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Halloween Document Revisited
GroundBounce writes: "The front page of LWN has an interesting three-year-after analysis of the predictions in the Halloween document, which was "leaked" from Microsoft around Halloween of 1998. It's interesting to see how their predictions have/have not panned out."
Moderators: this is more Usenet plagiarism from spootnik.
Seems as though (*MAYBE*) you stole your comment?
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Oh really? Sun sells hardware, which runs a Posix OS. Solaris can be made fully 'Linux compatible' very easily. If Sun hardware continues to be compelling (the basic value proposition of Sun), Sun will prosper.
Microsoft, on the other hand, sells software (ignoring cheap Xbox servers for the moment;). Microsoft is currently engaged in driving up it's software margins across the board. What do you think the effect will be if much less expensive software does the same job better? ;-)
It doesn't hurt that Windows XP has been received with jeers of condemnation. Also, don't rule out the legal system yet. The states have yet to weigh in, also the courts have not considered the monopolistic chutzpah exhibited by Windows XP. Oh yes, and then there are the legal challenges from foreign governments.
It doesn't seem to be a good time to be a MS stockholder (regardless of today's bump).
Linux, with it's free licensing, and lack of Product Activation, is looking very good to many people these days. It also benefits from version stability (no need to get a new version simply because a vendor says so). Its quite a value proposition compared with Windows XP.
299,792,458 m/s...not just a good idea, its the law!
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Umm...did you read the first paragraph of that Usenet post?
See the resemblance yet?There are BSD copyright notices in various userland utilities because Windows has an implementation of the BSD sockets API, which makes the BSD utilities relatively easy to port. The kernel is a different matter--while I haven't seen the source code to Windows, I have seen the DDK and the documentation for writing Windows device drivers. Windows device drivers are quite different from BSD device drivers; it would be a major undertaking to take BSD's TCP/IP stack and interface it with the rest of the Windows kernel. I don't think it'd be worth the effort... even with Unix-like OSes like *BSD and Linux, it's generally not worth the effort to actually take code; the other OS' code is just good as documentation. I think it's much more likely that MS reimplemented the sockets API to give programmers an interface they were familiar with.
Even if you want to go all out with the benefit of the doubt, and decide that they rewrote their own implementation of the API, it's still safe to say that MS' IP stack is based on BSD.
I don't see that that follows... the IP stack is the low level protocol implementation, not the API.
Did not notice this before in the Halloween memo:
"Who do you sue if the next version of Linux breaks some commitment?"
MS have in their EULA (?) made it clear that you can not sue MS over any damage resulting from use of their software.
Quite an odd thing to put in their FUD, since it expose a weakness in their own reliability and ways to deal with, or rather lack thereoff.
Carbon based humanoid in training.
It is true that closed-source projects can make one sort of deadline and stick to it. That's the "we'll ship by" sort of deadline. That's not the kind of deadline that knowledgeable users generally need.
The sort of deadline that open-source projects can generally meet is the "we'll get a nightly build up every night" and the "we won't call it version 1.0 until we're ready" sorts. These will do just fine for knowledgeable users. No closed-source company can meet this kind of commitment.
Indeed, but there are very serious problems with development processes that set these kinds of deadlines.
Clearly, the "we'll ship by" deadline can lead to shipping products that were not ready to ship. But if project managers and developers are intelligent about it, it can also lead to debugging and other project finalizations being done when they need to be done.
"We'll get a nightly build up every night" can become a completely worthless type of deadline very quickly. Nightly builds are worthless and should not count as any kind of achievement most of the time. No user needs a new release every night, especially at the cost of uncertainty of quality. Post builds when it's useful to users to do so. Developers shouldn't need a build posted every night to continue the development process.
The "we won't call it 1.0 until it's ready" anti-deadline is obviously a rule that everyone should follow. It's tautological. Unfortunately, I think a lot of the time, especially in open source projects, this rule gets turned into "we won't call it 1.0 until we get bored of adding new features to it; and we won't debug it after that because that isn't as interesting to do." Worse yet, it turns in to "we won't bother releasing a version we'll call 1.0 any time soon because stableizing the project to an acceptable level isn't something anyone on the team is interested in."
Even microsoft has figured out a solution to the problem of making users wait for an official release. It's called releasing betas to the public. It's still up to the users if they feel the betas are good enough to use on a daily basis. Still, for most users, it is unacceptable to have to try out more than one release of a product to find out if it's up to their standards. A whole lot of users want that 1.0 release so they can try it will the expectation "if this release isn't good enough, the product isn't good enough, and I should go try something else."
I'm not a smorgasbord.
For those interested here is the entire text of the usenet message. I thought it was an interesting piece and deserved to be repeated here on Slashdot :
From: Roy Stogner (roystgnr@iname.com)
Subject: The Philosophy of Linux (was Re: Gates Plays All the Engels)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
View: Complete Thread (10 articles) | Original Format Date: 1997/10/24
> So don't compare Linux with Marxism - an open design and development effort
> with no limitations on the capacity for either commercialism or free
> distribution has NOTHING in common with the conspiratorial, underhanded
> attempt to install a dictatorship through coercion.
I think one of the reasons people become so enthralled with the
economic/political philosophy of Linux (as opposed to the people who use
Linux, because, hey, free UNIX) is because it does something extremely
rare (I would say unprecedented) politically.
1. The Linux development model is a perfect communism. OK, this one
should start some shouting, but forget for a moment the whole "brutal
dictator takes over and screws up a nation" capital-C communism that
we've seen this century. Linux is a perfect example of what communism
was supposed to be: "From each according to his ability," with every
Linux developer contributing what he or she can toward free software,
"to each according to his needs," with most software GPLed and available
for free download to anyone who needs to use it - college kids with
programming and networking tools, businesses with database servers -
whatever you need, it is out there and it is yours for the asking.
Linux spans national borders, is unconscious of race, class, or
prejudice, and is available to anyone who wants it.
2. The Linux development model is a perfect libertarianism. In it's
simplest form: "no force," No developer is coerced into working on
Linux projects, no consumer is coerced into buying Linux. No
"Linux-only" sales strategies prevent you from having your choice of
OS. No forced incompatibilities try to hook users into one operating
system. "no fraud," Every piece of software under the GPL has source
code available, so there are no hidden APIs, no fine print in the
liscensing, no proprietary file formats to trap the consumer. There is
no marketing machine spitting out FUD to lure in computer illiterates.
There is no monolithic design to force everyone to use the same kernel,
same GUI, or same window manager. Everyone's contributions to or
benefits from Linux are purely by individual choice.
3. The Linux development model works. The GNU utilities may have
started by emulating earlier corporate designs, but they have ended up
surpassing them. The XFree86 people may not be able to afford
plastering "Where do you want to go today" over every computer magazine
in existance, but their free implementation of XWindows has made
possible window managers like Enlightenment which resemble where
Microsoft will be going in ten years. Open standards (which, in most
cases, means standards based on the plethora of Unices) work. The
entire world networks over IPv4 instead of IPX, communicates with HTML
instead of Word, and in general simply gets more out of open systems
than it can out of software companies which look out for the bottom line
more than for the consumer's interests.
Anyway, putting aside the unbounded praise for a minute (me, get carried
away? Never!), you have three conclusions. Linux is a perfect
libertarianism, a perfect communism, and it works. Until recently, I
would have said that the first two characteristics were impossible to
achieve, that they were doubly impossible to achieve together, and that
they were both incompatible with the third. The idea that all three
could describe the same system (even if it is a computing paradigm
instead of a state, more's the pity) is stunning.
---
Roy Stogner