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Why Linux is About to Lose
mpawlo writes "Wired ran an interesting piece by Russ Mitchell in the latest issue of the magazine. Mitchell focus on the so called war between Microsoft and Linux and why Linux will have a hard time winning such a war, and especially in respect of the desktops. The article was only available in the paper issue, but is now also available online."
when Linus Torvalds says they arent even fighting them?
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
No more MS Os's on the Desktop ?
Or Linux Everywhere ?
Both sound bad, what we want i guess is
a competitive playing ground for OS designers.
We dont want the best the greatest the fastest,
we want something usefull and workable or atleast i do.
Linux is usable for me at the moment,
i dont care who wins or who is in war.
Quazion.
But he fails to acknowledge the reality that sometimes a linux desktop makes real business sense. Yes, that market is small, and yes if you're looking at it as a war, Microsoft has won. However, in the words of Phil Jackson, "You are only a success for the moment you achieve something."
Users do want simplicity and ease of use. And it is also true that Linux can't give them this right now. But it's even more true that this can change.
Go Lakers!
... but I think the 10- or 50-year outlook isn't so clear. Yes, for now Dell has dropped Linux from their computer line, but that may not stay that way. I personally think that the 'Ghandi-esqe' approach that open-source has (i.e. the passive resistance thing - not pushing to sell), not to mention the fact that there is no single company behind it, makes it an invincible force in the long run. Maybe Windows will stay ahead of Linux forever... but that will take a lot of running from a horse that will surely get tired.
"Free beer tends to lead to free speech"
To use the paltry 1.5% of shipments of Linux for desktop environments to disqualify Linux as a contender for the desktop shows how little the writer knows about Linux. And the writer worked for Red Hat? Please, somebody hit her with a clue-bat. The amount of shipments tells nothing about the installed base and for desktops you can rest assured that the number of shipments should be multiplied by a _much_ larger amount than with server-shipments exactly _because_ of the reduced licensing cost it can bring for workstations! Don't bother to read the piece, it's useless and shouldn't even have been posted here especially since it's a day old.
Karma? What's that again?
Karma? What's that again?
Here's a comment from my tech-illiterate wife: "Get that damn Linux installed -- I'm sick of this s**t from Microsoft!"
If my wife, of all people, is asking for an alternative to M$'s stuff, then there really is some hope. Linux may never get beyond a 10% desktop share, but just giving up because there's no good spell checker for Linux is silly.
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
The technician who didn't bother to backup her
data files should have been fired on the spot!
This is totally unacceptable behavior.________
I don't see any reason to be concerned about what this individual is saying. We all know some people care about linux and some give it a bad name. Myself it is a great idea, a revolution if you will and I intend to use it regardless of the desktop numbers.
... hi bingo
Linux is written by geeks, for geeks.
MS/Windows is written by geeks and business types, for business types... and geeks. Who controls the pursestrings in the enterprise?
Which OS spends millions on UI design? As long as Linux continues to move ahead with fragmented windowing systems, it'll continue to fail to compete with Windows on the desktop.
If you've learned nothing else from models, it's that sometimes it's better to be pretty than smart.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
This was posted yesterday or the day before on Linuxtoday, and the thing I really didn't understand is not why people keep posting articles like this that claim to explain why Linux will never succeed, but why editors don't correct the headlines.
Very, very little of this article is about why the author thinks linux won't succeed on the desktop - what it is about is why Linux isn't *currently* on the desktop.
Sure, for example, we don't have an Office killer *currently*, but where exactly does he explain why we can never have one? Nobody can seriously be so conned by Microsoft as to believe that we'll always be playing catch-up. Obviously there will come a point (very soon, IMHO) when Linux word processors have every function most users could possibly want - just because Word adds new extraneous features every release doesn't mean those are necessary, and certainly doesn't mean people use them (or would miss them in a Linux equivalent).
I'm just constantly bemused how people seem to make the inference from 'linux isn't currently on the desktop' to 'linux will never be on the desktop'. There may be some good reasons why this might be, but this article certainly doesn't offer any conclusive ones as far as I can see.
Seems to me that there will come a point where a free operating system can do everything current OSes do, so the intuitive step is to ask 'Why when that happens will people pay for an OS instead?' - surely the burden is on people claiming linux will never win the desktop to answer that, even if that time is a year off or whatever.
It seems that the article is motivated by an anger towards the fringe lunatics. This is too bad -- wiping a hard drive and installing linux on it isn't a linux problem, it's a stupid fucking employee problem.
As for whether or not Linux is going to lose on the desktop, time will tell. It's staying on mine, but I don't do any word processing that other people need to see. I do find it funny that the writer considers the competition for the desktop a bad thing, and writes it off as duplication of effort. I suppose there's an argument for that, but you might as well say that Darwinism is a duplication of effort when it comes to evolution -- the only other recourse is to accept being stagnant or having your evolution determined for you. No thanks.
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Unfortunately, I think the desktop is the passenger train of the golden age of railroads. You don't do it because it brings in the cash money. It's a mindshare thing. How else can you explain microsoft's now-dominance in the server market? They didn't do it by ignoring user-friendliness, that's for sure.
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
between the desktop and the server.
The way open source development works you scratch
you own itch. If you need better server support
you do that, if you need better desktop clients
you do that.
This is no crusade against Microsoft. It is a better way of developing software.
That since linux isn't there now, it can never be?
If anything is to be learned from the last 5 years of OpenSource, is that it is very dynamic and can play catch-up very quickly, usually measured in weeks.
We need an idiot version of linux. When you can fully run and configure a linux system without VI, Emacs, Pico, cat, grep - and do it all through a consistant well-thoughtout GUI will be the day that linux is ready for the corporate & home desktop.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Windows suffers in two areas: reliability and usability. Obviously, Linux is quite good w.r.t. the former, but not so good w.r.t. the latter. Windows seems to crash everytime I'm really doing something important. Linux has only crashed on me once in my entire life (remarkable, I'll admit).
However, usability is king with users. Most users who have seen Windows for the first time simply can't figure it out because it doesn't map to their mental model of how the system should work. Double-clicking? Minimize a window? Right-click to bring up "hidden" actions? Click "Start" to find the "Shutdown" command? These things are counter-intuitive to any beginner, and even seasoned veterans are confused when a new version of Windows comes out due to MS's inability to adhear to their own standards. This is an area that Linux could have capitalized on, but unfortunately developers were too interested in developing GUI's for developers... not the average Joe.
This is why Linux will "lose the battle." You can point to monopolies and such as long as you want, but in the end the user makes the decision what he or she wants, and the user will say that the switch to Linux doesn't offer enough benefits to justify a shift.
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." - E.W. Dijkstra
Sounds like this guy is just upset because some holier-than-thou tech deleted his data and rightfully so. The guy has a bitter taste in his mouth, thus the article
The Anti-Blog
But what that article fails to take into account is the very rapid rate of development happening in the Linux desktop community. Very soon Gnome 2.0 and KDE 3.0 will be released, which are both major steps in their respective projects. What has Microsoft put out lately? Windows XP with the Luna interface, which after having played with, I can definitely say I'm not impressed (Mac OSX is still the best eye-candy).
The point is, Linux is usable, but still in development. At the rate that support for linux is snowballing and more and more people get onboard, Linux will be as good or better than M$ in, I'd guess, about two years.
I do not understand this "war" for supremacy in the OS world. If Linux users are concentrated on winning, they should direct their energy on writing good, bug-free code, not only on the OS, but the apps as well!
Address the complaint. Speedie's complaint was about the apps. The Linux kernel is relatively stable. Let's create some stuff to go with it.
The way to win a thorugh a superior product, not saber-rattling.
I heartily advise anyone, who hasn't already, to listen to Bill Gates give a speech. He is a megalomaniac and a charismatic one, besides, buy you really have to pay attention to what he says between the lines. It is very intimidating to hear his version of the future, one in which there really is no competition, but a utopia run by your best and well meaning friends, microsoft.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...and we should immediately conclude with the question are we lacking in any way from a server operating system perspective?
Linux as a server remains very strong; Samba can emulate a PDC, free Sybase is an MS-SQL Server 6.5 lookalike, complete replacements for an Exchange server are available, and Linux supports the whole family of UNIX server protocols. There is simply no excuse for Windows in the datacenter from a basic OS-functionality perspective.
True, there have been significant weaknesses. ext2 has been a problem for some time, but this is (close to) getting fixed (it would really help if the distributions would coordinate some of their work). I wish ipfwadm/ipchains/iptables would stop changing. We still suffer from significant fragmentation, which is most dangerous, for it is fragmentation that severely damaged commercial UNIX.
So is fragmentation the biggest danger in the server space? Are there even greater risks?
As far as the desktop market goes, no one in Linux is serious about desktop market share unless and until a major distribution releases a "Win32" edition with layered WINE optimized for running Windows binaries.
I do wish that we could get serious.
"Users are used to ms-windows. they are all old dogs and refuse to learn new tricks."
From a pure desktop / application interoperability point of view, what "new tricks" can "old dogs" Gnome/KDE seriously teach Windows?
Can I have a common clipboard, please? pretty please?
PGP KeyId: 0x08D63965
Speedie needed to use Microsoft Word because the Linux word processors at her disposal were saddled with spellcheckers so abysmal they caused more problems than they solved, skipping over misspelled words and offering bizarre alternatives for words spelled correctly.
Strange...that's my experience with the Microsoft spell checker. Or with any other spell checker. None of them are perfect; nor are they intended to be a crutch. They're just tools to help find typos.
A decade later, Linux is lauded as a technical success. But as a business, it's a flop.
Why do we insist on measuring everything by the dollar value?
What if all the mental energy, the rage on Slashdot message boards had been concentrated on building solid business models in enterprise computing?
That's strange; the impression I got from the whole article was that of some junkie posting a rant on a bulletin board. I don't see him out developing the next greatest platform, and yet he pans others for doing exactly what he does.
Microsoft will beat Linux on the desktop because they control the way PC's are installed at the manufacturer. Linux will Never surpass Microsoft, unless their grip over the Major manufactures, with the secret OEM licence, is broken.
Eg, hypothetically, Microsoft could just about to release a new OS, called M$ Shite - This will be worse than MSDOS, Take ages to boot, be non-gui, bugger up the HD's boot patition table so that only a Low Level format will put things right, and only run MS branded crippleware, and not allow any other software installs. Unfortunetely, they are also strongarming the Manufactures to preinstall this next generation software, so that every PC sold from BESTBUY, or PCWORLD, without exception, will come with it pre-installed.
I wonder how many people will still stick with the OS their PC came with, in this situation regardless, 30%? 40%, maybe even 50%. Many people do not know the difference between the OS and the Computer, and don't even realise that they can change, and wouldn't even know if they would want to.
Linux will most likely never die, because it is an excellent platform for development, and it makes a killer server box
The desktop 'scene' will be mixed and quite possibly dominated by Windows products for a while, but as people become more aware of Linux and its advantages, and more developers choose to
write code for Linux and other *nix clones, this situation might change.
Yes, it's true that M$ officials bash Linux and free software in general every chance they get, but that just means that _they_ see it as a threat, esp. as more and more folks lose interest in MS software due to MS's inability to provide well-tested and secure software for mission-critical apps, such as web servers, etc..
blarg.
--- sig moved for great justice.
Ten, twenty years?
In the future when we think ``computer'' we won't picture a big beige box under the desk with wires running all over the place, and another big box with a beam scanning back and forth across a piece of glass.
If Linux lost the desktop PC, that's fine, 'cause the days of the desktop PC dinosaurs are numbered.
The computers of the future are smaller, faster, and cheaper--Three words NOT in Microsoft's vocabulary.
War? What, I thought this was a relatively free market? Aren't we allowed to continue competing even if Microsoft has over 90% marketshare?
</sarcasm>
This is utterly stupid, of course Microsoft has "won" any supposed war, they have a friggin monopoly. By this logic of there being a "war", Microsoft had already won before Linux was even written.
The point of Linux, however, isn't to break Microsoft's monopoly, it is to simply be a good operating system. IMO, it is that.
Unlike a war, there is no beginning and there is no end. We can all keep trying as long as we want... barring some serious draconian legislation that makes open source software illegal.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
The guy has no clue. On page 1 or 2, he says that you can't get drivers for linux. It's sooooo hard. (never mind the fact that any real distribution these days detects just about everything right on install).
Then later (page 4) he says "Linux is effectively a commodity and can be made to work on any hardware system."
Reconcile those two, if you can. I can't.
I'd love to see if your "tech-illiterate wife" is happy with her choice.
So she's fed up with Microsoft, but why does she want Linux? Would she know Linux from *BSD from OS X?
If we Linux folks give up on the desktop, we will eventually have to give up on the server, unless the states and the DOJ get really wise about remedies.
As it stands now, the biggest single factor, by far, driving Microsoft server technology into the enterprise is the fact that Microsoft desktops want to talk to Microsoft servers. Jeremy Allison made this point on the LinuxToday talkbacks for this article, that the reason Exchange gets pulled into companies is because Outlook (part of office, and so bundled everywhere) has to talk to Exchange to do calendaring and scheduling. Exchange 2000, at least, needs to talk to ActiveDirectory. ActiveDirectory and Windows 2000 really, really want to absorb the DNS function (or else you're stuck with either a lot of manual overhead to manage the SRV records, or else you have to enable Dynamic DNS updates with a total lack of security because Microsoft doesn't support any open DDNS standards, they simply use the ActiveDirectory ACL's for security..)
See how that works? It's like dominoes, and Microsoft is supremely willing to set them up and knock them down.
Even though we spent 5+ years developing Ganymede, we're getting massive pressure on us to adopt ActiveDirectory because that's what Microsoft says Windows 2000 really needs, and because the protocols that Windows 2000 uses to talk to its directory services are proprietary and non-documented.
Microsoft is like a cuckoo bird, that lays its eggs in the nests of other birds. The eggs hatch, and out pop the baby cuckoos, who then proceed to shove all the other eggs out of the nest.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
If only he'd deleted her Microsoft applications, Windows, given her the $$$ cost of the apps and OS back, and most importantly NOT DELETED HER WORK FILES!!!
Did she have a backup?
Baz
Actually, what I got out of the article on Wired (print version) is that he works extensively with Linux (he worked at RedHat), and thinks it is technically superior. But he thinks that OS wars and flames, and (he specifically mentions) /. Rage are counter productive to the movement.
He says that if Linux slowly eroded the MS base, it would win. But instead you have guerilla IT departments go through and trash peoples computers, and make linux-ites look like a bunch of freaks.
He specifically mentions an incident at RedHat where a biz. person had some Excel documents. The documents had some heavy duty macros and whatnot which would not work under any of the linux competitors. She installed Excel. She had an issue with her drivers or whatnot, and when she got the computer back from IT, excel was gone, along with her documents. The IT guy said it was her fault for being a traitor to linux.
Summary of article : Linux is great, but the long haired freaks are gonna make it lose.
The article was somewhat deceptive in titling, and the author did give the nod on the server side. But you're right, it essentially re-hashed the same thing we keep eharing (and doing nothing about), like the way developers will come up with a whole bunch of programs doing the same thing (KDE, gnome, etc, etc) instead of working together. I know, different goals, slightly different niche. I tend to write my own code when I need to do something, even if a program already exists to do pretty much what I want. Anyway, I'm not sure those points needed hashing out over the 6 or 7 pages that they gave to it. Then again, I don't think that the whole lord of the rings thing they did in that issue needed to be as long as it was either. Heck, I don't think the *magazine* needs to be so damned long.
That reminds me, is anyone else who got 1 trial issue of "maximum linux" now apperently getting Wired for free? I've gotten the last 3 or 4 issues now, and have never even suggested that I'd like to subscribe...
open source is an alternative that gives users more power to control their computing environment than closed source software does, but it is *NOT* a war!
We need to stop describing stuff in such combative terms. That's part of what turns businesses off and prevents them from trying open source software. Businesses view people who talk about software choices as war as a bunch of loons. If you want to get linux on the desktop, point out that it is a high quality, low cost alternative to the software they are currently using. Give specific examples that match their current products.
Remember, this is not war, noone will die over this.
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
Why is the desktop and what's running on it always referred to as a "war"? And what does "Microsoft has won." mean? Does it mean that right at this point in time they dominate? Yes. Does it mean they will dominate next year? Maybe. 5 years? 10 years? It certainly doesn't mean that we've quit and gone home because there are still desktop environments that are being developed and improved continuously that Microsoft doesn't own or contribute to.
To make broad statements like this seems a little silly to me when its applied to things like technology and open source. Technology (and the desktop) is always evolving and evolution implies a change both in what is dominating and how.
Wars and battles are discrete things that refer to a point in time and imply that once its over its over. Technology wars can only be fought between corporations and are only won when one corporation gives up or goes under. When applied to open source that comparison just doesn't work. Stop equating the changes in desktop technology to a battle and lets discuss it in terms of where it should be going and how we're going to meet the needs of people using them tommorrow. Evolution will take over.
Some friends here run a server farm for a school district. They switched to Linux on ALL their servers. They say that the maintenance required with Linux is far less. And, of course, there is no software upgrade cost. A Microsoft sales person called and asked why they had not done any business recently.
It seems to me that the reason for Microsoft's increased abusiveness is that every top Microsoft executive has plenty of experience seeing 5 years ahead. They know they don't have long. So, they want to gouge everyone as much as possible now.
The referenced article says that Linux can compete in the server market. You can be sure that, if there are people on staff that know Linux, there will be constant attempts to put Linux on desks.
The article said, Linux boosters insist that if free downloads and pass-arounds were counted, that figure would be even higher; and they're probably right.
Probably??? Certainly.
Conversely, Linux managed only 1.5 percent of shipments in the desktop market in 2000. And that sliver is unlikely to grow in 2001.
Except, of course, the Chinese and Thai and maybe Indian governments are switching to open source software, partly because they are afraid of possible back doors in U.S. software. Only the governments of 2 billion people. And some state and city governments in the United States. And... And...
Desktop computer users care about what they can do on their machines. They want reliability, simplicity, access to popular software, and the ability to communicate easily with other users.
More nonsense. Many work users have computers dedicated to one task. If they don't want that one task to crash, if they don't want Bill Gates coming around and deciding on new ways of abusing them, they can do what?
As for its programs, Windows and Word sometimes drive me nuts.
Is that because they are buggy and quirky, and have numerous security risks due to low-quality source code?
Secret U.S. hostile action tries to enhance oil profits. See the new section, "Avoid the common mistakes" in What should be the Response to Violence?
Bush's education improvements were
I read the print version of this article, and while I enjoyed it, it has serious problems.
First, he suggests that everyone would be better off if Linux (or any other open-source alternative) just gave up on trying to create a competitive desktop to Windows. The situation with BE makes it clear that there can be no commerical alternative to Windows that can succeed because of the MS monopoly, so open source solutions are IMHO the only choice. He suggests that Microsoft's Windows is and will always be the only choice on the desktop for consumers, and that trying to work on alternatives is a waste of time. In other words, let's just accept that MS are a monopolist and not try anymore. Having seen where KDE has come from in the last 3 years, I beg to differ.
He also states that "The Linux desktop offers very little that could be considered plug-and-play.". He goes on to talk about the lack of drivers for scanners and digital cameras, not exactly the kind of peripherals everyone has with their PC. At any rate, I've installed hundreds of Windows and Linux PCs, and I can say with confidence that Linux is in fact more plug and play on hardware it supports than Windows is. With the 2.4 kernel, this situation is improved.
With Windows, I install the hardware, boot the machine, install the driver, reboot the machine. Hopefully it'll work, and to be fair usually does. With Linux, I install the hardware, boot the machine. No fiddling with obnoxious drivers, no reboots.
I've been very impressed with a distro like RH 7.1 in this regard. In my experience, a standard networked office PC is far easier to install with RH 7.1 than any Windows PC. Less time less hassle. As for digital cameras, I know a few who would beg to differ on their ease of installation in an OS like Win 98.
Anyway, the article hasn't convinced me it's time to cede to Windows. Since I've used and supported both, I'd say that Microsoft's success will continue depend on the bundling of software like Windows Media and IE, not on its superior hardware support.
To all you desktop developers out there - keep up the great work!
This is one thing that MS is still working on after 20 years, with occasional interferance from marketing, and which they occasionally get right. Of course, their marketing department has often shaped what people want, but that is another story.
If Linux evangelists insult the people they are trying to convert, then people will not convert. If they ram it down the throat of someone, then they object, just like people object against MS.
Remember, to do better than MS you do not have to be as good as MS. You have to be many times better.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I disagree. Yes, Microsoft has vanquished its enemies, but it may have more trouble protecting itself from its own greed.
What happens when Win98, ME and 2000 Workstation (or whatever they were calling it) are no longer for sale? I think consumers' calculus will change when only WinXP and its successors are on the market
As Mitchell writes, consumers want "reliability, simplicity, access to popular software, and the ability to communicate easily with other users." But in XP these virtues are tangled up with Microsoft's efforts to force its online services down your throat.
Redirecting all mailto: links to Hotmail instead of the registered mail editor is an obstacle to communicating easily. Forcing customers to download a Java VM does not enhance access to popular software. Forbidding reinstallation of the OS without calling Microsoft and proving that you own it isn't what I'd call simplicity.
We all know the full list, and we all know that both consumers and CIOs are balking.
Don't get me wrong, Linux has a long way to go to offer a viable alternative for the average luser. But I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of people take a second look at MacOS and Linux after tangling with XP.
In the end there will be a great battle between good and evil, and evil will probably win.
Yeah, a couple of years ago Wired crowed about the soaring stock market and how it would never end because things were "different now." I think you can almost take Wired pronouncements, reverse thm, and have a pretty good look at the future.
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
"You are only a success for the moment you achieve something."
Phil Jackson
"Seems to me that there will come a point where a free operating system can do everything current OSes do, so the intuitive step is to ask 'Why when that happens will people pay for an OS instead?' - surely the burden is on people claiming linux will never win the desktop to answer that, even if that time is a year off or whatever."
Most people don't now what success entails!
no word processor = rubish operating system
Basically he says that people should stop working on the Linux desktop because it has no hope of replacing windoze. As a Linux desktop user, sure i'd like to see everyone switch, but even if they don't i still want a good high quality desktop on a real O/S. Just because we may never make windows go away, is no reason to stop working on alternative packages.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
"Microsoft is like a cuckoo bird..."
Excellent points.
Bush's education improvements were
I don't like this statement one bit. An analogy I would present is PalmOS vs. WindowsCE. Palm clearly had "won this war", but it clearly wasn't "OVER." WindowsCE is making slow progress in market share, and will probably overtake PalmOS eventually (opinion! I own a Palm, love it)
I think the Desktop fight is a good fight and can be won by Linux. Everyone loves an underdog, but not everyone will fund one.
M@
Krispy Cream is people
Then his grin would have been answered with "Hit the street right now. You're FIRED."
Issues of OS "treason" or "loyalty" are secondary to getting one's job done in ANY company, and vaping a user's OS and legitimate data files without authorization is NEVER an appropriate action for an IT support person. This isn't an example of Linux fascism, but rather one of a loose cannon of a technician who is a danger to the company.
Any info on how that scene actually played out?
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
...and they've been trying for years. Linux attempts to compete with Office have so far not given Microsoft any reason to take them seriously, but if the Linux apps ever did become a serious threat you shouldn't think for a moment that MS will continue to stand still (as I feel they've been doing since at least Office 97). Remember Netscape? MS is perfectly capable of ignoring something for a long time, then suddenly turning their massive firepower on it when they feel the time is ripe to do so. They just haven't felt that the so-called Linux alternatives to Word, Excel, etc. have been worth wasting bullets on...yet.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
We're at war with Microsoft?! Holy cow, no-one ever tells me anything!
Free clue to all would-be Web journos: when Linux made that comment about "world domination" all those years ago: he was joking. Really. He was pulling your wire. Jerking your chain. Taking the Michael. Extracting the urine.
'Kay? 'Kay.
No doubt it's a waste of brains and time to even bother refuting this windy gibberish, I'd like to make a few points.
No-one has made money out of Linux and everyone who tries goes to the wall. To paraphrase Bill Hicks: non-Linux businesses go to the wall every day. Bob Cringely has reckoned that 90% of all businesses fail. The Linux has no innate monopoly on business smarts.
A sizeable population of Linux advocates are foul-mouthed social inadequates. Again, so what? I had invective-laden ZX Spectrum/ C64 flamewars with my mates when I was eight years old. While there is a human race, there will always be bigots. Is it impolite? Yes. Is it unprofessional? Surely. Does it amount to two tugs of a dead dog's mickey in the long run? Nope.
It's a war between Microsoft and Linux out there. Oh get a grip, you solipsistic little nonentity. Try to see beyond the VDU on your desk for a minute; in the light of recent events, your inflation of a trend within the IT sector to the status of a war are laughable and tasteless. Sure, there are the windbags on both sides of this MS-vs-Linux thing who read earth-shattering importance into everything, who think installing Linux on their PCs is some sort of subversive act. Nonsense.
I use Linux because it suits my needs. I also use Windows and MacOS. I don't feel any desire to conquer the world. I don't feel like I'm part of some "war for the desktop". No sane person does.
One wonders why WiReD bothered printing this giddy nonsense in the first place. Could it be that no self-respecting techie reads WiReD even though it likes to think of itself as the official organ of tech culture? Is that acid green they favour in their layouts really the colour of sour grapes?
Regarding the Spell Checker comment, I can remember the days before the spell checker, when you either learned to spell, or learned to 'grep dict' and find the correct spelling yourself. I hope Linux Desktop tools don't get hurt trying to kow-tow to user weeknesses produced by Microsoft Tools. Maybe there's a better way.
I'm not saying a spell checker is an unnecessary crutch, just that in general too much emphesis is being placed on MS features, without understanding their real need. "Becuase MS has it" is not a need.
[Whiney Voice]Oh! Oh! Where are the nested queries! This tool SUX because there are no nested queries![/Whiney Voice]
M@
Krispy Cream is people
I'm so glad that this has been posted to Slashdot! I'd been meaning to write a letter to Wired about this but was too lazy to get it done before the next issue came out....
The article has the Open Source movement all wrong. The author treats the Linux desktop issue as if it were IBM versus Microsoft, not Open Source versus Microsoft.The author spends most of the article lamenting that the Open Source movement is wasting its energies worrying about the desktop, when Microsoft owns it.
To put things in more pompous terms, the author spends a lot of time bemoaning the opportunity cost of spending time on the Linux desktop, and claiming that this time should all be spent on the server market.
This shows a total failure to understand the Open Source movement. The Open Source movement is not Open Source, Inc. Linus, Eric, RMS, or whoever is your pick for Open Source, Inc. CEO can't just say "yo! KDE-boy, toss in the towel on this desktop thing and spend more time on the server!" or "yo! I know you want to make a totally excellent system for tracking your MP3's, but you should be improving Apache, instead!"
People write Open Source software because they want to improve the tools that they use all the time. People who use desktops will want to improve the desktops and people who use servers will want to improve servers. And those people are not fungible --- they can't just be reassigned. And I think ESR's spot-on in the book when he talks about the fact that a lot of the quality of good Open Source software comes from the fact that people can't be reassigned to projects they don't give a rip about. People are passionate about the software they write, so they try to make it good.
The author's failure to understand this key fact about Open Source makes his whole perspective into nonsense.
The article might make sense as an argument about what Open Source packagers should be doing, but even there, the packagers are largely driven by software producers.
All this work, and ... it doesn't matter. Desktop computer users care about what they can do on their machines. They want reliability,
check
simplicity,
getting a heck of a lot better---linux is worlds simpler than it used to be
access to popular software,
This seems extremely short-sighted to me. How can linux desktop software become "popular" until linux desktops become more popular? cygwin, maybe?
and the ability to communicate easily with other users.
check.
I need a TiVo for my car. Pause live traffic now.
I read the original article (bigger than the online version) and I can only say it was a very flawed piece.
He started of recounting the story of some jerk tech. admin that deleted Windows and all other files off one of his companies staff laptops and installed linux. He then used this as one of his arguments as to why Linux wasn't going to succeed. How clever is that?
These are the facts as far as I can see them:
A new process has come in to the world. That process is called the open source development model. This allows commercial quality software to be developed by diverse entities around the world. These entities can be individuals, public bodies and governments or companies with an interest in the particular piece of software. Each can make a small contribution to a larger project. The software created is often distributed for free.
Because of this, it is very unlikely that there will ever be an Open Source software company with Microsoft's level of turnover. However, Open Source Software is not dependent upon any particular company for its success and is not reliant on anyone making a particularly great profit from it. More important are the savings that people can make from it.
The Open Source Development model has only really gained momentum over the last few years. In that time, some projects have demonstrated an increadible rate of development. Although it is true to say that many Open Source project still lag behind their commercial equivalents, the rate of progress of these projects suggests that this won't be the case for long.
Microsoft makes the majority of its profits selling an office suite and several operating systems.
It is now trying to change its licensing model to one of rental, rather than one-off payment, because the software is just about mature and there is increasingly little incentive for most businesses and organisations to upgade. The change makes Microsoft software an on-going cost for businesses, even though new releases do not add much in terms of essential new functionality for most busnesses.
Therefore, Microsoft's core business - the products that make most of its profits - are under threat from a new process. Just as new processes during the industrial revolution completely destroyed certain previously profitable businesses, so will new processes, such as the Open Source Development model, destroy certain types of buiness. Microsoft is likely to be one of those buinesss. In the long term, it is impossible for any business to seriously compete with free equivalent products.
Arguments like "Linux isn't ready for the desktop", "Dell decided not to ship Linux on the desktop", "What about support?" are all short term issues. Think big picture. Think long term. Think worldwide. Think fundamentals.
Microsoft is doomed unless it can radically change its business to something completely different, and maintain it current turnover levels, which from where I'm sitting looks like a practically impossible trick to pull off.
And hey, I'm typing this in IE on Windows 2000, I'm not a Microsoft hater. It's just I think the world is changing and there's not much Microsoft can do about it.
I don't think anyone is disputing that Microsoft has won the majority of desktop users, but the issue is, who cares?
Some people just don't get it: Linux is not about market share, Linux is not about wining anything, Linux is not about profits.
;-) ) but it is there for you to try.
Linux is about choice.
The day one gets tired of MS you can try something else: it can or can't be what you want or need (I don't need an spell checker for instance, you people can suffer my English
Does it work for you? Great, you are welcome. It does not? Bad luck, let us know and we will try to help. Can you program? Can you translate? Can you write documentation? Then would you like to help improve the thing?
And what is the brilliant alternative? Do nothing? Is this person suggesting to abandon the project of desktop computing in the hands of a company that has been deemed acted ilegaly? Uh, no thanks. In particular poor countries can't afford this alternative.
If there are companies and individuals out there trying to make a living out of Linux, great. If they can't make money that means their busniess models are flawed, not that Linux is flawed.
It is really an insult to the intelligence of many brilliant people to assume that the Open Source programmers will never manage to produce something "user friendly" (like if Windows was, all those "Windows for Dummies" or "Learn Office in
24 hours" books are telling the real history: MS products are also difficult to use).
Dismiss this thing as mostly nonsense. It has some marginal value for any company that
wishes to make money with Linux in the user's desktop. For anybody else it amounts to little more than a rant written by somebody that is angry at an incompetent IT person in its company.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I use linux with KDE at home as my primary desktop. When I am using that computer I am not thinking about what the CFOs of America think.
Were alrady there for some userse - I'm a consultant for a bunch of small businesses, and have been replacing the "front desk" computer operating systems with Mandrake 8.0 in KDE mode and AbiWord. The secretary types love it becuse they can't "break the computer" and they don't loose work. Just make sure your printer is supported with CUPS and away you go. Granted, the Linux desktop can't replace the whole MS-Office desktop, but in actuall use (for the correct type of user) I've had great sucuess with the above.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
The simple, most basic fact of Linux on the desktop, is that that great majority of users fit a certain profile:
1. College student or fairly recent college graduate.
2. Strongly dislikes Microsoft.
Now, now, this is a blatant stereotype, but there is truth to it (heck, I thought geeks would hate Star Trek and for being mass market, condescending, and that people _expect_ geeks to like it, but Star Trek threads on Slashdot can get more than a thousand postings).
Students tend to use computers in fairly simple ways: browsing the web, playing MP3s, writing papers, doing programming assignments, playing games, exploring free software. Now keeping this in mind, when you see such a person zealously proclaim that The Gimp is superior to Photoshop for graphic arts work, you have to stop and wonder. So on the one side you have people with much passion but limited to no experience arguing that an open source program is just as good as a commercial offering. On the other side you have professional graphic artists who put The Gimp and Photoshop side by side and are stunned that they're even bothering which such a comparison.
The bottom line, for me, is that we should be seeing much less Linux advocacy than we currently do. If I met someone who ran a small business and later found out he used Linux or some open source software for some tangible reasons, then this would be interesting food for thought. But when I see threads like this:
A: I find it disturbing that a number of popular e-commerce sites don't work under Linux, either because Mozilla doesn't render them properly or because they require Windows-only tech, like ActiveX scripting.
B: Bah! I don't _need_ to go to sites that that! F**k em!
Then I realize that "B" isn't someone who uses computers. He's someone who dinks around and has a chip on his shoulder and shouldn't be listened to. Sadly, there's the impression that a majority of Linux users are like B.
The last time anyone designed a board with the intention of supporting Linux drivers for it was 1998. There was a time we thought winmodems were bad. Not many slashdotters remember what a winmodem is but since 1998 every piece of hardware can be considered specifically designed for Windows. Not that not having desktops which can run Linux is bad. When was the last time anyone wrote a story about a desktop PC?
There are far too many applications companies who have a vested interest in a vendor neutral operating system. They all know that Microsoft has totally taken over the desktop and that they are slowly infiltrating the server market. And since Microsoft likes to bundle applications together, they slowly drive companies like Oracle, Sun, and IBM to the periphery.
I'm certain that if any of those companies could have Microsoft's dominance of the O/S, they'd jump at it in a heart beat. But since they know that won't happen, having a standard that nobody dominates is a far cry better.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I've seen users use UNIX with a hell of a lot less desktop environment than you can get with Linux. Take away the nastiness of actually setting the system up and I find the level of Linux user friendliness to be about comparable to Windows. Given that, saving a couple of hundred million a year in Windows licensing fees should be pretty compelling to just about any CIO.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
For many if not most users in the world, Microsoft is free software. That is about to change, now that new MS releases are starting to enforce software that only works for the paid-for and registered installation.
This is going to be a sea change in the economics, folks.
When people find out that they really have to pay big bucks to have multiple copies (not to mention their OWN copies) of MS operating systems and applications on their various desktops, laptops, iPAQs, X-boxes, etc., and that they keep having to pay big bucks each time one of these is upgraded, they will quickly lose enthusiasm, no matter HOW user friendly and convenient Windows, MS Office, etc. seems to be. Maybe this gets moderated by reduced prices and incremental charges for services delivered over the Net, but it will still amount to a new and substantial drain of green dollars from the consumer to Microsoft.
As interested as I am in what I read of Windows XP and Office XP, I can't justify spending the money when there are so many other and better ways I could spend the same money (e.g., hardware upgrades, or even non-computer purchases) and just use Linux, Mozilla and OpenOffice.
I suspect many others will feel the same way, especially given the next year or so of relatively hard times that we all seem to be facing.
The coming months, in fact, is the time for Linux really to make some major strides on the Desktop.
Go down to the seashore and declare a war against the sea. Bill did that just as the tide began to recede, so it looked as though he was winning. But after a while, you realize that how matter how much you kick at the waves, it has no effect.
It's a waiting game and we don't have that long to wait...
Cheers,
Jim
-- My Weblog.
KDE and Gnome are NOT Linux.
When will people understand that the desktop is not the OS, and the applications are not the desktop? KDE and Gnome can work on any Unix-standardized computer. In fact, theoretically, KDE at least (not sure about Gnome) can even be the desktop on a Windows system.
The real struggle here is not about whether Linux or Microsoft "gets" the desktop, but about what computing environment people will use in the future. I agree with many of Russ Mitchell's points about the lack of standardization and integration for desktop apps in Linux.
There is a good possibility that all of this argument over a good Office clone such as Koffice will be a moot point in another few years. More and more companies are moving to web-based apps as their computing environments, because there are some clear advantages:
1. The whole application can be controlled and updated from one central point; the server room.
2. Glitches, crashes and bugs on individual users' computers are less problematic, and less likely to cause serious downtime.
3. preventing loading of local files does away with trojan virus proliferation. (how many times have you chased a virus around a corporate network, because idiots keep downloading the same attachment)
4. It is much easier to keep track of realtime company statistics.
5. A clear case of separating presentation from business logic.
6. The client OS can be anything with a valid web browser.
7. The application can even scale to small devices such as handhelds.
8. Tokens can be used to pass a users's application state from one client to another quite easily. Output a report at the office, finish editing your report at home, review it from your handheld on the subway, etc...
There are many other benefits to consider; this is just the beginning. I know that there are both pros and cons to this argument, and not every app should be web-based, but a significant amount (majority) can and will be. The web browser will in a way "become" the desktop. Will Microsoft win this war? Maybe, but maybe my prediction for the future will come true:
1. The browser will become ubiquitous. It will eventually be in everything, in some form or another, because it is such a usefull information tool. This means other devices besides what is traditionally called a computer. Microsoft will lose here, because most "net appliances" or web-connected devices do not run Windows.
2. Maybe Netscape or Mozilla will not be giants of the web browser world, but the technologies they have made as Open Source will. Already the Gecko DHTML rendering engine (which is the core of mozilla) has been used in several other web browsers. It provides to any other browser developer the benefit of NOT having to re-invent the wheel. Gecko has been ported to just about any operating system you can imagine.
3. The graphical user interface we have become used to will gradually merge with the browser. Most user interfaces on all operating systems now have some form of window/mouse interface, so it is just natural to follow this shift. Also, almost every computer or net device will run some sort of internal webserver, to handle its own GUI and to serve data out as defined by users and software.
4. Eventually we will not think in terms of a thing called a "browser" but in terms of what type of information needs to be rendered in what way, with something like XHTML being the underlying basis for all other data rendered to human-readable format. Along with this we will be using XML, XSL, XML-RPC, SOAP, etc... And Javascript/ECMAscript will be the basis of client-side dynamic manipulation of data.
5. During this time, Microsoft will repeatedly try to derail the open standards process by introducing minor changes into the way its XHTML rendering software or it's ECMAscript-parsing software works, but they will keep having to return to the standards as they are embraced by most other companies.
6. In the end it won't matter who makes what browser, as long as it follows the open standards. The rendering of XHTML/Javascript will become as intrinsic a part of the operating system as the concept of "files" and "directories" are now. It will matter who makes the server, though. And here is where open source *nix (Linux/*BSD) will WIN.
7. It will be a good life for those of us programmers who know scripting languages and open standards and ways to tie all this stuff together. It will also be a good life for the "heavy-duty" programmers who can advance the core server-side applications. VB/Delphi/{insert your IDE} programmers might not be so lucky.
Whattaya think?
I agree with what you said, Jon, but some people are moving to Linux nevertheless. It's good to focus, not on what cannot be done now, but on what CAN be done.
Check out this Linux success story: The "semi-official" distribution of the K12Linux Project. Here is a quote from that site:
"The Multnomah Education Service District has successfully moved most of it's core network services to Linux. Linux powers dns, dhcp, mail relays, proxy servers, web filters, and directory services for the 45,000 administrators, teachers, and students within our agency and the school districts we support . For our agency and a couple of our districts, Linux powers the web, mail, ftp, and file servers. Tickled with our success, we have started work on putting Linux workstations in the classroom. More on that to come!" [my emphasis]
Check out this site about putting Linux workstations in the classroom:
K-12Linux Project.
Here is a quote:
"We have FREE Xeon and Celeron processors to give to schools participating in STRUT and K12LTSP. See the applications page for more information."
U.S. government corruption: What should be the Response to Violence?
Bush's education improvements were
Saying that desktop installs (of Linux) will not grow in the future is a very big mistake. 1 Reason I will give is like this: More than 1/2 of "desktop" users are finding that most of their work is happening via a browser and email client. Up until recentlly it is a well known fact that linux lagged WAY behind in the Browser market....but anyone using Galeon, Konq, or even the commercial Opera....can see that the gap is closing FAST....It took a few years to get here...but in those few years the browser has taken over the desktop....now the main (not only) thing Linux needs to compete is a simple browser...and the time of a level playing field in rendering HTML pages is drawing near.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
I use what works for me.
Visit me on #weirdness on the Galaxynet.
if you have been paying attention in the media. Linux this, Linux that. Never gonna make it. Too hard. Not supported enough. Flawed business model. You know the drill by now.
Folks - we should just do what we do best - continue to write great code. That is what has proven the critics wrong in the first place!
Stop the brainwash
The biggest weapon that will smite the mighty Microsoft corporate juggernaut is its own accounting practices.
Microsoft's earnings declined from 6.5 billion two quarter's ago to the just released 6.1 billion results from the previous quarter. A decline from quarter to quarter in Microsoft's earnings hasn't occured in a VERY long time. Microsoft hasn't seen a decrease in earnings like this since their pre-DOS days. We have just witnessed the ebbing of the largest and fastest growing company that has ever existed.
Now we all know that tech earnings across the board are down, but no other company depends like Microsoft on steadily increasing stock valuations. Even given the decrease in PC shipments, we have seen the launch of Microsoft's new licensing model and the launch of Office XP (many months ago) have a neglible affect on their bottom line.
Look at their numbers in markets outside the US. In every market outside the US their earnings really tanked this quarter. Without the corporate US licensing market to prop it up, Microsoft wold be in even more serious pain.
The simple fact of the matter is if Microsoft's stock doesn't keep going up, BAD things will happen to it. It will probably need to pay out three to four billion in ill advised put options. Microsoft is going to have a hard time retaining staff as they don't pay their people worth a SH*T. Its more than obvious to their staff and to the investment community that Microsoft is no longer a high growth company. If they finally are forced to pay their people what they are worth, their earnings will tank even further.
What's really funny is that Microsoft predicted 7.1 billion revenue for the current, just started, quarter. This is clearly based on BIG sales of XP and XBox. If either of those products don't do well, and neither is looking like it can makes those numbers at this point, then no one will be wanting to hold MSFT stock come Dec. 30.
What can Microsoft do? They can't afford to give MS Office away. MS Office isn't standing still because they don't care (in all fairness, they've done amazing stuff on the Unicode/multilingualization side recently), but because MS Office 97 does everything most people could want. Once you've caught up to MS Office, where are they going to go? Add an AI to write your papers?
The Red Hat techie who erased her files was irresponsible and stupid - you don't win people over by switching them without consultation, and particularly not by erasing people's data. However, it's unlikely that this would ever happen outside a Linux-only culture, so it's hardly applicable to the rest of the world. One idiot does not make a trend...
Linux evangelism needs a lot of work on subtle and effective techniques (as opposed to flaming), but this is not really a good example.
The biggest stimulus to Linux on the desktop is Microsoft's recent squeezing of its installed based for more revenue through changes to its licensing model - there are several local government and police organisations in the UK that are going to save millions of pounds through switching to Linux.
Without Linux & OSS, just imagine how restricive M$ would be with their products and business practices. Some people think M$ can't get much worse, but I think it can. M$ would make XP a mandatory immediate upgrade AND enforce product registration COMBINED WITH the rentware provisions of "Software Assurance" were it not for the threat of Linux desktops.
MS Office at $2000 per seat? Aside from Star Office and other OSS projects, what stops M$ from doing this?
I think Linux/open source can dictate features that M$ must include to keep pace. In effect, Linux can prevent M$ from breaking out each "feature" into a distinct product and revenue stream. Example: If Linux was not already doing IP masquerade, you would not see "connection sharing" thrown in as a freebie with Windows.
Linux & OSS do not have to "win" the game, they simply have to maintain pressure on M$.
The article states that M$ has won the desktop battle. I see plenty of weakness in M$'s position. Consider their diminishing upgrade rate with each new product release. The XP licensing practices border on desperation to lock people into the upgrade treadmill. As I see it, XP is the beginning of the end for M$.
Winning the battle and holding onto victory are two different concepts.
Well, undoubtedly this email address is being flooded with a deluge of flame mail (unless this community has suddenly decided to mind their manners, which, frankly, I doubt), but I hope this message gets through to you.
Now whether you posted this article merely as flamebait, or you actually believe the statements that you are making, I would like to present a very simple argument to the contrary.
Basically, if I get the point of your article correctly (and please correct me if I am in error) you are making the claim that you want open source computing to succeed. And for open source computing to succeed it is important for Linux to concede defeat on the desktop. You make the claim that too much time and energy is going into desktop software for Linux when Linux still only has a 1.5% marketshare in desktop computer shipments. You say that the community should focus its efforts on the server side where they currently hold a 27% market share. You make the basic claim that by supporting an effort that is doing very dismal (and getting worse) in marketshare, they are risking their substantial marketshare in another market. Sure, that is a very valid argument for any corporation. By putting too much resources in a product that is dying, a corporation can sacrifice their flagship product. But the Linux, and the larger open source community isn't a corporation--its a community. Yes, there are companies that are betting their farms on making Linux grab more marketshare, and many, if not most, of these corporations are focusing on Linux on the desktop, but the Linux community doesn't need these corporations to survive. Granted, these corporations and the economic support they offer are a great boon to the community, and I have seen Linux take leaps and bounds forward in the last couple years, much farther than it would have gone without this support, but the community will not die with the corporations. The community isn't about market share, (granted, most people within the community seem to forget this very simple fact, leading to flamewars between the KDE/Gnome camps, etc) it's about choices.
I use Linux. I have been an avid Linux user for over four years. I have only purchased a couple distributions of Linux in that time (most I purchased as gifts for other people). I have never purchased a desktop computer that came installed with Linux...heck, I've never even purchased a desktop computer. I've purchased motherboards, and DIMMs, and CPUs and cases, and fans and 3D graphics cards etc, and I have downloaded gigabytes upon gigabytes of free source code to build compilers, and GUIs, and utilities, etc. Why do I do this? Is it because I'm waging a war against Microsoft, and I am determined to send the company out of business and put Linux on every computer that ships from now on? No. I don't care about what happens to the majority of computers that are shipped. If someone wants to pay for and use Microsoft software, that is their choice. But I refuse, steadfastly refuse, to let the choice of whether or not to use Microsoft software be taken away from me. And there are others with me. Others that refuse to let their choices be taken from them. Others who don't want to accept the lesser of two evils. Others who would rather work on building something good. I want to work on building something good. And, when I am done building, I will give this away to my neighbors, so that they too may benefit from my hard work, and so that they may respect me for my generosity, and for the quality of work that I do. Or they may help me to improve the quality of my work, and allow me to benefit from theirs.
Yes some develop server software, some develop OS software, but many, many these days are writing desktop software. Software meant only to help your average computer user use their computer more simply and effectively. You said all this work doesn't matter. I'm here to tell you it does. It matters to me. It matters to those with me who are doing the work. It enriches our community, opens its doors to new members, and helps free us all from the shackles of corporate doctrine. Will our community necessarily grow to dominate the world? Honestly, I hope so, but it isn't necessary. Whether the world joins with us or not, we will still be here.
I refuse to let my choices be taken from me. I am willing to work to maintain my freedom of choice, and I am willing to allow others to benefit from my work, so that I too may benefit from theirs. But above all, I refuse to let Microsoft convince me that I need them more than they need me. They have no power over me. They are the corporation. They are the ones concerned with growing or shrinking market share. I could care less. I don't need market share. I have a community, and we are already a success.
I have to admit that about 2/3 through the article I stopped reading, because I've heard it all before, and it's all very true. If I look at my friends around me I see them doing the same thing. A couple of them have removed Windows and installed a sloppy install of Linux on their parents' computers, and a few sysadmin friends that I have have even done the same at work (resulting in nearly getting terminated).
... ahem ... other operating systems that we all know have problems, but we have to sit and wait for an individual group to fix (:
... Linux in its current incarnation is for the geek community. My Mom and Dad would be so pissed if I took their Windows away. Just about everyone where I work would be outraged if I took Windows/Office away and replaced it with Linux/OpenOffice. Right now it just doesn't get the job done like Windows can. Give it time, all good things come to those who wait. The geek community needs to chill for a little while and let the OS and software get up to 'desktop snuff' before we take on giants like Microsoft.
If the Linux community as a whole would like to see Linux succeed in more than small shop servers and geek workstations, someone is going to have to spread the word that Linux can't be forced on those that don't want it.
Lets relate it to the Christian movement. What do we call Christians that won't leave us along in elevators and in lines at fast food? Turbo Christian Bible Thumbers. They irritate the crap out of me, AND I'M A CHRISTIAN! They're going about it wrong. Christ didn't bug the crap out of people about "Hey look at me, I'm the son of God, w00t!". No, he meerly lead by example. Geeks can do the same quite easily, and I've seen a few examples.
Run Linux on your computer, make it rock solid and bad ass. People will notice and want to give it a try, even if it's just surfing the web on your Linux Mozilla browser. Help them, but don't trash talk Microsoft or Apple in the processes. If they ask what you like about Linux (and they will), tell them the possitive things about Linux, but don't *compare* it to anything else. Just say what you like without trash talking something else. You might even want to point out a few of the problems it has, but mention that Linus and Alan are working on those things, *with help from the ENTIRE LINUX COMMUNITY*. Maybe that will light a bulb in their brain that shows them the difference between open source and
And yes
~LoudMusic
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
If it was, then Linux would have to win the war on every front, especially the desktop. But Linux is far from alone in this fight. It has allies.
.Net. Only Linux can stop the Millenium monster from arising to soak up all our data!
;)
The strongest ally of Linux is the one taking the desktop front: OS X. Unlike Linux, it does successfully bring Unix to the average desktop (no dishonor to Linux there - before Apple, no one had managed that feat). Also, unlike Linux, it has commercial apps begging to be ported over. It can run existing Mac apps (with Classic), Windows (Virtual PC), Linux apps (Virtual PC and X on X with a recompile), and Java apps. Beautiful and powerful, OS X.1 was launched to rave reviews and a solar flare. Don't worry, Linux, OS X can hold the desktop front for you for now. It can also teach you how to get there yourself.
Linux is no looser. It has gone from a college kid's pet project to being championed by no less a company than IBM itself. It's valiant deeds on the server side have even Microsoft worried. If the job of OS X is to slice into Microsoft's precious marketshare, then Linux' role is to block Microsoft from achieving its future monopoly:
Linux may well have a role to play on the desktop as well. For now, that is confined to those enterprise desktops whose conversion to Linux would *not* impair the ability of the employee to do their work. (The cruel act of the Linux technician is a sterling example of how the Linux community should *not* be emulating Microsoft's cruel ways.)
Later is another story. Given time, Linux can learn from OS X how to be a good consumer desktop. Apple is giving you a good example here. For the apps and the marketing, Linux needs to turn to the PC makers, and convince them that they need to drop Microsoft like a hot potato (or in this case, a hot bullet that is bleeding them to death). They don't have the profit margins to afford the Microsoft tax anymore, and XP is not going to come and save them. It's simple economic sense: who is the only one reporting millions of profit and billions of cash reserves? Apple. What are they putting on their systems? Open Source Unix. If the PC makers want to compete, they are going to have to dump Microsoft, embrace Linux, and go en masse to the software industry and tell them that all new computers will be running Linux next year. The easiest way to manage the massive port would be a OS X to Linux porting tool (made perhaps with some cooperation from Apple). War won.
Then everybody (except MS) lives happily ever after. OS X and Linux can have friendly competition. The PC makers can actually make PC's that sell again. Microsoft is then reduced to an application company that has to figure out how to port Office to Linux.
If you like this lovely dream of a future, please work to make it happen. Just leave the cruel treatment of users to Microsoft.
"Heart can reach, where hand cannot.
Climb over any wall..."
-Mothra (via Moll) "Mothra 3: King Ghidora Attacks"
Many people are saying, "Linux cannot lose, because there is no war", or, perhaps, "Microsoft has already won." I would pray that these two statements not be proven true. I would pray Linux does everything in its power, and every other operating system, for that matter, to counter Microsoft's firm grasp on the computing industry. Monopolies are not only bad from a moral standpoint, but a much more consumer-related perspective. I'd have to say that competition is gods' gift to progression. Competition forces companies to create new and better products, it forces athletes to become faster and stronger, it urges supermodels to get larger and larger breast implants. If there was no competition, we'd never see a new version of windows, or PhotoShop, we'd never see a faster time for the.. uhh.. whatever dash they're doing in the Olympics these days. Without competition, we'd have a world full of idiots who are content with fitting the norm, not exceeding, nor challenging the current circumstances. I agree with the people who say there should be no winner to this war, or, in other words, the competition should never be run out so heavily that only one company is left standing. Every single operating system should compete with Microsoft as best they can. If a company can create a completely advanced, proficient, productive, stable, and all around excelling operating system, then Microsoft would have to do the same, which would inevitably help Microsoft users, and users of other operating systems who would see their own vendors attempting to improve. If Microsoft has already won the war, then we need not worry about the future, because it will be whatever Microsoft wants it to be, which I don't see happening, therefore I believe there is still a war running. Let's hope that Microsoft doesn't have the ability to cease all competition with foreign (competing) products, systems and software, then we'll have some light at the end of the tunnel.
"Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness."
KDE and Gnome are doing good jobs at becoming good window managers for average computer users. It's the system that is the problem. Installing a harddrive in windows is easy, you just plug it in. In Linux you have to mount the drive and edit your fstab table. Is your average every day user going to be able to do that? What about configuring Xfree86 to use a newer video drive? /etc/..."
"Goto a command prompt, load up vi, now open
"Huh? What? Don't I just reboot now?"
And your average joe compiling a new kernel? hahaha
It's the hardware installation and configuration that needs work. Linux needs better plug and play support. I mean if Windows can do, why shouldn't Linux be able to do it better?
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
Basically, he just doesn't get it. Linux is not supposed to have any particular policy or direction. It simply evolves with the needs of the users. Thus far, this appears to be one of the main reasons for its success. The idea that Linux "should focus" on a particular thing is not only completely unrealistic, it also reflects a lack of understanding as to how software on Linux actually gets written.
I read this in the print edition last month, so if this doesn't work out, perhaps they cut the web version.
/. trend that you get more karma for slating Linux than you do for boosting it. He has applied this to getting paid for writing the article, and Wired has applied it to getting people to buy their 'zine.
After the stuff about the desktop war, he goes on to conclude that because Linux is already succeeding in the server market, that is where open source developers should concentrate, abandoning further work on (specifically) KDE and GNOME. He completely misses the points that:
1 - Developers are doing this for free. If there is money and market share in developing for the server market, that is where companies will (and do) develop their products for Linux. Open source developers don't often work on things that are specifically there to make money for someone else, and are of no use to themselves.
2 - Its the desktop software that Linux is perceived to be weakest, so why does it make more sense to abandon it and work on the stuff that is already doing well? And how are people supposed to develop the server software without an adequate desktop environment? I get the impression that he wants people to use Windows on their workstation, writing code for Linux. Why would I be happy to give BillG $200 for a WinXP license, but love Linux so much that I did hundreds of hours of free work on stuff that made someone else money?
Fundamentally, this guy has latched on to the current
One more thing. The writer specifically says that Kodak digital cameras are not supported. Funny then that my Kodak DC200 works fine with gPhoto for the last year.
"You can't win you know, but there are alternatives to fighting."
Free software doesn't have a fighting chance.
It does, however, have a very passive and almost viral way of spreading.
Will it ever consume the whole? Probably not. But then, it doesn't have to as long as it never dies. As long as it still lives, it wins by default.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Well said, but wait, it's worse. The whole idea of linux is that the developers are in charge. The writer just engaged in one big rant that he wished that the developers would develop the way *he* wanted them to. They certainly will, as soon as he starts paying them.
That's the real difference between Open Source/Free Software and Communism, the people are truly in charge and no self-appointed dictator for the proletariat can override their judgement.
Another point to bear in mind is that although Microsoft controls the American desktop market and to a large extent the market in other western democracies, most of the people in the world do not live here.
That leaves a very large market unexploited. While it may be difficult to imagine your average camel driver as a computer owner, it was even harder 30 years ago to imagine the average American as a computer owner.
At some point, international aid agencies are going to start distributing simple inexpensive computers to thirdworld villages. If the Linux community is alert, they'll see that these machines are running Linux, and it shouldn't be a hard sell. Linux will run on very inexpensive hardware, is free, and even more important, Linux users are not charged for upgrading their systems in the way that Windows users are.
The consequences of developing a base of users several billion strong could be enormous. Bright kids are just as likely to be found living in mud huts as in gated communities, and if Linux recruits these kids into the Linux development fold, they will vastly outnumber the developers in the Microsoft camp. The most important asset in the OS wars is sheer brainpower. Microsoft may soon be overwhelmed by a tide of thirdworld coding geniuses.
So, Linux zealots... join the Peace Corps and spread the Linux meme to the world.
yes. Microsoft has won. Definitely. And the war is over. Anyone can see that. They won that war. But Linux was not their enemy, DR-DOS was.
The problem is that the market is saturating and Microsoft cannot compete with Free Software (or Open Source, for that matter) as this futher develops. They will HAVE to charge subscription licenses, while we do not. So this war is not over so much as not begun. Both sides are mobilizing, but shots have yet to be really fired yet.
This Wired article is pathetic. If he really is a former Red Hat employee, I would think that he would have some concept that Open Source is not a singlular business any more than proprietary software is. Open source can go every direction at least as well as proprietary software can. It is not a business, it is a business model.
If we substitute "Proprietary Software" for "Open Source" everywhere it appears in this article, we can see how truly insane his point of view is. Should "proprietary software" companies all focus on building server-side software? What makes is appropriate that a much more diverse group of developers similarly restrict themselves.
Again, have we lost? No. We have not begun to fight because the time is not ripe.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
The perception of some silly "war" is in itself part of the problem.
I like Torvalds' take on it. Just work on what you're working on -- make it better because then it'll be more useful to YOU, or your friends. They say in business that one of the surest ways to fail is to be always watching the competition. It turns you into a follower. A true leader, be it a CEO or an OS, works on making the best product possible. Though he's cognizant of the competition's moves, he doesn't make them his preoccupation, because then he'd be thinking about what THEY'RE doing, not what HE'S doing.
Mr. Torvalds gets this. Most here don't.
The only tool you've got against psychosis is experience.
Summary of article : Linux is great, but the long haired freaks are gonna make it lose.
Yes, that's a good summary. Rubbish, isn't it?
Wired has really gone down the toilet. I used to love it. Can anyone recommend a replacement?
I read this article yesterday on Linuxtoday, and I was immediately struck by how many people there are who think that GNU/Linux and other free software can be driven in the same way that proprietary software is drivin. Or that the goals of the creators of free software, are the same goals of the creators of proprietary software.
This guys seems to think that the best way to push the development of GNU/Linux is to write an article about what does not work. This, I guess, is supposed to spread concern among the users of the software who will then, en masse, complain to the software creator and vote with their wallets on something that will do better. What this presumes is that the people who create the software are going to care about how users spend money.
But, obviously, this is not the case with free software. Developers create free software for a single purpose: to accomplish something that they want done. They don't write it to get someone to spend money on it. They write it to get something done, and then they share what they've accomplished with others. So, if users don't spend their money on software, what do the developers care? That software still accomplished a task for the developer, and that's all that matters.
I believe that this guy really does want to see free software succeed. What he doesn't understand is that the ways to do that have changed. Writing articles to incite users isn't as effective with free software as with proprietary software. The best tools to improve free software are an editor and a compiler and time.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
We should all keep in mind this simple truth: Wired Magazine is dying.
.008 percent of the search engine market. Therefore there are (7000/100)*.008 = .56 Hotbot users.
You don't need to be Rossetto to predict Wired's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Wired faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Wired because Wired is dying. Things are looking very bad for Wired. As many of us are already aware, Wired continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Famed Wired author Negroponte states that there are 7000 subscribers to Wired Magazine. How many readers of Wired News are there? Let's see. The number of Wired versus Wired News posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 1 to 4. Therefore there are about 7000*5 = 35000 Wired News readers. HotWired posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Wired News posts. Therefore there are about 700 readers of HotWired. A recent article put Hotbot at about
Due to the troubles of Suck.com, abysmal click-through rates and so on, Wired went bankrupt and was sold to Conde Nast. Now Conde Nast is also dying and the corpse of Wired will soon be turned over to another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Wired has steadily declined in market share. Wired is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Wired is to survive at all it will be among tech magazine hobbyists, dabblers, and dilettantes. Wired continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Wired is dead.
sulli
RTFJ.
Can I have a common clipboard, please? pretty please?
:o)
You already have one. It's called "middle button"
Thomas Miconi
Before the moderators give me -1 offtopic, hear me out - I do have a point to make. Further, some of what is about to follow may appear like I am judging certain types of people, but this is not my intent. I am simply stating things as they are.
Linux is unix. This is not to say that Linux is Unix as in the registered trademark, but Linux is unix as in the mindset. It is reasonable to go so far as to say that Linux is truly a unix for the masses. Not masses as in appealing to everyone, but masses as in everyone CAN get it if they want it. Specifically, Linux was the first unix to that was low cost enough enough that anyone with the appropriate hardware (which itself was very affordable... this is VERY important) would have no financial reason to not use it.
Now given that Linux is unix, why would a majority of people want to use it? Consider that the average desktop users are only interested in getting work done on time, or playing video games. Has unix ever been traditionally geared towards these crowds? No. Can it ever be, and still be unix? Think before you answer... remember, I'm not talking about Linux specifically here, but only the unix mindset. Rephrasing the question, can the unix mindset ever be geared towards the people who don't care about the mindset and still actually BE the same? If the answer is yes, then Linux (or some other low-cost unix) may someday achieve desktop dominance, but I'm pretty sure that the answer is no. In which case, Linux could not ever dominate unless it someday abandons the unix mindset - is this something that anyone who thinks Linux is a good thing wants?
Unix will survive -- always in niches, always as an alternative, but always there. Linux may come and go, but the unix mindset is the single longest lived software paradigm in the history of computing, it has persisted for over 3 decades now, and is likely to continue to do so for the forseeable future.
Now what was the point to all that? That MS has no reason to be at war with Linux in the first place because they are two entirely different paradigms. Further, unless Linux does a radical shift from the philosophy that created it, Linux cannot ever stand to achieve the status of Windows as long as a majority of people want to use computers for nothing more than a fancy typewriter, calculator, or arcade game console.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The only way that they'd have nowhere to go would be if they have already achieved the pinnacle of office-suite (not just word-processor) functionality, and I don't quite believe that's the case. Here are some fairly random ideas that we could use to start:
Maybe some of those ideas are just totally stupid, but at the same time others could lead to another leap ahead of would-be competitors. I'm sure other people, including those at MS, could think of more. This well is far from tapped out. My point remains that if MS actually perceived a threat they could do something about it...but there's no reason for them to bother yet.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
I don't think that "irresponsible and stupid" is a good way to describe that person. That's outright sociopathic. Switching someone's OS without permission isn't a good thing to do, but it's a world apart from completely reformatting their drive without making a backup of their work.
If I were that person's boss, I would want them out of the company immediately. The fact that this appears tIn a computerized company, it'd be a nightmare to employ somebody who erases company files if they happen to get in the way of the system configuration... Yikes. You might as well have an janitor going through your file cabinets and shredding all that dirty, messy paper.
Most planets in the visible Universe are probably lifeless rocks, not supporting any life at all, let alone intelligent life. It's obvious that life has lost the great battle for the planet surface. So we should do the honorable thing and just extinguish life on Earth, instead of continuining this pompous charade of assumed superiority. It will happen anyway; we are just delaying the inevitable.
A story about a tech support guy hosing somebody's windows laptop is supposed to convince us that windows will forever own the desktop? Are you serious? I hope that guy was promptly fired.
I do tech support and systems administration at a small company. I use linux on my desktop machine--which I was alone in doing until recently, when we brought on a new developer who's running linux. Now--I run blackbox, and don't do graphical file management or anything, but the new guy is using Gnome.
Basically--this story is stupid. MS is great, like everybody knows--and also leaves a lot of people cold. Like me. Because it's monolithic, and hard to individualize. Basically, it's nothing special.
The worst thing, as everybody knows, is that MS Windows is all about upgrading--upgrade your OS until they can figure out how to make the os upgrade require a new machine, at which point you have to buy a new machine, preferably with preinstalled WinXP2005Supertron or whatever.
Also, win2k doesn't run worth a damn on a lot of machines--like anything before a pentium 200 or so, with less than 128 mb of ram.
MS has already lost the 'war.' In a few years, the number of computers that don't have the specs for MS's new OS will be staggering, and there will be next to no reason to upgrade. My company, like a lot of others is already passing on the XP upgrade. Because there's no benefit.
MS's dominance was the product of an incredible economic boom. But in a few years, when most pc's are 'obsolete' by MS standards, we'll see how high their stock price is.
And you know what else? I hate it when people complain about linux business models. Linux isn't about business (although it is helping mine out quite a bit--it sure would have hurt us to have to use something like MS Adv. Server 2000 which is like $10k and would have required us to hire an MSCE just to make IIS work, or get Solaris boxes for the price of a luxury car).
Linux is great because it's free dammit--Linux doesn't care if it 'defeats' windows. Linux isn't going anywhere when the funds dry up. To talk about this in terms of conflict is inherently looking at it from a corporate perspective, which Linux doesn't need or care about. Sure, a lot of companies are now using it because it's a great product, nearly for free, but Linux was doing great with just home users, smart hobbyists who liked to hack.
You know what, I've said too much already--that article just really got my goat. I haven't seen too many articles that dumb in awhile. I thought the 'Will Linux conquer or will it die?' thing was done because people had realized how stupid it was.
Linux is here. Deal with it.
Linux will not be deployed on corporate desktops until several things happen\.
Two commonly mentioned deficiencies are (1) overall functional immaturity (e\.g. - the spellchecking deficiencies the article mentions) and (2) incompatibil\ity with existing file formats. I.E. - the filter problem. These deficiences \are well known, and are being addressed, albeit not always as quickly as we wou\ld like.
However, there's another serious deterrant to corporate deployment of Linux \desktops that I never see mentioned: the complete lack of a sensible way of sha\ring centrally stored files. NFS (v2 or v3) is far too insecure to warrent ser\ious consideration for corporate desktops. Automounting SMB shares might work,\ if not for the necessity of storing authentication credentials in plain text c\onfiguration files. Again, unacceptable, both from a security and a management\ point of view.
Perhaps automounting could be improved. The other alternative is NFSv4, the\ specification of which mandates strong security. There are two free NFSv4 imp\lementations under development: a kernel level version at citi umich, and a user-level client/server b\eing developed by no less than the samba team. Both\ implementations are still quite immature, however.
Until Linux desktop users are able to easily and securely share files on a c\entral file server, it's difficult to envision widespread deployment in corpora\te environments.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
ppl. don't realize it is the *direction* and not the talent that sometimes will put an OS at the forefront. What MS has and Linux doesn't is a vision.
the goal of a corporation in capitalism is not to become a monopoly, but to become profitable
Actually, the goal is to MAXIMISE profits. In order to truly maximze profits, a corporation must eliminate competition which has a downward effect on profits. As such, monopoly is most certainly ultimate corporate ambition.
Takahashi Rumiko made beats! DON, taku, DON, taku. . .
In order for something to lose, something must beat it. The loser must lose something, The winner must be the last man standing.
However Linux cant lose because Linux is not a product. Linux is a technology. Saying Linux will lose to Microsoft, Is like saying Math will lose to Taco Bell.
So lets set the record straight, Linux is a TECHNOLOGY, and a TECHNOLOGY cannot "Lose" or "Win"
A technology is either useful, or its not.
Linux has been proven useful for the server market. Linux is not yet useful for the Desktop market.
Because Linux is a technology, Unless everyone plans to use Microsoft OS now and forever on every computer created until the end of time. Linux has a damn good chance of being useful to the desktop.
Why? Because Linux is a technology, as computer technology changes, the needs for Linux will become more and more great. As Linux enhances, the usefulness of Linux will become more and more clear to the average user. As Linux becomes easier to use and works with more hardware, The people will begin to accept Linux more and more.
Unlike Apple, and Microsoft, Linux is not a companies product, Linux from redhat goes down, Linux mandrake pops up, Mandrake goes down, Slackware pops up, then debian, the list will go on FOREVER because Linux is a technology.
Example? Napster. Napster was stopped sure. But Napster technology simply advanced and now its at the point where its unstopable.
The more people try to stop Linux, the more faster Linux will be enhanced, and the faster Linux will be accepted.
Just like killing Napster made Gnutella and Morpheus and Aimster and Freenet pop up, If Microsoft beats Linux on the desktop this round, round two Linux will be back again under another company, and another and another until the industry accepts Linux as the industry was FORCED to accept peer to peer.
Linux is going to take over, if its not in the next 5 years, then in the next 10 years, but its going to happen, because technology cannot be stopped.
Microsoft cannot keep ahead of Linux forever, Linux is catching up in EVERY area, and its only a matter of time before Linux is better than Windows at everything, even playing games.
When this time comes (and yes it will come)
Windows will fade and Linux will become the new standard.
And when this happens, if Microsoft doesnt try to make Linux illegal, Microsoft will attempt to create their own version of Linux in the same way the RIAA is creating their own peer to peer.
Wait and see.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I mistakenly equated configuration/installation with use. I apologize. It's all those years of working with windows boxes that have blurred that line for me, sorry.
Go Lakers!
2. Linux developers are wasting their energy on desktop-oriented software, like office suites.
I wonder why it never occured to the guy that maybe if more developers "wasted their time" fixing up a good open source spellchecker, his employee would have never needed a Windows partition.
Actually Microsoft only had about 80% compatibility with WordPerfect, and their support for macro-encrusted 123 sheets was even worse.
When companies converted to Office, they generally hired a temp to spend a couple weeks going through all the documents on the fileserver to convert and reformat them. (Of course, this before widespread use of office docs in e-mail, so you didn't need to worry about new documents coming in all the time.)
The Office Document Problem is a prime example of Linux-types having only a skin deep understanding of the problem. Hypothetically, let's say it's solved (or I want to switch to Macs and use MS Office there) --
Then what? There's people using Visio and MS Project. There's people who RUN THE BUSINESS on crappy Access applications which would need to be rewritten. There's vertical software that we use that's only available on Windows (prime example being DB or CASE modeling tools for the developers). There's VB apps that people have hacked together over the years. There's still that wing of the company using Lotus Notes. There's the sales automation solution that you spent $10M for. The VP loves his business card scanner. Etc Etc Etc.
From what I've seen, it's incredably difficult to even move the userbase from Win98 to Win2000 and verify that everything was tested and working. Linux? -- unpossible.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Okay, for THREE years now, I've heard the Linux people on this board whine and complain that if Linux could only get a truly simple user interface (and a decent Office substitute), that Linux would "take over the world and Microsoft would go away".
Well, that's true. That would happen. But the point back then is the same point now:
MOST home computer users, and a whole lot of business users (ie. 95% of the market) don't understand the concept of something as simple as a directory.
Mac users are beginning to accept their niche-dom. Acceptance of niche-dom isn't very much fun, because you know that eventually, niche systems like Atari, Commadore, and Amiga were squeezed out by Microsoft.
I think perhaps the Linux community needs to plan for a "post-Microsoft Apocolypse" world. (ie - what will users need on an OS once MS has taken over the world, and the internet.)
Obviously, portability - we'll have to run on whatever hardware MS allows to be produced. Security, to prevent the RIAA from scanning your hard drives.
AND - the ability to connect to an internet that, frankly, may not run true TCP/IP (but rather, a bastardized "innovative version" of MSTCP/IP).
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
As Mitchell writes, consumers want "reliability, simplicity, access to popular software, and the ability to communicate easily with other users." But in XP these virtues are tangled up with Microsoft's efforts to force its online services down your throat.
The thing that made Windows 3.0 great for it's time was that it offered so many things in one easy to use package. Microsoft hasn't forgotton that lesson. They could bundle other people's products with Windows, but then they would have to deal with all the licensing hassles, and be responsible for bugs in other companies software. They've bundled stuff in the past, and probably will bundle some stuff in the future. I'll have to wait until I see it myself before I dedide if they are really forcing thier services down my throat or just making services I may find useful available to me without me having to download or purchase something seperately.
Redirecting all mailto: links to Hotmail instead of the registered mail editor is an obstacle to communicating easily.
Never heard of this one, but this would really piss off business customers, I believe it when I see it.
Forcing customers to download a Java VM does not enhance access to popular software.
SUN shares a lot of the blame on this one. If the JVM isn't exactly what SUN wants from it Microsoft would spend years in court. When two giants like SUN and Microsoft squabble, the users usually get screwed. Microsoft should make it clear that their extensions to Java are extensions, but SUN wasn't exactly playing fair either.
Forbidding reinstallation of the OS without calling Microsoft and proving that you own it isn't what I'd call simplicity.
Unless I misunderstand something the same activation code you used the first time will work when you reinstall. You can even upgrade several pieces of hardware. You just can't install it on a significantly different PC thant the one you first installed it on without proving you own it.
We all know the full list, and we all know that both consumers and CIOs are balking.
Yes, there are a lot of people who are complaining about Microsoft. Thera always are. A lot of these same people would bitch about Microsoft XP if it were a near perfect product. I've become numb to all the bitching and moaning. CIOs are blaking at the changes to the volume licensing, because it looks like it's going to cost them more. Microsoft appears to be yielding to the pressure, and those plans may be changed to make CIOs happier.
Don't get me wrong, Linux has a long way to go to offer a viable alternative for the average luser. But I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of people take a second look at MacOS and Linux after tangling with XP.
I don't like to spend a lot of time patching my computer, or dealing with compatibility issues. Because of this I buy quality hardware and don't use beta drivers if I can avoid it. I use my home computer mostly for games, and its simply a lot easier for me to keep a windows gaming system running well than a Linux one.
For web servers it seems Linux is the one that requires less patches and is simpler to keep running. Maybe that's why Linux does so well in that market.
It's real simple for me. I value my time at higher that the price the Microsoft software cost me, and Microsoft's software suits my needs better. MacOS might be more appealing if the hardware weren't so expensive, and more games were available on it. After dealing with Linux on a Mac at work, I wouldn't recomend it to anyone who isn't very familiar with Linux. Linux on a PPC is still needs some time before it becomes a mature platform.
It's not illegal to be a monopoly; it's illegal to abuse your position as a monopoly.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
Okay, let's start with the beginning. Mr. Mitchell first (rightly) complains about someone at Red Hat wiping the contents of some worker's laptop to replace Windows with Linux. This is first, a straw-man argument (we can't argue against it, but it has nothing to do with linux, but with a stupid Tech).
Likewise, his arguments about one peice of software (generalized into all Linux word processing software) at a point obviously somewhere in his past (but not current, he no longer works there) isn't terribly suprising, or valuable. It doesn't say anything except that some version of Applixware in the past, didn't do a great job of spell checking.
Then Mr. Mitchell tries to gain our confidence in his ability to criticize all of linux by saying he appreciates Linux "Technically". The fact that Mr. Mitchell then says that the "Linux community is a muddled and unfocused lot" really shows that he doesn't understand how Linux is developed. This is an open source, anyone-can-play, large group of people who can (and usually) do what they want.
Mr. Mitchell's claim that the "the war [for the desktop] is over" is also bizarre. This is something I have heard a lot, but it makes no sense. Was the "war" for department stores over after Sears? How about for the railroads? Nothing is over. The world keeps going. And, as I said above, people in the Linux Community can and will do what they want.
The claim that one part of a community is distracting the community as a whole is also another fallacy. This is not provable and most likely doesn't reflect reality. People who work on the desktop do so because it's what they want to do. They may do desktop work elsewhere (maybe for Windows or Macs) if they didn't have Linux. You don't know.
Of course, what Mr. Mitchell is really saying is that he doesn't think competition is worthwhile. Doing something for the thrill of doing it isn't worthwhile. I disagree. Every major advancement, and many minor ones had people who weren't motivated saying things like, "Who cares? Can't be done. No one will want it." and have been proven wrong.
I'm going to wrap this up, because I got side tracked and have other things to do. But consider his final statements. Mr. Mitchell wants the Linux Community to give up because he wants Linux to succeed. This is defeatist and makes little sense. The Linux community should do what it wants to do.
Finally, just because I have to say this. If you work for a company that sells an OS, you should make all efforts to use that OS. Period. The president of Ford does NOT drive a Toyota. The company cars are not Nissans.
Well I don't know about you, but I feel beter.
The Doctor What (KF6VNC)
You're right, in the short run. As you say, adding Star Office to the mix really hurt WP. Then again Star Office didn't do anything to WP that M$ wasn't going to do anyway.
Having the choice of closed source MSO vs. closed source WP wasn't much of a choice. In the long run, WP (and Lotus) will go away. Star Office will compete mostly with MSO and will offer a real open source vs. closed source choice.
Until XP came along, I would have agreed that the MS Office users would never abandon the product. Given the XP cost and upgrade hassles, many Office users may discover that their management has made the decision for them. In my organization, If I planned and budgeted for an Office XP upgrade and simultaneously offered Star Office as an alternative, I could abandon MSO today with full CEO and CFO support. My actual plan is to ignore XP for the time being. Either the licensing will change, or I will be planning a gradual phase-out of MSO. Every day I can postpone this, I improve my odds of getting a better deal from M$ or a better product from Star Office. I see nothing to be gained by upgrading now.
Without a viable alternative to M$ products, we're all condemned to run like a bunch of rodents on the M$ hamster wheel.
I agree. The tech was an idiot. Changing someone's OS, even if the software is unsupported is amazingly stupid, and almost criminally inept. He deserves to be fired.
But his actions are completely irrelevant to the meat of the argument. That doesn't mean that RedHat's help desk should support MS Word, and more importantly it does not mean that Linux is not ready for the desktop.
In fact, it illustrates how far Linux has come in a relatively short time, and how ridiculous the author's assumptions are. Applixware was really the only useable Office suite when I started using Linux, and now there are several Office suites that are much better. Saying that Linux isn't ready for the desktop because Applixware sucks is like saying that Windows wasn't ready for the desktop because WordPerfect 6.0 for Windows was so bad (after all Word for Windows was great). If Applixware doesn't cut it Linuxers can easily use OpenOffice, Abiword, or KWord, and if you don't mind using commercial software you can use WordPerfect. All of these will happily teach you to spell web site.
There are businesses trying to make money with Linux, but Linux is not a business! He says that there is too much focus on the desktop and that it robs developers from "Linux' real place in the world". What a bunch of crap. If Linux were a business, this arguement might hold water. You could go to the CEO of Linux Corp. and say "Why are you wasting all of these developers on developing desktop apps when your real strength is on the server?" Of course, there is no Linux Corp. There is no product strategy developed by market annalysts studying focus groups. There's just a bunch of folks who know how to write code working on what THEY want. I will continue to support Linux on the desktop because that's where I want it! I don't have a server, and if that's all Linux did it would be useless to me.
Konquerer, an open source browser, doesn't even track market share figures.
Of course it doesn't, because Linux is not a business!
that doesn't take into account the ... steep learning curve for most desktop users.
This is the anti-Linux arguement that I hate the most, because it's total BS. There is no steep learning curve for the Linux desktop. How do I know this? Because the 3 least technical people I know (my mom, wife, and sister) all managed to figure it out without any help from me. In fact my sister actually likes Linux better, she feels it's easier to use than windows. My wife is indifferent as long as she can surf the web and check her email. My mom feel's the same as my wife does about it, but she has the additional requirement of needing to process Word .docs for work (and no, I haven't tried StarOffice6 yet).
Huh?!?!? How can you call someone your enemy when they've done so much to help you? Big Unix vendors, like Sun, IBM, Compaq, and SGI are all supporting Linux in some way. Sun and IBM especially. Why? It's hard to say sometimes, but I suspect that most of them see Linux as a great way to leverage their vast investment and experience in Unix for the future. I also suspect that they see Linux as the only way that true cross-vendor Unix compatability will ever really happen, something that has been tried a few times.
Wouldn't a competent integrated development platform be more useful than an office suite?
No, not really. If you're a developer, learn how to use the command line. Thanks to pipes, the developement platform is as integrate as you want it to be, and it's integrated in exactly the way you want it to be. How many of the "competent" IDEs can claim that? If you use one particular combination frequently, write a script.
Wouldn't a graphical debugger be better than a whizzy file manager?
Absolutely not. I'll take gdb over any graphical debugger any day of the week. gdb is so powerful precisely because it isn't hampered by a GUI. Don't get me wrong, GUIs have their place, like file managers for instance, but for things like debugging I far prefer the power and flexibility that only the command line has been able to provide. And how would you use this cool graphical debugger without a GUI desktop? Don't GNOME and KDE both offer graphical debuggers (or at least graphical front-ends to gdb)?
Wouldn't a pro 3-D package be more targeted than an Outlook clone?
Again, how are you going to use this pro 3-D package without all of this developement time being "wasted" on developing Linux as a graphical platform? Of course, pro graphics on Linux has already been discussed recently, so I won't go into it any firther. I will say, though, that without an Outlook clone to go with it, this Linux 3-D app doesn't have a snowballs chance at my company. We use 3-D apps for mechanical design, and if anyone knows of a Linux-based alternative to SolidWorks 2001 I would love to hear about it, but unless there are also alternatives to MS Outlook and Project as well, my bosses will never go for it.
As if the lack of applications weren't enough of an obstacle, self-inflicted public relations problems - in the form of bad behavior by vocal Linux proponents - are casting a dark shadow over Linux.
First he complains that there are too many apps for Linux, and now there are too few. Make up your mind. He makes a good point about Linux zealots, though.
In short, Linux is not a business! And because of that, business annalasys will always fail on Linux. Red Hat is a business, annalize it till the cows come home, but don't make the mistake of thinking that Linux==Linux_Companies. There's only one thing that can be proved by that kind of comparison; that the person making it doesn't understand Linux.
Linux can be all things to all people, that's the true beauty of Open Source. It's already a great server OS, everyone seems to agree on that point. I happen to think it's a great desktop OS, too. Some think it's a great realtime/embedded OS, and if I were into that I would probably agree. The closed source embedded OSs can be a real pain in the ass to work with. And as for scalability, how many of those "scalable" OSs can run on a wristwatch? The only thing really keeping Linux from scaling the other way is access to system specs.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I recently switched over to Ximian on two RH 7.1 boxes.
Immediately I thought if this 'look' was available from the get go, and this Red Carpet thingy was available from the get go I could have sold my company on going Linux.
3 years ago of course it was not.
Now what? Well guys I know we have 500+ MS 98/NT4/2000 lics but what say we switch over to this beta-esque software.
The "easy" desktop and the Office-like products still are not available. Abi Word and Star Office aren't even close. WINE and VMware are nice but you still need to buy lics. So bottomline is that Linux still ain't ready for the average AOL/ICQ/Word set.
I think the servers rule (Mail/Apache/NFS/Samba) but the desktop needs help.
OSX has made HUGE strdes in that direction. Hopefully Linux distros will take the hint. Looks and feel matter. OH and if you can can get MS to make Office for you that's good too.
This
Dell did not actually offer Linux on their desktops or notebooks. I regularly get snail-spam from Dell, and not once was Linux mentioned for a desktop or notebook. Only occaisionally is it offered for servers. I also visited their web site 5 or 6 times over the past year. Again, no Linux for desktop or notebook. If Dell thinks it didn't sell, maybe Michael should have a talk with his VP of marketing. I find it hard to believe they slipped the entire duration of the Linux campaign in between my web visits.
And you don't expect it to be a mass seller. This kind of thing takes time. XP will come out soon for retail sale (you can get it on whole systems now). That won't make people switch to Linux immediately, because they can just stay with the old version they are running. But eventually the old version won't be supported, and won't do well on new hardware, and the decision will have to be made to either upgrade Windows (to XP) or switch to Linux. As we are seeing in some places, the switch to Linux is starting to happen, in places like certain cities in Florida, and some countries like Thailand and potentially in Germany.
I suspect Dell had other motives for not wanting to sell Linux. We might like to think that it is because of an under the table deal with Microsoft to kick out Linux. But that doesn't have to happen because there is more incentive elsewhere for Dell to not support Linux and pray for it to fail. This is because Linux allows people to keep on being productive with older slower hardware, and not upgrade the hardware as often. This means lost sales to vendors like Dell, and they are hurting a lot right now, even more so than losing Linux customers will do. They see the problem of lack of hardware growth, and see that Linux could only make it worse for them. If Linux were to catch on and be at least significant against Windows, like maybe 1/3 of the market, that would surely mean more lost hardware sales, and Michael understands this you can be sure. Maybe Bill wised him up about this, but I don't think that was even needed.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
While I applaud your views, the problem with Linux now is what you want to do with the OS on that bulleted list requires the OS to automatically configure and update itself with as little user intervention as possible. Sad to say, Linux currently is not quite there yet.
If the Linux programmers can support the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) natively, this could give Linux the automatic configuration ability Windows 98/ME/2000/XP now uses. I've read about the ACPI4Linux project but that needs much more support so all the major commercial Linux distributions will support it.
I really don't care if Linux takes over against Microsoft Windows or not. It is not my goal to displace Windows in the market place. Instead, my goal is to make my Linux desktop experience complete. I know I can not ever accomplish what I want with Windows, so I use Linux. But I would still like to do a few of the things I cannot now do.
Linux needs better applications. In some areas it has it. In some areas it does not. Consider Visio. There is nothing in Linux that even compares. Programs like xfig are a joke compared to Visio.
Linux needs better hardware support. When a new kind of hardware comes out, driver support needs to be immediate. I want to be able to buy it now, and use it with Linux.
Things like this are not really what we expect of Linus. These things need to be done by other people. Application developers need to do the killer apps, and cover more bases. Hardware manufacturers need to make open source device drivers for their new hardware available, and quit trying to shove their "innovation" into the drivers (I want innovative hardware). But to bring these things about, Linux does need to get some market share, including on the desktop. I want Linux to succeed at this, but not for the purpose of bringing down Microsoft, or Windows, but instead, to let me have what I want on the desktop, and add to it with what I want. Yeah, I'm selfish. But at least I'm honest about it.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Unfortunately, this author forgot to throw the rules of business sense out the window before writing about our favorite OS. From here...you guys can finish writing what I am about to say...you've already heard the arguments. You know...programming for the challenge...money doesn't really matter...without a centralized organization, the community can't loose money---MS can.
Now for the meat. This article mentions focus quite a lot. Developers should focus on servers...developers shouldn't focus on Microsoft...blah blah. Again, he doesn't understand how things work in the Free Software Community...or ignores it.
He thinks the way people have been trained to think since computers became commercially viable. Computers are new...still new. And any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. People worship their computers for the good they do and when the computer messes up, they are willing to sacrifice anything to the gods to make it better again. Metaphor--of course. So over the years big companies like Microsoft and AOL (and IBM) have taken the role of information gods they have decreed certain assumptions that computer users take for granted today.
A lot of people won't use GNU/Linux because it doesn't have a god. Red Hat tries but fails. I would like to the whole Free Software Community become these computer gods that people rely on to make them feel comfortable using the software. But we often contradict each other and are not as inviting as the other gods.
But the idea that companies are very big doesn't deter them. In fact, it makes them feel safe because bigger gods makes them feel safer and the gods won't go away.
So this is my explanation about GNU/Linux on the desktop. They aren't interested so much to get their work done but rather they want to feel safe using the computer. So saying "Linux is stable" isn't nearly as effective as saying "Linux is nice". Even when their computers crash or their files don't open up, they will still stick with it because they believe the gods know of their struggles and will fix it in the next upgrade.
This author and many tech writers have the same problem with computer gods. When they are talking about business sense they are saying how GNU/Linux doesn't have a big enough god. And when they use the software, they are aware that few people use this software for the desktop. So they come in not feeling secure. The warps their perceptions from the beginning.
Not to be a bastard or anything, but this article was in the October issue of Wired. The latest issue is the November issue.
For a capitalist closed source competitor, Free Software is a nightmare came true. You can't out-invest it, you can't bankrupt it, you can't stop it.
Worse of all, you can't even beat it by developing a better technology. Because we don't care.
They tell us Word is at least two or three years ahead of StarOffice and we smile at them with a condescending look. They look into our eyes and slowly came to see the little bright spot in there. They leave quickly, because they know we must be mad. Because that little bright spot spells victory.
You see, Free Software does not really have to care about marketshare in the small. Wall Street is not measuring us each quarter. And if I can't finish it, because I don't know how or don't have time, my eventual sucessor will. Or my sucessor's sucessor. Who cares?
As for technology. we eventually catch up. We always had. Free software has already developed the best WebServer in the market and two or threee of the best operating systems. We can and will some day come up with the best Office suite. It is just a matter of time.
If ever programmer working on KDE, Gnome, OpenOffice, Mozilla, and all of the programs/environments the article says are redundant efforts - if every programmer quit how far ahead would Linux be in the enterprise
Not much further than right now.
The article takes the false assumption that all of the creative energy aimed at the Linux desktop is a resource diverted from core development. Not so. There are programmers who wouldn't know how or have no interest in kernel programming. Not every developer would by default work on system library building, server-related issues, or hardening security.
These so-called side projects and diversions are efforts that re-enforce, not detract from, the growth of Linux.
It's fairly easy to look at the defecentcys of Linux and see how it will never messure up to Windows.
It's easy to look at the defecentcys of Windows and see how Linux must grind it into dust.
But when you look at both the picture isn't so clear.
Linux has many destros that provide diffrent behavures...
This makes it hard for closed source develupers to make binarys than run on all Linux systems
vs Windows
However DLLs on Windows are installed automaticly. Even bug fixes threaton to cause all existing software to not function. Two computers in the same office don't behave the same simply becouse the software was installed in a diffrent order.
In short it's a crap shoot eather way..
The best bet for Linux is develup for the majority and for Windows is to work closely with Microsoft.
Those tactics seem to work well.
Linux isn't user friendly so staff must be trainned to use the system
Windows staff need to be trainned to avoid doing what Windows experts consider stupid such as open e-mail with file attachments..
[Sorry it seems perfictly reasonable that an e-mail program wouldn't offer an easy way to destory a system...]
Trainning is unavoidable.. With Windows the person who sleeps through the trainning will destory the system with Linux the person who sleeps through the trainning won't be able to do a dam thing.
Fire him...
Windows is buggy and Microsoft tends to not want to release bug fixes for "features" [e-mail viruses again]
Some Linux destros are worse and have even more insidious behavure.
All the games are made for Windows...
Well all the commertal ones.. the freebes are all Linux...
The best ones are on game consoles.
I play games on my palm...
For every problem there is a counter issue..
Windows servers can send raw HTML and image files realy fast.. but don't do dynamic content very well.
Linux isn't that much slower but image files are big enough to make this an issue.
Tit for tat...
Linux was born as a desktop I think everyone is far to willing to forget this...
It's all dependent on what you want and need.
To expect one to crush the other is really nieve.
I think Linux will reach equalibreum with MacOs and the two will crush Windows...
I don't actually exist.
Many people in the US like to be able to do things without spending a lot of time learning stuff. Microsoft caters to that market. However, the market for the real UNIX/Linux desktop tools is large enough that it won't go away.
One size doesn't fit all, not when it comes to cars, clothes, or operating systems.
[Cross-post from the LinuxToday thread:]
Just mulling over Russ Mitchell's anecdote about his former employee, Anne Speedie. That description of her files being deliberately clobbered by a smarmy, scrawny, black-t-shirted Linux technician has such a conveniently mythic quality about it, doesn't it? We have the stereotyped Linux geek. We have the unrepentant and gleeful callousness. We have the outraged but helpless everyday office workers, persecuted by the former.
Seems tailor-made for Mitchell, doesn't it?
The more I think about it, the more I suspect that the story has, to quote Tolkien, "grown in the telling". Or, more specifically, that crucial parts of the story have been strategically omitted.
For instance: Mitchell (then Speedie's boss) says he confronted the scrawny, black-t-shirted technician about the deliberate mass-deletion when he was just supposed to "get some dial-up software installed", and the latter just stared back and smiled. And...? At that point, Mitchell and Speedie just dropped it? Why on earth would they do that? Wouldn't the logical next step be to escalate up the IS Dept. organisational foodchain? The account as written more than strains credulity; it leaves credulity in a body-cast.
Could it be that Mitchell's assertion about "getting some dial-up software installed" is a fabrication, and that Red Hat's IS Dept. has a firm, well-publicised policy that company-issued laptops will be reloaded with the supported Red Hat Linux load, when sent in for service, unless the user makes specific arrangements to the contrary? Could it be that Mitchell knew that Speedie had no cause for complaint, but is just incensed that his former employer didn't let him override software policy on company-owned machines?
Could it be that Speedie ignored company directives about data-file backups, or that her files were in fact backed up for safekeeping, but she and Mitchell are just steamed about losing her unauthorised and possibly bootlegged modifications?
We don't know any of this, because telling the latter half of the story doesn't help Mitchell's polemical stance. But it's not difficult to guess what he doesn't want to tell us.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
I wish I could do that to the next luser that walked into my office!! ;-)
I strongly suspect that Russ Mitchell's whiney apologia for failure wouldn't have had a prayer of seeing print if he weren't -- let's see, isn't it brother-in-law of the managing editor?
Anyhow: Mitchell was one of the lightweights brought aboard as part of the short-lived San Francisco Web operation. I suspect he was with Atomic Vision, the Web design house, when Red Hat acquired it and then tried and failed to get them to produce useful work: Wide Open News started out fairly pathetic, and never got better. And for that botched job, Mitchell got a hunk of San Francisco real estate? Hmmpf.
Speedie needed to use Microsoft Word because the Linux word processors at her disposal were saddled with spellcheckers so abysmal they caused more problems than they solved, skipping over misspelled words and offering bizarre alternatives for words spelled correctly.
Such drivel. Even the system's built-in ispell utility provides excellent spelling checking.
Conversely, Linux managed only 1.5 percent of shipments in the desktop market in 2000.
This is of course the time-honoured pastime of playing games with numbers. He's almost certainly quoting some uncredited source (if any) on preload sales, which tells you nothing at all about the amount of Linux actually in use on desktops.
PC makers are concluding that consumer Linux is too small a market to mess with: Dell Computer recently dropped Linux from its desktops and notebooks.
Actually, Dell never did support Linux in any meaningful way: You even had to pay a sizeable premium to get a Red Hat preload, compared to getting the much cheaper bundle with Win32 crud and then loading the Linux distribution of your choice. Smart people did the latter. All that's changed is that Dell dropped a basically worthless configuration option, and simplified the conversation scripts that their telephone support people are allowed to follow. And guess what? The number of Dells with Linux on them, despite vendor neglect, continues to climb.
The charge is obligatory in this genre of article, but, honestly, the place you hear the overwhelming share of anti-Microsoft ranting is from that company's captive user base, not from those who've eluded its grasp.
A decade later, Linux is lauded as a technical success. But as a business, it's a flop.
Notice how, here, he completely changes the subject of conversation. The article was purportedly about why Linux cannot "win the desktop" (tra la), but now he's talking about the fortunes of companies. Not the same discussion at all. (Probably, the unstated assumption is that development of worthwhile software requires well-funded companies devoted to them. Which is not obviously the case.)
What if all the effort that's gone into writing desktop drivers that peripheral outfits don't care to support were redirected toward drivers for corporate environments?
There are no such thing as "desktop drivers". This passage is gibberish -- but it's obvious that Mitchell is entirely clueless about the technology.
Linux has been on the industry's radar screen since the mid-'90s, yet the vast majority of applications available for Windows and Mac don't exist for Linux.
The trick when you're making a non-sequitur argument like this is to carefully avoid stating it explicitly, but instead only imply it. Then, people probably won't notice that you've just pulled a fast one.
To wit: Mitchell is implying that the only way productive and useful software comes into existence for Linux desktops is to be ported from Win32 or MacOS. Which is, of course, completely false. But he's preaching to the choir of people who've never heard of any other software, and who refuse to believe that such software exists unless they see it shrink-wrapped on the shelf at CompUSA.
I would wager good money that, in the year that Mitchell impliedly attempted to use Linux, that he made no effort at all to truly attempt to acclimate himself to the thousands of packages that Red Hat's IS Dept. undoubtedly handed to him on a platter. Instead, I'll bet he sat back and whined about how much he wanted back his MS-Outlook, MSIE, and so on, not caring about the security exposure to his company or really anything else.
[Michell has a passage where he complains about alleged lack of hardware support.]
You'll note that Mitchell's idea of where to look for hardware support is, invariably, to visit the manufacturer's Web site. Consider: A full year of working for a Linux company, and it never dawns on him to start with the Linux Documentation Project or with Google. Simply amazing.
Nontechnical users continue to have a hard time installing Linux.
Guess what? Non-technical users continue to have a difficult time installing Microsoft operating systems, too. But I'll bet that Mitchell has never actually installed any OS in his life. He probably thinks he has, harking back to the day that he put his name and S/N into a preloaded Microsoft "welcome" screen, and then (of course) rebooted.
Matthew Butterick, a former member of Red Hat management who ran Web operations from the company's 35-member San Francisco office, disagrees.
Right: The Atomic Vision Web weenies are clearly expert on OS technology and strategy. {cough}
Frankly, KDE 2.2.x strikes me as a good bit easier for naive desktop users to learn and become productive with, than are Microsoft Corporation's messy and inconsistent desktop offerings. But Mitchell and Butterick's yardstick is, predictably, people like themselves who will settle for nothing other than exactly what they're already useful, and will whine until they get it.
Serious technical issues must be resolved, the biggest of which is scaling.
Yet another subject in which Mitchell is clearly out of his depth. Scaling can occur in any of several ways, not just the SMP approach Mitchell discusses briefly. In the latter area, with the 2.4.x kernel's ability to scale well to around eight CPUs on a motherboard, Linux has surpassed all but a couple of OSes, without the sluggishness on uniprocessor systems typical of, say, Solaris. But one can also scale by switching to faster CPU architectures, or through one of a couple of different varieties of clustering. And guess what? Linux is a leader in both areas.
Gartner's Weiss understands Linux's appeal to IBM.
It's not surprising that Mitchell digs up quotations from Microsoft Corporation's chief shills in the IT industry, Gartner Group. (It's usually analyst George Weiss, these days. It's unclear where the formerly ubiquitous Rob Enderle has gotten off to.)
So: You won't learn anything about Linux from this article, but Red Hat's early closure of its San Francisco Web office becomes suddenly much clearer.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
The reason why the war has not begun is that the marketplace is changing. Microsoft's business model has historically been based around the idea that if they sell lots of copies of the software they can cut their prices AND provide greater profit. I am not bashing Microsoft here-- this was their greatest innovation and without it there might not be ANY open source software. Certainly the Intel platform would not have gained the ubiquity it did without a common OS marketed through a company that is not tied to a single hardware vendor (as is IBM).
/. crowd). So Microsoft will have to go to subscription licenses in order to maintain revenue.
This market has been immensely successful but it only works when people are buying software regularly. This is breaking down as the hardware market saturates (and few people actually upgrade their software regularly outside of the
In other words, past performance is no guarantee of future profits.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Worst.. Advice.. Ever..
Give up the desktop to MS and we end up giving up the server as well. It is MS's strategy to use their desktop dominance to take over the server side as well. And it can be done. What difference does it make that Linux can run a good server when MS continues to hijack the protocol standards, and MS has final say over what the OS on the client machines is?
Lose the desktop, and then lose the server. And no, we don't need to *win* the desktop, per se - just have a respectable enough percentage that the world isn't totally MS desktops everywhere.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
As I've just posted in another thread further down - that's the worst advice ever. I agreed with his points about OS Bigotry getting in the way, but he's an idiot for suggesting that the desktop market should just be ignored. If MS gets 100% control of the desktop, then all other servers (not just Linux) on the market will die shortly after that. (Think "embrace and extend" - applied to network protocols.)
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Why Microsoft is About to Lose: The Slashdot story is called, Why Linux is About to Lose. Journalistic fairness demands that the other side get attention. DCE/RPC.net lists numerous projects that will replace Microsoft: Open Source Win 2000 directory services, an MS-Exchange clone for Unix, an MS SQL clone, a
Jon, respectfully, it amazes me how much open source people under-communicate.
I took your post above (#2451850) and re-wrote it, using exactly the same information. My version is 100 times stronger. You call your post a tangent. How can what you said be a tangent? It is EXTREMELY relevant. It changes everything.
There are legitimate times to stand on the rooftops and shout. This is one of them, it seems to me.
U.S. government corruption: What should be the Response to Violence?
Bush's education improvements were
Nope.
(well, maybe a _little_ more ;) )
The problem here is, the author of this article lives in an immediate-gratification world in which there is no possible reason to use some other software if the MS one has more features and has lock-in.
It is quixotic to pick a solution that is known to be doomed to 'lose', if you care more about 'winning versus losing' than you do about meeting specific demands and accomplishing defined tasks.
However, only through the quixotic does the world progress: inevitably you'll find there are other, hidden advantages to the 'loser' choice, that are being ignored by the 'win/lose' mentality.
Instead of having a do-everything-for-you mail client, some choose immunity from Microsoft-hosted mail worms. Instead of defining a journalist as someone with a really GOOD spell checker, some define a journalist as someone who's read and written so much that they can spell all by themselves. (CmdrTaco is not necessarily a journalist- he is an essayist of links. We don't turn to him for skilled presentation of all information, we turn to him for quirky presentation of _his_ personal choices in information. He needs no spell checker to be valid- but he's not a journalist.)
Insisting on maximum immediate gratification is a childish thing, and Microsoft's children are numerous- indeed, they outnumber all other computing factions. However, the question to ask is- when you want a bridge built, or an article written, or an educated opinion delivered on a subject such as the relevance of mass popularity to effectiveness as a desktop computer user- do you ask a child?
We have multiple desktops to escape micros~1 hegemony. If we win the desktop marketshare war, fine, if not, fine also. I now have choice, something gates & co would like to remove.
It's pretty sad.
Replacements? Why, the web, of course - who needs dead-tree magazines any more?
An esoteric scratched itch:
Homeworld Map Maker Tool
I read that article when it came out in Wired, and thought it was crap. That's been well-beaten here, so I won't get into it. But basially people are willing to accept a system that does everything, no matter how poorly, than something that does a few things very well, and somethings it can't do (yet)
I run an ecommerce website, admin a dozen-ish desktop computers with vastly different needs (sales, accounting, shipping/warehouse, development). We use Linux for the server (always have) and that's how I cut my teeth using Linux. I had always been eye-ing it for the desktop, and about a year ago I tried it out, first on my ancient 586 laptop, then on my new tower at home, and now I keep it on my desktop at work. I've had a ton of problems with w2k, and I had to ditch it at home and go to 98 (had to ditch 95 too), but that' mostly a game system and TV/VCR.
I've been studying the feasibility of switching the others at work to a Linux system.
Less than half of the office staff has a computer at home. Those that do have gotten them in the past year. Many of them have terrible usage habits, mainly from lack of training. They save images as W*rd documents, browse the web in Outlook, and generally do things that I would never have thought possible until they actually do them. No matter what system these people are using, if they aren't taught how to use them, they will make silly mistakes.
People also have this idea of computers that they will do all the work for them. They don't understand that, yes, even in the year 2001, computers have limited resources, people don't like spending 20 minutes downloading TIFF files, and the like. It has become so EASY to screw things up using a computer, that I'm about to scrap the mess and go back to Xerox, film, fax, and snail mail, since that's what these people understand. But even with all of the shortfalls, using computers saves lots of time and makes things possible that wouldn't be without them.
Sadly, the possibilities for using Linux in our office are limited. Sales needs a good contact management system, something they can browse through while on the phone with people. instead, they use Outlook which, although it's a virus risk, it's easy enough for them to use, they all know it, and until someone points me to a similar system in Linux, I can't switch them. Everything else they do (email, basically) I've got covered.
Accounting is hopelessly entrenched in Microsoft. We just got an expensive accounting package that's MS-only. I spent a lot of time looking for an industrial-strength accounting package that was open-source, or even just available for Linux...no dice. Same thing with our shipping department...carriers aren't getting anything out of developing software for more than one vendor's OS,
The only way around this is go develop/extend web-like apps for CRM, which is in the long-range plan. phpGroupware is a nice package, but a little rough around the edges, but I'll help fix that when I get a little more time
And as far as my department...I and my assistant both have Win2K and RH7 on our drives...and we have problems with both, surprisingly similar ones. One scanner we have only works in Linux, and vice versa with the other one. Printing/communication is fine in both (it was strange installing HP drivers on my Linux box).
As far as the Gimp goes, it doesn't do what I want. I need to do heavy batch operations and corrections on whole rolls of film at a time, and according to everything I've seen, it's a limitation of Scheme/script-fu that won't allow this to happen. I'll look into using Python, again, when I get the time. But for now, we use Photoshop, which I have 50 scripts for already, and it takes no time for me to make more.
So even while I stay in Linux 99% of the time, I still can get rid of that damned Microsoft OS. And although we;ve got an office full of people who are prime to learn any OS, I can't give them anything but MS. I'd also have to spent a lot more of my time training users, and less time doing what I enjoy
As far as the future goes, Linux has got a lot more potential than people realize. It's always fresh (we just bought an OS from MS that was released in 1999!) and you can't get current without paying. And I find getting things done in Linux is much faster...UI wise. Find/replace in Windows is a sick joke.
Oh, and this document was spell checked using ispell! Works fine for me, but when I tried to select the text to re-copy it into the browser, I got hung for 4 minutes in a stupid text-scrolling loop where it insisted on processing every scroll-up-line command, one-by-one, redrawing the screen -each time-, way back into the scroll buffer. Not a good thing to do to a Pentium with XMMS and Mozilla loaded and running...Gnome bug?
...Time is the best teacher, unfortunately it kills all of its students.
This author really missed the boat. I can't believe he worked at Red Hat and didn't understand that Open Source software is written because people want to write it. Not because they feel a need to make Linux win some war in some abstract sense. I'm not surprised he does not work at Red Hat anymore with a lack of understanding of Open Source shown in this article.
On to a winning day for Linux at work. I am an IS manager for a fairly large semi-conductor company. I use a Linux Dell laptop for all my work. Today I watched my guys install 5 new Linux Athlon workstations and remove 5 Suns workstations from design engineer's desks. The 5 Athlons have 3 times the RAM, 10 times the disk and 1000 more CPU Hz than the Suns and cost about one 1/5 as much as Suns cost. Almost all of the design software needed is now supported in Linux. Within a year 100% is predicted to be. Due to the industry downturn we haven't bought a Sun in recent memory, but more Linux boxes keep showing up due to their much better value. Did I mention that most software runs at least twice as fast on a 1.4GHz Athlon than a 440MHz UltrasparcII?
I also approved a dual 1.2GHz Athlon from Penguin Computing to replace an aging Sun E450 to run SAS statistical software. This dual system should run SAS about twice as fast as our 4 processor Sun. And the icing on the cake is our SAS license is about $20K less per year on the Linux server.
Interesting development number 3. Due to the increase in MS license costs, the director of IS is interested in a proposal to use Linux on a pilot desktop project to replace Windows.
So it doesn't matter what an out of touch commentator says. Linux will continue to move in where MS and Sun screw up by not beating the overall value of Linux.
But Jon, you are not thinking like a marketing manager. You said, Microsoft's control of the clients will still allow them to push the client away...
Your manner of looking at the future is helping something bad happen instead of something good. You and I both don't know what will happen. There are two steps: 1) open source gets the software, and 2) open source people find some way to keep Microsoft from being abusive.
Yes, number 2 is difficult, but it is not impossible. Neither of us know what will happen. There are perhaps 30 legal cases against Microsoft now. I have heard that at least one of them is investigating Microsoft's secret file formats and protocols. It seems likely that what Microsoft is doing is so anti-competitive that it is against anti-trust law.
It could happen that Microsoft is required by a court to publish all its secret protocols. If not, would you give $300 to support a case against Microsoft? I would. I think there are others who would give money also.
The world does not handle abusiveness well. We should not let abusers run our lives.
If you think like a marketing man, you will think positively. Eventually, open source will find a way.
You have the same problem closer to home. Ganymede is being under-sold. This is VERY important!!!! It isn't only you. Most open source people are under-selling their work.
Your said at the bottom of your first post, "Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX." There are a lot of people who don't know what a metadirectory is.
You web site says, " GANYMEDE is a portable and customizable network directory management system
Someone who thinks like a marketing manager will sell the benefit: Ganymede makes managing a large network far easier. Manage up to 20,000 computers remotely, from ONE computer.
Jon, respectfully, you are too modest.
Bush's education improvements were
Windows 3.x sucked hard for its time. Where were you then?
Its competition was Desqview, MultiFinder, the Amiga OS... all vastly more usable.
It won because M$ signed contracts with a large number of application providers to produce products exclusively for Windows 3.x. So, people bought Windows to run apps on then, just as they do now.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
Jon,
The paragraph you wrote in the parent post gives you powerful legal standing. It is copied below, with improvements. Clean up the paragraph and send it to Congressmen and Senators. Send it to the courts!! File an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief. The court clerks will tell you the necessary format. File the same brief at every court. There are more than 30. Offer to serve as an expert witness. (Ask to be paid expenses.)
You'll meet interesting people. The governors of several states are bringing this case against Microsoft.
The people in authority cannot do anything if no one is complaining. If you complain, you give them powerful help. You and your entire department are being hurt by Microsoft's anti-competitive methods. Five years of work hangs in the balance.
_________
Here is a re-written complaint. It is beginning to take the shape it would need to be filed as a friend of the court brief:
As it stands now, the biggest single anti-competitive factor, by far, driving Microsoft server technology into businesses is the fact that Microsoft desktop operating systems communicate with Microsoft servers using a secret method.
Microsoft Exchange, the mail server software, is forced into companies because Microsoft Outlook (part of office, and so bundled everywhere) must communicate with Exchange to do calendaring and scheduling.
Exchange 2000 communicates in a secret way with Microsoft's ActiveDirectory. ActiveDirectory and Microsoft Windows 2000 are written in such a way as to force customers to use Microsoft software for DNS (or else a lot of hand work is necessary, or there is a lack of security). This is extremely anti-competitive.
Bush's education improvements were
The reason this would be an obstacle is that you're thinking of dropping a grand on a piece of Apple hardware, which is where Steve makes all of his money.
When encryption is outlawed, ?o'AZ-,++o+i++##4AoA+-/-C++bI+/.+~
Please don't confuse not having a vision and having a vision you don't like. Linux' vision is the creation of an operating system where the consumer is in charge. There isn't any manipulation, there isn't any politics in getting a functionality working in the OS. Nobody can tell you, you aren't important enough to have your changes in or that your patch is going to be delayed for months because not enough other people are having their business destroyed by the system failure. You can hire your own programmers and fix any mistakes. Have an itch? Scratch it! is a vision, just one you seem uncomfortable with.
Have fun with your EULA!
I see. You've convicted the tech of idiocy based on the testimony of two disgruntled ex-employees. Have you ever worked in tech support? Have you ever had to enforce an unpopular policy? If so, you should know that:
- Anyone who enforces policy will be hated by some users.
- Users do not generally hear the explanations given by tech support. They only hear that they will not get what they want. It's quite possible that this incident is part of a larger, companywide initiative, and that the user was quite clearly informed about what was going to happen to the notebook.
- Users lie. That is the single most important fact about tech support. Anything a user says about his past interactions with computers or tech support is suspect. They lie to conceal actions they should not have taken. They lie to keep their story consistent. They lie to present themselves as innocent, aggrieved parties in a dispute. They lie even when it should be obvious that logs or email will contradict their story.
If you don't believe any of the above, please at least believe this: There are two sides to every beef.We've been their with web servers. A Unix based web server would beat an M$ based web server hands down. Guess what? M$ found it was an important market, and invested serious money into speeding up IIS, to the point where the "it runs better on Unix" argument broke down.
Now don't get me wrong. I still think IIS sucks eggs, because of the opacity of the thing (do you know what your webserver is doing?), and its propensity for doing things the Microsoft Way. But I think it's dangerous to focus on "Linux only" server solutions.
It's keeping the playing field level that counts. One thing that would help in new protocol development is to create mandatory compliance testing. Java's model, in this sense, is one I like, except I think it is a bit too lopsided in Suns favor.
Being able to enforce standards compliance will provide the disincentive for an "embrace and extend" approach (and, if successful, will get M$ in "extinguish" mode -- the best thing M$ has done for open software lately has been their all-out attack on Linux and the GPL: ask any CIO in private about this war on Linux).
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
OK, it is a dead discussion by now, but let me take a chance.
My answer to you implicit question is so what? Someone solved a problem and open sourced the code. You tried to use the same code to solve another problem. Whose faults is it that it crashed most of the time? Unfortunately yours.
And as for process, most free software (take a look at SourceFourge) is indeed written by 3 or 4 people. Most good free software has code moderators to decide what goes in what doesn't (see Linux).
This is very true, and it's getting worse for M$, a recession looks set to help and bizarely the normal cost reduction should be good for the Open Source/Free Software.
http://news.excite.com/news/ap/011022/06/earns-m ic rosoft
This problem is going to cause M$ sever problems; The M$ share price will fall, they will cut investment, the share price will fall more, they will lose their 'famous names' the shares will fall further, it is a vicious feed back loop, before long the Microsoft Empire will be shadow of it's former self, like IBM in the 80's. We'll probably be really proud of our selves, "I defeated M$" we'll say, but it will have a hollow ring. We'll know in our hearts and minds that they where defeated by their own greed, lies and stupidity and not by Open Source/Free Software.
However there is another way. I've been thinking about an idea for some time, waiting for the right moment, I happen to think that the time is soon, very soon. We'll be able to say "I [we] defeated M$" and it will be true. We take the Open Source approach, we help, help the share price fall that is. A little short here, a little put there, however we approach it on an open source scale, on the grounds that many bucks will make short work of M$ :)
We short M$ on global scale.
http://www.fool.com/FoolFAQ/FoolFAQ0033.htm
Not only will we get to engineer the fall of Microsoft, we'll prove that open source community can make money, the delious irony of it :)
Which brings me to one final question, is it ethical for an Open Source/Free Software advocate to make money from M$ stock?
£$%^& ethics this is [Capitalism|Justice|Victory].
Actually, Microsoft had a hard time at first getting application developers to write Windows programs because doing so meant they had to rewrite too much of their applications. Microsoft went ahead and developed what became MS Office and ended up with the largest cash cow in the history of the software biz. There were plenty of now Windows apps available and many companies had both Windows and non-Windows versions of their software for years. I was there. I used it. It was buggy, but considering it's features, and the wide variety of software that was written for it, it was the best overall choice.
I tried using Desqview, didn't like it. I use an Amiga some. There wasn't a wide enough variety of software available at reasonable prices for it to be a reasonable solution for me. Part of putting out a good OS/Operating environment is having good development tools so that people can develop for your product. Desqview didn't do that, they disappeared. Amiga never managed to managed to get a reasonable marketshare except in low end video applications, so no one would write software for them.