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Why We Can't Just Get Along: The Bootloader
mccormi writes: "Byte has an article from the BeOS perspective on why we don't see more dual boot machines from vendors. Browser anticompetitive complaints are nothing compared to what's happening with the bootloaders since the majority of people using computers will never have the know-how or courage to make an OS change."
Yes, before you start replying here, please READ that Byte article. It will show you what really happened with the Ms antitrust case in the issue of the "secret license", and it will explain one of the fundamendal and most important reasons why Be was driven out of business and BeOS never became mainstream.
You and I can't read the license because Microsoft classifies it as a "trade secret." The license specifies that any machine which includes a Microsoft operating system must not also offer a nonMicrosoft operating system as a boot option. In other words, a computer that offers to boot into Windows upon startup cannot also offer to boot into BeOS or Linux. The hardware vendor does not get to choose which OSes to install on the machines they sell -- Microsoft does.
The obvious question here is: why didn't the DoJ use this as part of their anti-trust trial? Isn't this the most blatant example of monopoly leverage in existence?
Most importantly, are there any copies of these "trade secret" OEM license agreements on file somewhere? Without some sort of public record, we pretty much have to take the author's word for it (not that I doubt him).
As much as we'd like to create a technological circumvention for this, we can't. Because the people who are affected by this are the people who don't have enough computer knowledge to even know they have a choice. And Microsoft has, very intelligently, ensured that they never will.
Innovation at it's finest.
The revelation that Microsoft would hold a gun to their OEM's heads doesn't suprise me. Microsoft may not be the 'Great Satan', but their business practices are somewhat sinister, cloak and dagger, and monopilist.
What surprises me is that some of the major hardware vendors would put up with this. Compaq, Dell and IBM? Without them to pre-load windows (which would happen if MS pulled their license) half of Window's market share would evaporate. It's true--few people would install their own OS. If MS pulled their license, why doesn't IBM or Compaq just install Linux for free and say to hell with Redmond?
Maybe there's more to this than just the license thing. maybe Bill Gates has several CEO's families held hostage in the basement of his Redmond Complex....
Beware the Whyte Wolf.
With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels...
Linux is free. And yet there are no commercially available dual-boot machines on the market.... There is no other way to explain this phenomenon other than as a repercussion of the confidential Windows License under which every hardware vendor must do business.
No, Linux is not free to the vendor. It requires an extra configurator setting, more system testing, documentation and support cost, installer and boot-time software development, inclusion of CD-ROMs, and a few gigabytes off the hard disk. If there's not customer demand for the feature there's no point in the extra cost for the system vendor.
Tim
The BEST bootloader available right now is GAG. Multiple OS's on multiple Primary partitions, the bootloader is able to fit into the bootsector itself, it fixes errors, it finds in bootsector etc. etc.
There are execptions, of course (for example, many of the readers here). But why would your average end user want to have to learn two (or more) seperate OSes?
At best, out of the box multi-OS machines could satisfy a small niche market of hobbyists and power users, and I'm sure somewhere those would make up a large enough marketshare to support a couple of vendors.
But me, personally, I'll keep BSD on my machine I made for BSD, and my Windows on my machine taylored for windows.
The Internet is generally stupid
The main evidence he presents is the absence of hardware vendors selling dual-boot systems. But there seems to be at least one counterexample.
DOS used to be a bootloader, for an operating system called Windows 3.1 (and, less obviously, some later versions too).
If we're going to call for restrictions on operating system bundling practices, we must be prepared to draw a line in the sand and define at what point a bootloader itself is *not* an operating system, and at what point it is...
Think about it. Is an OS something that allows a user to select from a number of different programs, each with their own storage/comm mechanisms, and have those programs run, successfully, managing resources as needed, to completion?
On the one hand - sure, lets melt down our bootloaders to make weapons, but then again: what're we really doing?
:)
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
The last solution is the one most people choose. The substitute may not work as well as the non-Windows alternative, but unless you're a total fanatic, it's just not worth the hassle.
Why can't M$FT be prosecuted for Denial of Service?
If I install, let's say FreeBSD, then I install Windows, it will wipe out the FreeBSd boot manager (without asking), thus denying me the FreeBSD service. Why does M$ think they own my boot track?
I'm afriad I'm a victim of popularity here. I'm a Windows and Mandrake guy. I've heard of BeOS, but have not taken much time (actually none) to learn more about it. It appears from the article that BeOS had something to offer to consumers that made Compaq, Dell, and Hitachi wanted to sell it alongside Windows (until the lawyers noticed the fine print on the MS license).
Given that, what is significant about BeOS? What is the hype about? etc etc.... ????
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
Because Office for Mac and IE for Mac would disappear.
This guy starts to make a good statement, and then trips and makes a fool of himself in the comment you quoted.
Yes, it's a mistake to make a commercial OS, but not because people are complicit in accepting Windows. It's because Windows is the only OS that anyone will pay money for nowadays, and even that is beginning to change.
The OS has become a commodity. What OS you use is becoming largely irrelevant for the most popular tasks people use their computer for. It's not that no one can compete with MS; it's that there's simply no money in it any more, and only sheer momentum is what allows Microsoft to charge for Windows. But even then, most people don't pay directly for it anyhow; they get it with their computer, and never see the costs.
No, we're not complicit in supporting Microsoft; we're complicit in not going out and buying OSes of any kind.
Not only petty and shallow, but totally wrong as well.
Are you trying to tell me that Microsoft doesn't use C++?
Lemme guess, you're a GTK/GNOME zealot, right?
Do you honestly think that Be would be in a better situation if they had used straight C? There are bigger things at work than the mere language of implementation.
The point is, with competition made possible in the marketplace by this bootloader issue, those *costs of maintenance and support* would be reduced. People *will go* with the easiest to use and nicest looking operating systems around - given a *choice*.
We'll never know. Microsoft is standing in the way.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
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BeOS was a half-assed (though excellently done, for the half an ass that was there) implementation of a great idea. What killed it in the end had a lot to do with Windows, but more I think to do with Jean-Louis Gassee's pigheadedness.
Be was a Mac fan's toy in the beginning -- the BeBox was a PowerPC-based system that was aimed at the geek world and happened to fit into the Mac world because of PowerPC loyalty. Be was doing okay until Apple killed Mac cloning and forced Be onto the much more hostile Intel playing field (a field they didn't have to be on, IMHO -- rewriting part of the Be microkernel using Mach/MkLinux code would have been workable (if a bit shady, since it's a little tough to tell what the licensing on Mach is) and would have kept Be alive on its native platform), but Gassee &c. chose not to.
I think Be could have made the whole thing work -- there was a Posix layer, after all, and the OS itself, though (as stated above) half-assed, was very elegant and well-implemented nevertheless. But as good a point as the bootloader issue is (and it's a damn good one -- day late and a dollar/euro/pound/yen short for bringing it up in 2001) it doesn't have much to do with Be's bright start fading slowly into obscurity.
/Brian
While I think you have some strong points, I've used BeOS and it was as good or better than anything I've seen from Microsoft.
I'm afraid merit never came into play here. Their money allowed MS to develop their way into the server market with a decent product, for example, but the real advantage of their money was in strategy, not product innovation.
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Simply to point out that C++ had nothing much to do with it -- the early Be community certainly didn't mind.
/Brian
This article attacks David Boies in a footnote, saying that because he doesn't have an email address, he is "technologically illiterate".
I heard that Boies is learning-disabled and does not read -- instead he has aides read relevant documents to him. He has an eidetic memory and doesn't forget what's dictated to him. (Interestingly, for that reason, he asks his coworkers never to tell him anything that they're not absolutely sure of.) So the comment I referenced is rather insensitive.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
So what? Its still anti-competitive. I don't care if all BeOS could do is print "Hello World" The bottom line is the hardware vendors are completely under Microsoft's thumb because of licensing issues. Think of all teh times you've heard of vendors paying BIG bucks becuase they said "Do this for us or we'll stop selling to you" I recall cases involving TOys R Us and others. This is the same cut and dried issue. Microcosft is telling OEMs they can't sell another OS alongside Windows - plain and simple. The fact that BeOS may or may not have been comparable to Windows is irrelevant. The HW OEMs are completely at Microsoft's mercy and cannot do anything Microsoft doesn't approve of.
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Clerk's Office
United States District Court for the District of Columbia
333 Constitution Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20001
I'm going to verify the address tomorrow, but in the meantime, I suggest that everyone write her a letter informing her of this issue. Tell her that any remedy she proposes for Microsoft must address the bootloader issue. Be sure to tell her, in simple terms, what this issue really is. Include the URL to the Byte article so that she can read more about it.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
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Perhaps one of the punishments is that all contracts must be made public if so chosen by any signer?
Or it should be that the contracts should be registered with the government and on supicion of monopoly they would be made public, with the help of a warrant.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
The Mac and Linux are probably the only platforms where a real competitor to MS could afford to release an Office suit. The only problem is that people have got so used the features of Office that it is hard to convince them to use an alternative. I use AppleWorks on a Mac and do miss some of the features of MS-Word - unfortunately it is true :(
As to the Darwin issue, Apple would never consider commercialising it, because if they did they would have to support it and that's not where the want to put their resources.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
This is akin to saying "The only things that get off the ground are airplanes, because they don't play by the rules of gravity". Every human activity obeys the rules of economics; at its core, economics is the study of how human labor and available resources are allocated. If some people allocate their labor to produce 'free' (insert your favorite sense of that term here) software, that is an economic activity just like any other.
A narrow view of economics which ignores volunteer labor, bartering of labor and resources, and value measures other than money will steadily diverge from the real world as this new century progresses. The net has finally allowed us to approximate the world of "perfect information" which allows the economy -- in all its many forms -- to operate at peak efficiency. To think that it will continue to do so within current market models is to profoundly miss the point.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
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Installing multiple OS's would be trivial. The difficulty is that they would all have to be tested and supported by the vendors. That takes time and money. The cost of putting BeOS on a machine would be much higher than the cost of an OEM license.
Linux is much more popular than BeOS, yet Dell backed away from it on the desktop because it couldn't justify the expenses. The OEM's don't want it because it would hurt their bottom lines.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
Its not about if anybody wants it, its about the possibility, the option!
Now, lets give an example. One of things about communist countries was, that you could not travel to the western countries. Not that anybody would want to do it and after the iron curtain fell, nobody actually does since they have no money to do it, but thats not the point. Now people are FREE to do it. They have the OPTION and the RIGHT. Its about your freedoms. Microsoft restricts freedoms of the OEMs to use the competetive solutions! and thats why its bad. Its not about how many people would actually buy. You will never know when you never try. And you never try, because Microsoft said so!
You don't give up your freedoms and your rights only because you just don't happen to have the need to exercise them!
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
While I find article presents a compelling example of MS' all too common anticompetitive behavior, it does not really provide a credible explanation for BeOS' failure. BeOS may well be a superior OS, in and of itself, but that is not sufficient to attract customers. For instance, the lack of software and support can easily outweigh any benefit that any individual consumer could draw from increased stability and performance.
In addition, I find it hard to believe that installing BeOS as a dual boot system is any greater an obstacle than the numerous other disincentives that present themselves -- especially when it is possible to design software for make the conversion riduculously simple. Dual booting means that you sacrifice useful HD space to both the partition and the OS files. You must learn how to use it. You must purchase much of the software, if it even exists, for BeOS, that you either already own or comes bundled with Windows (hardly an argument for MS), at least if you wish to use it in that capacity. You may have to contend with compatibility issues. The Cost of BeOS itself. And the lists goes on. Any one of these could be sufficient reasons NOT to use BeOS, or any other OS, without that particular form of monopolistic behavior.
Although, MS has no reasonable excuse for its behavior, the writing was on the wall people. All Be's escapade has done is to demonstrate to some, those that believe BeOS to be a clearly superior OS, that a technically superior OS can fail. I do not understand how anyone familiar with the industry could not understand this. Certainly MS' monopoly position played a significant role in Be's demise, but moreso in other ways (e.g., the Applications && OS symbiotic relationsip--although much harder to quantify). Furthermore, even without MS' monopoly position, it is not necessarily impossible for a superior product (which is what Be is presumed to be) to fail.
While I find article presents a compelling example of MS' all too common anticompetitive behavior, it does not really provide a credible explanation for BeOS' failure. BeOS may well be a superior OS, in and of itself, but that is not sufficient to attract customers. For instance, the lack of software and support can easily outweigh any benefit that any individual consumer could draw from increased stability and performance.
In addition, I find it hard to believe that installing BeOS as a dual boot system is any greater an obstacle than the numerous other disincentives that present themselves -- especially when it is possible to design software for make the conversion riduculously simple. Dual booting means that you sacrifice useful HD space to both the partition and the OS files. You must learn how to use it. You must purchase much of the software, if it even exists, for BeOS, that you either already own or comes bundled with Windows (hardly an argument for MS), at least if you wish to use it in that capacity. You may have to contend with compatibility issues. The Cost of BeOS itself. And the lists goes on. Any one of these could be sufficient reasons NOT to use BeOS, or any other OS, without that particular form of monopolistic behavior.
Although, MS has no reasonable excuse for its behavior, the writing was on the wall people. All Be's escapade has done is to demonstrate to some, those that believe BeOS to be a clearly superior OS, that a technically superior OS can fail. I do not understand how anyone familiar with the industry could not understand this. Certainly MS' monopoly position played a significant role in Be's demise, but moreso in other ways (e.g., the Applications && OS symbiotic relationsip--although much harder to quantify). Furthermore, even without MS' monopoly position, it is not necessarily impossible for a superior product (which is what Be is presumed to be) to fail.
I once sat down and thought about what I was missing in Linux. BeOS had almost all of it.
BeOS has great font support, and excellent Unicode support. It's very fast, with the main browser (NetPositive) being much faster than Netscape. It had a nice GUI and a 64-bit journaling filesystem years before Linux did. BeOS advocates always went on about how you can play 200 videos at once smoothly. It also has fairly decent POSIX support and includes BASH as the default shell.
It was a very nice system, handicapped by a lack of applications, lack of hardware support and the other stuff that comes with being 4th in the OS market.
Suppose an OEM wants to sell dual boot machines, but is afraid of Microsoft's wrath. What's to stop them from selling a computer with Windows-only pre-installed at time of sale, and offering to install BeOS afterwards for a nominal charge?
You point out a very interesting inequity in Microsoft's relation with the OEMs. If a this licensing is leaked by a disgruntled Microsoft employee, Microsoft could use this fact to punish that OEM unfairly. The OEM would be hard pressed to prove it was innocent.
There is something that runs a danger of being lost in all the noise here, indeed it probably will: Palm only purchased Be's IP assets, specifically leaving Be Inc intact and explicitly with the "rights to assert and bring certain claims and causes of action, including under antitrust laws".
:)
So, we could see Mr Gasee in court after all. Maybe a good time to buy Be stock
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
The OEMs are at their customers' mercy, and that means no Linux machines.
Bull - its obvious OEMs see some potential for non Windows OS as some have tried it (and yes some have stopped doing it *cough* Dell losers *cough* But custoemrs wanting Windows does NOT mean Microsoft has to forbid OEMs from giving customers a CHOICE! RIght now customers have NO CHOICE of OS so you say they demand Windows - I say they never had a choice. So Microsoft aims to keep it that way by preventing OEMs from dual booting alternate OSes just like they prevent OEMs from having non MS ISP icons without Microsoft's. Microsoft has a monopoly and they use that monopoly to threaten OEMs into doing what they want (Sure - try dual booting BeOS - We'll drop your license - you can't install WIndows and you'll go bakrupt) That, AC, is a Monopoly and its illegal for obvious reasons.
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I've found windows to be very useful for all my dual booting needs...I have found it to be one of the best hardware detection utilities, ever.
It helped me to get my slackware box setup and running just perfect.
Moose.
The above paragraph contains humor and sarcasm, which has been known in the state of California to cause confusion in certain readerships.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Your use of the word "are" is misleading. It may be legal for a monopolist to enter into an exclusive contract. Then again, it may not. The question turns on specific facts. A monopoly, as the article points out, is not illegal in and of itself. However, a monopolist may not use its monopoly power to compete unfairly.
"This did nothing to stop competiton, except for one specific form of it.
Oh, well why didn't you say so? I hadn't realized that Microsoft's secret OEM licensing agreement didn't do anything except for the stuff that it did. I fell much better now.
"It wasnt brought up because its not illegal! The Sherman Act doesn't regulate free trade, it regulates monopolies trying to use its monopoly power to expand into new markets. Period. This isnt a new market. This is the preservation of an existing market."
The Sherman Act is the first piece of U.S. antitrust law. Not the only piece. It is supplemented by the Clayton Act amongst others. The Clayton Act says, in relevant part:
"It shall be unlawful for any person engaged in commerce, in the course of such commerce, to lease or make a sale or contract for sale of goods, wares, merchandise, machinery, supplies, or other commodities, whether patented or unpatented, for use, consumption, or resale within the United States or any Territory thereof or the District of Columbia or any insular possession or other place under the jurisdiction of the United States, or fix a price charged therefor, or discount from, or rebate upon, such price, on the condition, agreement, or understanding that the lessee or purchaser thereof shall not use or deal in the goods, wares, merchandise, machinery, supplies, or other commodities of a competitor or competitors of the lessor or seller, where the effect of such lease, sale, or contract for sale or such condition, agreement, or understanding may be to substantially lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly in any line of commerce."
"Unlawful" is typically considered synonymous with "illegal." Just an FYI since you don't seem to think that forcing hardware vendors to only use MS OS products in a box if they use any MS OS products in that box tends to create a monopoly in any line of commerce.
In any event, a monopolist is not supposed to be able to use their power to preserve their monopoly. They are supposed to get the monopoly in the first place because the market rewarded their innovation or service or pricing or something. But they have to be able to lose that monopoly. That's what free trade is all about. It's not the monopolists freedom to shove some spray-painted turd down your throat. It's the customer's freedom to decide that today, I don't want to swallow a turd but would rather eat a nice apple fritter from Bob's Donuts in San Francisco. (mmmmmmmm . . . Bob's . . .)
"Anyone of the large vendors could go head to head with MS any day of the week. IBM was prepared to do it, but chickened out at the last second. Compaq had at the time revenues easily topping that of MS. Dell is a freaking-gigantic monolith."
You say that CPQ had revenues easilly topping those of MSFT at the time. What time? It matters. And revenues aren't profits. Look at telcos if you don't understand that. But if any of the big hardware companies could do it, and if it would have been advantageous to them to do it (which you don't say but I assume you agree with since you say that MSFT was protecting their market by using their monopoly power), why didn't they do it? What does your libertarian philosophy tell you about why a company doesn't do something that would give them advantages in the market? Maybe because they couldn't do it? Or are they all just commies?
"They didnt go against MS for two reasons: first, it was easier not to, and the easy road is often the most attractive. Second, no one gives a shit about your alternate operating systems. MS had the hardware vendors by the balls because people didnt have any tolerance for other OS's. Ask Apple how the mid 1990's was for sales. People wanted Windows, Windows, Windows."
If MSFT had the OEMs by the balls because nobody wanted an alternate OS, why does it require OEMs to enter into this "trade secret" license agreement? Maybe because consumer choice can only hurt it? You say that it was easier for the OEMs to not fight MS. But if your opponent is going to grab you by the balls and squeeze, how much "harder" is fighting? Unless your opponent will kill you instead. Hmmm.
I agree with one thing, people do find the easy road attractive. Maybe that's why they parrot libertarian nonsense about how certain choices of certain classes of people are the ne plus ultra of freedom rather than actually thinking.
Q:How many libertarians does it take to stop a Panzer division? A:None. Obviously market forces will take care of it.
First off linux is innovating faster then windows even though its still behind. Lets look at kde as an example. 2 years ago it equaled windows 2.0 and the browser resembled IE 1.0. 2 years later kde equals WindowsME and the browser is somewhere between IE 4.0 and 5.0 in terms of supported features.
Second off innovation is dying thanks to microsoft's strangle on the wintel market. Microsoft did not invent the gui, they did not invent object oriented programing, or ide's, or the internet browser. They let other people invent them and used market forces and their monopoly to copy them and squeeze them out of the out of the market. For example for the price of one copy of visual basic, you could also get Visual C++, and foxpro, SQL server and Interdev in the form of the bundled Visual Studio. Brillant! Borland c++ is still technically ahead but because vb is popular, visual c is taking over.
Great software is made by people and not by corporations or a group of marketers. Hiring more people can create more code but not innovation. You can hire great innovative people but usually they are told what to do by the marketing department( in the case of microsoft). Microsoft knows how to make money but not good innovative products. I believe the true innovators are college students, those who are privately funded and can do whatever they like, or those volunteering code. This is because they can be free and code whatever they like.
http://saveie6.com/
Right - and those are the only shops that ARE experimenting with dual-boot setups just like mentioned in teh article:
Yes, you can get dual-boot machines at some of the smaller shops, but these are the ones that slip under Microsoft's radar, and there's no guarantee that Microsoft won't decide to take action against these vendors at some point.
The bottom line is any large OEM cannot dual boot their systems because they will lose the OEM discount which will cost them millions of dollars in an already low margin business - thus Microsoft forces them to have ONLY single boot systems.
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The bootloader is not the issue. The issue is having more than one OS on the machine. And the partitions.
First of all, who needs more than one OS? The answer is that some people do, and those reasons are generally for people who have the skills (or are learning) to install two or more systems on the same machine, and understand (or are learning) the issues they have to decide, like partitions.
The majority of the computer using population does not need two operating systems on one machine. They just need applications that run. If we can offer them all the applications they need which run on Linux or BSD, then we can certainly suggest they run Linux or BSD instead of Windows. Then they don't need Windows. And if we make that suggestion before they buy Windows, we've saved them that money. And they can get a PC without Windows.
Aside from the obvious market lock-in, there is another reason Microsoft would not want to have Windows co-exist with another OS. That reason is support. Who supports the software on a system when each can impact the other, not only during the installation, but also during regular operation? Support costs do go up, and the finger pointing ends up making everyone mad and no one happy. The only time dual OS systems work out is if you take responsibility for it yourself.
Sure, I'd love it if more people knew they had a choice. But I'd never recommend to ordinary people to have a dual-OS system. It seems to be hard enough for lots of geeks to set up a multi-partition Linux system (preferring instead to have one swap partition and everything else on one big filesystem partition). And we would expect non-geeks to understand how to manage disk space between two co-resident operating systems? I think not. If someone not ready to do partitions wants to try Linux on a Windows machine, they should be using UMSDOS and LOADLIN.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I sat waiting for J2SE for 2 years. I'm still waiting. BeOS with J2SE would have been THE machine, if you added just a bit more hardware support.
The REAL sam_at_caveman_dot_org is user ID 13833.
"we pretty much have to take the author's word for it (not that I doubt him). "
Actually, I do doubt him. Can someone point to a trial transcript which claims the license is a Trade Secret?
The DOJ clearly had access to the OEM license agreements as these were brought up in the trial with regards to modifying the OS to remove Internet Explorer.
If this were the case, it would be evidence of exclusionary behavior that coincided with the previous consent decree preventing Microsoft from charging computer makers for DOS whether or not a computer shipped with it.
So there I doubt him.
Although I also agree that the DOJ lawyers were completely inept for bringing this case to trial the way they did. Browser? Oh good grief.
One thing MS could do, should this happen, is not to affirm that the released documents is indeed the true license. A few phone calls, and Bill could get Micheal to shut up too. Then all we would have is hearsay to go by.
It is true that the lack of response IN GENERAL is not a proof. But in many specific contexts, the lack of response make be suggestive circumstantial evidence. To only way to refute circumstantial evidence is to present real evidence, or disprove it soundly. Why is Microsoft not interested in doing so?
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My friend once told me...
"Dual booting is like having a mistress, it's all great till they find out about one another."
My experience (in dual booting, not mistress having) tends to agree with this.
troy
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Nothing prevents an OEM to ship computers with MS-Windows and some other OS. Now, if you want a few k OEM licenses (for wich you'd pay much less than if you bought them from a retailer) then terms are obviously different. This is business commom practice: you give someone some kind of favoured treatment and you demand some loyalty in return. Whats the point of an OEM license from an OS company viewpoint? Increase installed base, so as to make shifts to other OSs more expensive.
MS could really make things hard for double booters. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but this perception that a boot loader can fire up just any OS is wrong. The code in a partition boto record has to be boot loader-friendly, even if by accident. Think about this: MBR code doesn't need be interactive or offer options. One can write MBR code that leaves the processor in some funny state and write the OS partition boot code so as to count on that state or information, all 100% transparent to the user. If the user repartitions and installs a second OS and his generic boot loader of choice, this new loader has no way to know how to "deliver" the machine to this OS. Maybe one could write an "intelligent" generic boot loader that would mimick such behaviour upon detecton of the user choice, but then one would have to consider things like patents, reverse engineering, etc. Also, I'm not sure if it's possible to squeeze that much code in a MBR.
I was told once, by a Marketing professor, that the tobacco industry considers one to be a non-smoker only 10 years after the person quits. In the meantime they call them inactive smokers. Be it true or not, I think this is why it's interesting for MS to have people *at least* double booting, as long as one partiton is Windows, for you never know...
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You're being blinded by your
Windows is absolutely the best desktop operating system out there. KDE and Gnome are great, but Windows is still more mature.
There. I said it. I displayed reason. I even posted this from my Windows 2000 machine.
However, you only need to follow the link in my .sig to see why it should be illegal to use Windows on a routable IP. And that's coming from a moderate Libertarian.
The facts speak for themselves. Microsoft is a sick and dangerous company, like the Nazis were a sick and dangerous political entity. They're so convinced that what they're doing is the right thing for everyone that they fail to see their own shortcomings.
Hitler thought that killing all the Jews would solve the world's problems. Bill thinks that being the only operating system will solve the world's problems. Neither one is/was anything more than obsessively convinced of the strength of a flawed vision.
Hitler's birthday = April 20th. Gates = October 28th.
Yahoo's Astrology section has some interesting insights into their romantic potential. Buy the happy couple some flowers. And please lace them with cyanide.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
You make good points. Although this bootloader thing is disconcerning, the reality is, I've triple booted Win2K/RHLinux/BeOS (R5), and the ease of install and hardware (especially video and sound) went from left to right - at least RH Linux PnP'd my 3COM 905c so I could attempt to download video and sound drivers. With BeOS, it was a bit of a PITA. And please don't say I'm an "idiot if I couldn't get it working." Please, the bottom line is, I stuck my win2K disk in, and
/. has had a lot more down time recently - not doing good for the whole Linux/MySQL/Perl movement :(.
OT: I know it's probably not the OS and more code related, but
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
> Second, BeOS is probably just as well supported as Linux.
Well, the bigger issue isn't about user support, it's about hardware support. Or rather, the lack thereof.
There was a period a couple years ago where I honestly considered going to BeOS. I started with computers in college on Macs, then my college switched to PCs, and when I graduated I wanted a Mac but even the used ones were too expensive. So I bought a used laptop running Windows 95. It died after six months and I decided to buy something new, with a warranty. Obviously it had to be a PC because new Macs, even today, are so much more expensive compared to equally-performing PCs in any given range.
I found a local screwdriver shop with good warranty terms, but decided to buy it OS-less to save the $89 Windows license charge. I had three choices: use Linux, use Be, or pirate Windows.
I tried Linux and at that point in time no fucking way was I going to use such a primitive interface. Remember that this was years ago, before the current KDE/GNOME/Nautilus/etc. advances. I looked at Be, and was beautiful. I liked everything I read about it and when I tried it out on a real machine it was great. But what I couldn't handle was the lack of hardware support.
At that point in time there was exactly ONE sound card supported. There was a very short list of "fully supported" motherboards, with the lackluster assurance that motherboards from other vendors using the same chipsets "should" work but are not officially supported.
I went ahead and borrowed a relative's shiny new Win98 CD. I knew it would work on any hardware. I knew it would support a lot of expansion over the coming years. And it has--I added a new video card and capture board, newer sound card, a DVD-ROM with a Hollywood+ hardware decoder, and other things, none of which would have been completely usable by BeOS if at all.
Obviously things improved quite a bit over the last couple of years, but not that much compared to all the new hardware that's come out. Be never had enough developers to keep up, much less catch up. And that's important.
It's important because, without all that nifty hardware and the software to support it, a PC is just a glorified typewriter and WebTV. Sure, not everyone uses the latest greatest video cards, or wants to interface an MP3 player or PDA, or a special sound board, or a certain DVD player, or buys a motherboard with a new chipset, or wants to use a video capture device that isn't supported by BeOS. But all you have to do is want one of those things, or one of several others, and all of a sudden the OS is not worth the trouble.
And as everyone points out, the problem is magnified on the software side. People can buy any kind of software or game for an MS OS. They can go to Best Buy or Fry's or wherever, and know that the software will work on their PCs 99% of the time. With any alternative OS this is just not the case. But the problem is all the more immense when there's a fair chance your hardware's basic features won't even work, which was the case for a very long time with Be.
> Enough with the focus shift BS. There have been two focus shifts in Be's history.
Hmm...
1) From an integrated hardware/software solution like Apple, to an alternative PPC OS vendor.
2) From an alternative PPC OS vendor to a dual PPC/x86 alternative OS vendor.
3) Dropping new PPC development entirely, and refocusing and redoubling x86 development. This was forced by Apple, but nonetheless happened.
4) Let's give a basic OS away for free for home use, and offer a more complete edition for business and home users willing to pay. A small change in the codebase, but a huge shift in business strategy and, therefore, the company's focus.
5) Roughly contemporaneously with 4 was the development of BeIA. The final focus change is the ascendance of BeIA over the desktop BeOS.
Each of these changes required a big shift in both business strategy and/or in developer assignments and the future of the OS.
At any rate, that's more than 2. And it's an awful lot of shifting for a very young company.
And ultimately, BeOS wasn't doomed by Microsoft's OEM licensing. It was doomed by its inability to run a wide variety of hardware and software demanded by end users. Pointing to BeOS equivalent software isn't good enough since most end users buy their software in a real store, and that software is almost always going to run on either Windows or depending on the store Mac.
If you really want to analyze the situation, Apple killed Be. Be never was prepared to support the wide variety of hardware commonly strewn together in the x86 market, and so while they did produce an x86 OS that ran beautifully on supported hardware, they did not have the hive full of Microsoftian development drones required to support nearly everything, or the similar army of Linux volunteers. Be made a wonderful PPC OS, and could have continued to thrive on that platform since hardware support is a far easier task. But Apple yanked the platfor out from under them by not releasing the specs.
Of course, one has to wonder how Linux manages to run beautifully on new Macs even though Be swore it couldn't. Surely it would have been easier to develop for the new Macs, than to spread the developers thin enough to code all those new and varied x86 drivers? It does make one wonder if Apple's refusal to release their specs was more of a red herring than a real reason to make the x86 switch. I have to suspect that JLG just bit off more than he and his little company could handle, by moving to x86. They might be more alive today if they had devoted those resources to running on Macs, since as I said Linux manages just fine--not to mention *BSD, where the BSD license would have allowed wholesale lifting of code.
So as far as I can see, either Apple killed Be by making them switch to a far more varied platform than they could support, or Be committed suicide by moving to the more varied platform when maybe they should have worked harder on continuing PPC work. Either way, it has nothing to do with Microsoft so much as it has to do with the fact that PC end users want their hardware to work with all its features enabled, and to run software they can get at the store. BGe never filled either requirement, so while elegant, it had no chance at all on the x86 desktop.
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
Speaking of down time, /. cut off my last sentance... to complete:
,br>
Please, the bottom line is, I stuck my win2K disk in, and... it worked.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
<rant>
OTOH, I don't know why the [GNU/]Linux distro vendors don't do this themselves. Parted seems to be ready - what are they waiting for?
</rant>
<rant more="more">
I wonder if Debian would quit stalling my application (for almost 7 months now!) if I re-wrote the entire bloody installation system. If only I had the time...</rant>
To all of the folks that say that average Joe user can't deal with multiple operating systems on a system
;-)) when one of those choices has been unfairly removed.
;-)
To all of the folks that say that average Joe user doesn't want some things from one OS and other things from a second (or third) OS
To all of the folks that say that average Joe user would never reboot to use a different program
I put forth some counter-examples.
1) A pair of OSes, lauded on the fact that Joe sixpack and grandma can use them, have a dual boot option for the entire line of new computers on which they are shipped.
2) Depending on their needs, some users spend all of their time in OS X and others spend all of their time in OS 9.x quite happily.
-------------------
When it comes down to it, people will accept *anything* if they don't realize that there is a choice. As soon as you are shown your choices, you will fight back when a choice is removed. Most of the people in the US do not complain because they never realized that there was a choice. Most users of Be, Linux, BSD, etc. have been shown the choice and fight back (or at least complain loudly
Why is this so difficult to grasp? The easiest way to deprive someone of their rights is to convince them that they don't have rights in the first place. What do you think high school is for?
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
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the know-how or courage to make an OS change.
Courage is standing up to tanks in Tianenmen Square. Courage is entering a burning building to rescue a child. Courage is not installing a second operating system on your computer.
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I read his book, read more than one of his articles, and actually talked with the man myself. He is a great guy. His work at BeTips was an invaluable service to the BeOS community. He's been a central figure in the BeOS community for years.
Most of what Scot talks about in this article is not unfamiliar to the BeOS community. Nearly all of it was slowly leaked by Be employees and then later directly confirmed by Gassee. I suppose if you don't trust Be or Gassee to be honest about their negotiations, Scot's article could be seen as dubious. Truly, nearly all of it comes from Be. However, Scot openly acknowledges this and makes no bones about his own speculation.
This isn't a news article. It's an editorial in which he offers his own opinion and explanation as to the downfall of Be and the severe lack of major OEMs shipping dual boot systems. To support this, he offers information from Be and Gassee, as well as public information from the Microsoft trial. No, he didn't get an exclusive interview from Gates. No, he doesn't have absolute support for some of his conclusions, but it's your job to evaluate those conclusions for yourself.
All you need is to set up one system, and then make all systems a complete copy of that system. You can do this by cd-rom, network or physically copying from hard drive to hard drive.
I would estimate that the cost of installing linux might be about 20 mins per PC - at definite most. If they streamline the operation, they would probably get down to about 5 mins per PC - boot, run install, reboot, boot from hd.
Yes - it's that easy.
Stop the brainwash
It should have been "complicit in", not "complicit with".
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
>>Realistically, no hardware vendor could afford to do without Microsoft.
> Thats bullshit as well! Anyone of the large vendors could go head to head with MS any day of the week.
> IBM was prepared to do it, but chickened out at the last second.
>Compaq had at the time revenues easily topping that of MS.
>Dell is a freaking-gigantic monolith.
Your assertion are pointless: there is a cutthroat competition between PC hardware makers!!
The day one of those hardware makers make something which goes against Microsoft, his rebate on Microsoft software would be suppressed and instantly its PC sold with Microsoft software would be higher priced than those of its competitors: he would be dead in no time (or more likely he would have to do what Microsoft wants him to do to regain its rebate).
So even if the revenues of the PC makers are above those of Microsoft, they are very vulnerable to Microsoft decisions because of
1) the competition between PC makers
2) the Microsoft monopoly
3) the Microsoft rebates
I really hope that Be will sue Microsoft, IMHO they have a really strong point so Be should win..
But it's just my opinion of course, Microsoft have so much money and power that I suspect that there won't be any outcome of a trial: if they see that they will loose the trial, they would go for an out-of-court settlement..
Again - nobody was saying OEMs wanted to just sell Linux. OEMs wanted to offer multiple operating systems on the hard drives. Windows - which customers expect and perhaps Linux or BeOS if they felt adventurous. But Microsoft forbids this. That is monopolistic. The OEMs shoudl be able to do WHATEVER they want with the hardware they build and sell. Talk about viral licensing! I have to admit that in the online services case, Microsoft has some right to dictate whats on the desktop of their OS since it IS their OS. But dual booting does NOT change the Microsoft OS ONE bit. So here you have an OS maker dictating what OEMs can and can't do with teh computers THEY pay for and build and sell. Again - THAT is monopolistic. Microsoft has no right to tell OEMs that they can't install another OS in a complete SEPARATE partition on a PC PEMs sell.
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
The last 80% or so of the article has been done to death here, so I'd like to comment on the first part:
Gee, BeOS users are stuck out in the cold, since their product is being discontinued?
Can we revisit the claims you BeOS folks were making about it not being important that the Source be Open?
This is why it's important, folks; no company can discontinue Linux. If RedHat dropped off the face of the Earth, my systems would continue to evolve and support new hardware.
In two years it'll be hard for BeOS people to buy a new machine that functions properly under their OS, because the source is closed and one company can dictate whether or not it's updated.
The PowerQuest stuff works great. I've had W2K, Win98, Linux (Redhat, Corel, Debian), and BeOS on my machine at the same time, and booted between them. Microsoft managed to break PartitionMagic with W2K (suprise!) so that I have to boot into Win98 to edit partitions, but apart from that there are no problems. Just keep your BootMagic Rescue disk around in case you accidentally write LILO to the wrong place :)
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
The point isn't passionate OS flamewars, the point is that Msft claims that it won it's desktop monopoly by 'consumer choice' in the PR fluff, yet in reality it's 'trade secret' agreement with PC vendors does everything to stifle any possibility of consumers 'test driving' alternatives. I.e., what they are shouting in the courts and astroturf campaigns is, "We have a monopoly because the consumer chose the best product", but to their vendors in the backroom their lawyers are saying, "You load anything but Msft and you're history."
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
"Browser anticompetitive complaints are nothing compared to what's happening with the bootloaders since the majority of people using computers will never have the know-how or courage to make an OS change."
If we can get people to give up on LILO and move to GRUB things will get better. Grub is incredibly easy to install and configure, and generally works better. Once all of the distros out there standardize on GRUB with LILO as the optional bootloader, multi OS machines will get much, much easier.
Actually, according to this primer on antitrust law, Section 2 of the Sherman Act makes it unlawful for a company to [...] maintain or acquire a monopoly position through unreasonable methods."
The OEM contract certainly sounds unreasonable to me, but, of course, IANAL.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
This is insightful? Looks like the typical "I can make any song into a song about bhang" Linuxcentric bias we're always getting fed on /.
The article's not about Linux, nor is it about whether an OSS license would have increased the viability of BeOS. It's about an unfair, predatory license. Linux was every bit as important to this article as BeOS was in paragraph 49 of Jackson's Findings of Fact.* The article is, instead, about a predatory practice that the author, as a BeOS diehard, happened to see firsthand thanks to his relatively unique perspective -- that of a hardcore BeOS user.
Not to say Syberghost doesn't have some insight here (he certainly does), but so does most anything written by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, and I don't think his works fit well in this thread either.
In the immortal words of Walter Sobchak, "The OS isn't the issue here, Dude." Careful you don't miss the forest (MS's predatory license) for the trees (love of Linux).
* Specifically, a blip that was tangenentially related to the issue only in that it made for a "value unladen" example to support one of the author's points.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
Be hasn't supported PPC for *years* so good luck even trying to find disk images of the last release.
And all currently shipping Macs dual boot OS X and OS 9.2.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Alternatively, you could use a HD selection switch like the 'NickLock' shown here on Slashdot a few weeks back.
There's more methods to dual boot a machine than using a single boot loader for both OS's (although that is the most convenient).
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
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... the majority of people using computers will never have the know-how or courage
or need
to make an OS change.
I can't begin to go into how insultingly patronizing this sentiment is. My father recently called and was bemoaning the state of his win98 box. Programs crashing, system utilities failing all over the place... I recommended win2k as an alternative. Nope, not Linux or BSD. He's a music freak, jazz mostly, and gets a lot of it with Morpheus. Also likes games, desktop toy stuff mostly, like simcity 3000. Frankly it wouldn't matter if Linux could run every last game and support every single soundcard in existence without hassle -- he just doesn't have a reason to run it. I've had all of one BSOD on win2k, less than the number of kernel panics I got with linux. Once you're into user application land, I see app after app after app on Linux crash with segfaults. And on the security front, I just tell him to get ZoneAlarm, something I still haven't seen anything like for Linux (maybe because the notion of user interaction with the firewall is considered heresy). All this goes double for BSD, I just don't see as many of that camp deluding themselves about viability on the desktop.
Linux might be a workable solution for him if he had a full-time sysadmin to get basic stuff working for him. Guess it keeps families together at any rate...
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
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"The economy" is the subject matter of economics. The article used the term in a sense limited to monetary valuations and capitalist exchange models, which is not the full extent of the economy, properly understood. I stand by my comments.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
If the issue really isn't so much about the end-user not knowing how to repartition, reinstall, blah-blah - or if it really is about Microsoft keeping the users in the dark about this possibility. Let me give you an example to illustrate my point:
When I first started using computers, I was 11 years old using a TRS-80 Color Computer 2, with a cassette drive. I learned how to program in BASIC (MS Basic, at that!) on that machine, using the manuals included. These manuals even had a full schematic in the back for the machine, showing every part used. The manuals assumed I knew nothing about computers, and took me step-by-step, into a world of programming and excitement.
Later, when I was in Jr. High, I got a floppy drive - which gave me around 160K of room per floppy (double that if I made a "flippy"), but still no notion of a directory tree structure.
In High School, I got a Color Computer 3, later upgraded it to 512K (I remember sitting at the kitchen table with my dad plugging in DRAMs, with a wire wrapped around the sink spigot and my arm as a grounding strap!). Still had the same floppy drive. I tried playing around with OS-9 (no, not the Mac stuff, slash kiddies, but the ultra cool multi-tasking, multi-user software for the 6809 8-bit (!!) CPU), but I couldn't grok it too well...
Toward the end of my senior year, my parents bought me a Tandy 1400HD machine, which was a revelation in power, in a way - 768K of memory, 8MHz of speed, a 20MB hard drive - but a blue/grey screen, CGA graphics - but still nice to play with. Oh, and DOS 3.2...
What happened was a culture shock, in regards to the file system - directories!!! It took me a little bit to get used to it, but after a few hours of reading the manual and playing, I found the flexibility great.
Too great.
You see, not more than a few hours after playing, I had created a sub-directory in a directory, then at the root level tried to do an 'rmdir' - well, it worked, sorta - the files were wiped, but the directory stayed! Some minutes of frantic flipping later revealed that you had to delete the files in the subdirectory first before removing the directory, otherwise you had a big problem! This was a limitation of the version of DOS that I was using...
My heart sank - I thought I might have broke it. But I knew I didn't - everything was still working. But I didn't want that directory - in fact, I wanted things back the way they were. So I did what every budding geek who has just played with a large hard drive, a "real" OS (compared to what was on the Color Computer!), and a directory structure does - I decided to format and reinstall the OS!
Mind you - I had never before attempted or done such a thing - EVER! But I read the manual carefully, followed the steps, inserted the floppies, formatted the hard drive, re-installed the OS and programs - and everything worked again...
You know something? It wouldn't have been possible without having that manual. The same could be said when I first started with my Color Computers - I had a manual there.
Today, it is a different world. You buy a computer, and you are lucky if you get a rescue CD-ROM, let alone individual CDs for the software, or a manual, or a schematic of the machine (ok, I know that last one would be impossible in today's world - and nearly useless to boot). A bunch of assumptions are made that these items would scare people off, when we know this is untrue - it didn't scare me off as a kid of 11, why would it scare an adult? Indeed, think of the manuals and such that came with 16-bit systems in the early to mid 80's - did this documentation scare off the managers and people who used these machine? NO!
So why isn't it included in today's boxes? Even if it did "scare" some people, they would still come to view it as a resource to help them - something familiar to help them learn how to use the system, how it all fits together...
But - it would not do Microsoft (or the clone makers, to a lesser extent) any good for the users to "gain a clue" - because it would give them a measure of power over the software and hardware distributors/manufacturers. It would give the user knowledge that would allow them to _truely_ make decisions about "where they wanted to go today".
You know something - this is what many Linux distros offer today - and is something that I first noticed with my first real distro install of Redhat 5.2 - I got manuals again. They told how to do everything, how to install and maintain the system, and I got actual floppies and CDs with the system. I later moved to SuSE 6.3, now I used 7.2 - each one came with floppies, CDs and a manual - which is why I bought the distros - I knew what I would get.
SuSE 7.2 does it best - the manuals for install and configuration of the system really show and help you to do it (though I did an upgrade, not a full install - it still went really smooth) - this is something that I think people would appreciate, and see what they are missing, if they really knew of the options available to them.
Perhaps this fact is something that should be pushed in the marketing of Linux...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I agree with you 100% The problem with BeOS was never the quality of the OS, but the development model. BeOS defintely should have been open sourced, because that is the only way an OS can survive competition with Microsoft. There were several problems with BeOS later in its development, praticularly with the VM. While Linux got a VM overhaul in a couple of months, BeOS's VM didn't improve at all over the period of a year or more. If the community had had access to the source, BeOS would probably be in a very different position today, both technologically and in terms of its userbase.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...