix to SCO, Microsoft agreed to never enter the Unix marketplace.
I asked Rex for proof of this story, where had he heard it, etc. He claimed it was in the SCO Annual report. Asking him to perhaps provide pictures of this on the Internet resulted in a claim that he only does research for others at $100/hour.
I've went and tried to find this in the Annual reports and was unable to locate it. I've also tried to locate the story in news articles, and have come up blank.
Unfortunately every time I went looking for something to corroborate this story in the real world I came up blank. When I went looking for something to corroborate the story on the Internet all leads pointed right back to Rex Ballard.
Whether this story is true or not depends on one question:
Do you Believe Rex Ballard?
No, Microsoft isn't pure evil. Neither is it simply in the business of making money.
Microsoft still looks up to Bill Gates like a personality cult. Until and unless they change that, consider them less of a mere all-for-profit corporate entity and more of a large and powerful expression of Bill Gates' will. He may be just the CTO now, but he still has the authority of a monarch there.
This is important because Bill Gates believes in central control--his central control. I believe that this central control is more important to Bill Gates, and thus to Microsoft policy, than even profits. This centralized control is impossible to achieve using Open Source software, and that is why Microsoft has not ventured there.
My understanding is that Gates has a vision for user-friendly computing, and belives that he must control the entire show in order to provide that vision for the people. He's not evil, he's doing it for us, the users. I just think that his vision is sadly mistaken.
Open Source Software threatens Microsoft's corporate profits. It also threatens Bill Gates' world-view, personally. If and when Microsoft enters the Linux or Open Source arenas, it will be for one purpose only--to destroy it.
--The basis of all love is respect
Even if Microsoft were to make their own linux distro, the *required* stuff would be open source, but all the Microsoft-contributed code would be closed. You better believe it. They will probably port over their Windows toolkit, and any versions of Office/IE/whatever that they make for linux will be dependent on their toolkit and ultimately their linux distro. If they're smart, they'll probably even make the underlying stuff freely downloadable and charge for the fancy windowing and UI (a la Mac OS X). They probably won't even use X.
That article brings up good points... they'll just capitalize on all the R&D that the linux companies have done. Typical tactics. Heh... MS execs are probably even reading this right now saying "hmm, that's a good idea, maybe we should look into this!"
I'm beginning to wonder what future the Open Source movement has, if there's not way to legally enforce some piece of code's open-ness. I mean, how do you take M$ to court? Cmon! Gates carries around more money in his WALLET as spending cash than most Linux-developing companies have as net worth. I'm starting to doubt the supposed MS breakup will ever happen. There needs to be a legally unshakeable means to protect Open Source from Micro$oft's usual hijack move. Or at least, in a perfect world there would be.
-Kasreyn.
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
The reason I don't think they'll come out with a disto based on Linux is because, as a LinuxCare exec said in an LJ article about a year ago, even if they throw in some closed libs/APIs, its a hell of a lot easier to reverse engineer them when you see how they interact with userland programs on the top and the kernel on the bottom.
Nathan
If you don't have anything nice to say, say it often.
- Ed the Sock
You want MS Linux? Here you are. :)
You should only choose another license if you specifically intend to allow anyone to make closed-source, commercial use of your code.
That's why it's pointed out in an earlier comment that Microsoft wouldn't base an offerring on Linux, but on BSD - as Apple is doing, with Mac OS X.
The Free Software Foundation recommends against the general use of the LGPL - formerly called the GNU Library Public License but now called the lesser public license.
Generally, you'd only want to use the LGPL if there is already an existing high-quality library that is available in closed-source form and you want yours to be adopted by people who want to keep the source to their applications closed. This was done, for example, with glibc, to make a replacement for the proprietary libc popular.
But if you're writing a totally new library, or if you feel that your library is a significant improvement on an existing closed-source library, using the GPL rather than the LGPL will draw new free software into the world, and although it won't prevent people from selling your work, it will prevent them from holding the source closed.
Licenses that would be inappropriate for competing with Microsoft would be the BSD License or the MIT License, the Apache License or the Mozilla Public License.
That's why, despite Mozilla, we still need a good browser that is GPL'ed.
For lists of a lot of licenses, see the opensource.org approved licenses and GPL Compatible Licenses - these last basically can be combined in software with GPL'ed code. Also note License that are incompatible with the GPL.
Upon further examination, I see that if you are not going to use the GPL, you should at least use a license that would allow your code to be used in the same project with GPL'ed code. This is the case with the revised BSD license (without the advertising class) and the MIT license but not the Mozilla license, or, significantly, the Python license - in some cases the incompatibility is not caused by restrictions by what you can do with the code but in the case of Python it's because the licensed is governed by the laws of the state of Virginia in the U.S.A.
Sometimes people do specifically choose to use things like the MIT License because they intend for it to be used for commercial use. My friend Andy Green who wrote the ZooLib cross-platform application framework is an independent consultant, and he had it in mind to make things easier for other consultants and small commercial developers, as well as free software developers. It was a complex decision but they people with an interest in the code ultimately agreed on the MIT license.
On the one hand, this allows people like Microsoft to write cross-platform closed-source products that would compete with free software - so MS could port their products to ZooLib and have source compatibility with Linux, Windows and Mac (and BeOS too), and this source would be closed, which could be a problem.
On the other hand, the ready availability of an open source but commercially-compatible crossplatform library gives power to the third-party developer at the expense of all OS vendors whether closed or open source, which I feel is arguably a good thing.
So it is a complex decision, really. But I think that, when in doubt, use the GPL. If you hold the copyright yourself, you can always supply a separately licensed version to people who pay you for it. For example, while the CygWin library (a POSIX API for Windows, part of a GNU programming environment that is largely source-code compatible with Linux) is under the GPL, you can purchase a proprietary license for it from Redhat which is actually pretty expensive from the terms they used to have on their page.
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
The idea of Microsoft buying RedHat is equally silly. If they did then ALL the key technical RedHat employees would resign. They would take their money and do something else (or maybe the same thing).
If Microsoft decided to create its own distribution, Microsoft Linux, it would be forced to release it under the same license agreement that the Linux kernel is released under.
Where they could start charging more is with their own applications and extensions that do not rely on open source code. In this case, they'd become just an application development house, not an OS vendor any more, at least from a financial point of view.
That's fine, but that defeats the whole idea of the article. The point was that Microsoft could dominate the OS field by putting out their own distribution - simply not dominance that can happen.
Hal's MS Linux scenario is absurd, so I won't spend time punching the straw man. Office, on the other hand, is an interesting scenario. With OLE/COM and VBA, Office integration has become a coveted logo for business apps. Red Hat's dominance, as demonstrated by proprietary applications supporting only Red Hat Linux, raises fears of one official Linux distribution. Likewise, KDE's adoption of the pseudo-free Qt raised fears that TrollTech would establish a toll booth on the Linux desktop (no flames please, I'm speaking in the past tense). Far more imposing would be a blitz by Office and supporting apps. like Visio to a proprietary Windows-on-Linux layer. Such a layer could quickly become popular by emphasizing performance at the expense of X's flexibility.
The longer MSFT stalls, the less likely the scenario becomes. Reading about Bonobo and lightweight CORBA is just like reading about OLE five to ten years ago. Eventually, Linux will have a solid component architecture. In the meantime, MSFT has an opportunity to hedge its bets.