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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."
As the memo says, they only way to "eliminate" OSS is to understand a process. Ironically enough, the entity searching for this "process" will in the end, find itself.
This is much like the ancient greek story OEdipus Rex, where he searches for a murderer and finds himself to be the person for whom he was searching. IMO, Microsoft in itself is the type of thing that drives OSS projects. The desire for non-corporate software, because of their greediness in terms of money, and inefficency of their products, and the desire to re-invent the wheel to be better than the current one, with input from all parties interested.
In order to combat the fees, the source code must be free and open, such that nobody will ever be able to claim it as their own and stop reproduction of it. And with OSS, anybody that sees a better way to do something, can contribute it. Whereas with the corporate model, you must write your programs to your manager's specifications, making innovation difficult at the developer level.
So in the end, the drive for OSS is to get away from the monolithic corporate model, which Microsoft ultimately represents. To destroy OSS, they must truly make their products more efficient and cause people to desire to migrate back to their software despite licensing fees.
Just some thoughts on the statments contained in the memo... maybe they're right, maybe they're not.
Quoting from the Halloween doc : "The biggest roadblock for OSS projects is dealing with exponential growth of management costs as a project is scaled up in terms of rate of innovation and size. This implies a limit to the rate at which an OSS project can innovate." To this, LWN responds in a totally tangentially way that is more commonly used by politicians ducking the question.
Indeed, Microsoft has made a spot on judgment of the management problem in open source : things eventually happen in open source projects, but not at a pace that anyone can control. Indeed, the management techniques that can be applied to closed source projects can allow people to define deadlines - whereas no such deadlines can be imposed (if one is honest) in the open source world.
LWN has attempted to distract one from this fact by throwing in the red herring that closed source project management is not perfect and can have problems meeting deadlines. (1) The Halloween document is not addressing deadlines - just the rate at which a project can be planned to proceed at (2) While I have observed the slippage of deadlines first hand in closed source projects, mostly they arent very serious slippages. Maybe a few days here or there, but hardly the three month delay quoted by LWN ("2.5 will ...").
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
This reminder of halloween document more than shows us that the ONLY important remedy in the M$-DOJ case is to force open protocols and open data exchange formats. Everything else is just a bonus or bogus. Even restrictive OEM contracts would not uphold long, but proprietary protocols and data formats might have the potential to break neck to OSS development
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
I can't remember where I read it (it might have been slashdot) but somebody recently was comparing Microsoft currently to IBM in it's last years of domination in the industry.
There are a lot of things in this article that support that theory too. Particularly Microsoft's concentration on proprietary protocols. Like the IBM of old Microsoft are trying to suck everything into their evil empire and proprietize (if that's a word) everything they can... including the internet.
Now, if I said to any Slashdot readers (and some preschool picture book readers) that I thought somebody could control the internet for their own benefit, and be truly successful at it you'd probably just point at me and laugh. And that would be quite fair I think. But not Microsoft. They're still trying to tame this internet thing.
You'd think after the success [sarcasm] of Push internet technology (remember active channels) and the microsoft network in it's original incarnation (now reduced to virtually an MS owned webring and AOL ripoff) and, speak of the devil; AOL's attempts to make the internet branded with AOL for anyone that uses it.
After all this has anyone ever come out on top of the internet? No. Of course there have been plenty of successes, but the internet still remains a global brand-name-independant network.
As the internet grows more it's that very size and reach that prevents it from becoming the MICROSOFT-InterNETWORK.
IMHO, this quest for making everything proprietary is just Microsoft going out of their way to piss people off. And much like the IBM keeping everything IBM attitude of past decades they risk screwing themselves royally because of it.
"How much truth can advertising buy?" - iNsuRge - AK47
"Ease of use must be engineered from the ground up. Linux's hacker orientation will never provide the ease-of-use requirements of the average desktop user."
"The desktop projects _are_ being engineered from the ground up. It remains true that ease of use is not always at the top of many hackers' priorities, however."
Sorry folks, but this isn't really true at all. All those flashy new GUIs are doing is putting a prettier, more easily configured face onto X and have a whole bunch of standalone applications that look and feel the same. To engineer "from the ground up", they need a _complete package_ that handles _all aspects_ of using and managing the machine.
For example (with KDE on FreeBSD):
* Where do I partition disks ?
* Where do I mount and unmount things ?
* Where do I set the colour depth and resolution of my display (on the fly is even better) ?
* Where do I load and unload kernel modules ?
* Where do I start and stop runnig daemons ?
* Where do I share things ?
* Where do I reconfigure my network settings ?
* Where can I reconfigure my kernel, compile it, isntall it and reboot all by checking a few boxes and hitting a button ?
* Etc.
You can just put a bunch of pretty pictures in front of a few things and call it "user friendly". The whole thing has to look and feel integrated as a single package. That means I should be able to do pretty much anything a normal person would want to do without ever having to
a) leave the GUI and use a commandline
b) use software with a different GUI (like gtk apps under KDE), or
c) install the software myself.
*That* is what they mean by "engineer from the ground up". Everything has to be doable with "user friendly" tools, not just a few things and not just things to do with the GUI itself.
Projects like KDE and GNOME, for all the good work they've done, still really haven't looked past creating Yet Another Window Manager. They still haven't really delved into the guts of the underlying operating system to try and make them easier to use.
I certainly hope these projects are working towards this sort of "complete product" integration. Until they do, you'll _never_ get the "ease of use" of Windows, MacOS, OS/2 etc because at the end of the day the OS still looks like a patchwork quilt.
CS
Personally, I think that there has been a fundamental change in the marketplace during the last three years that Microsoft didn't anticipate. Three years ago, they were trying to figure out the best way to protect their interests from the likes of Linux and the rest of OSS. However, while they were concentrating on the external enemy, they missed the internal one. With Windows and Office 2K, Microsoft developed a product that is good enough for most people. That, combined with the subsequent major falloff in PC sales that accompanied the tech bust, meant that people had no reason to buy their software in the huge numbers they had previously been buying them in, and they certainly didn't see much need for further updates. Why pay for more software when what you have works. I would argue that OSS software is superior in most ways to CSS, but the simple fact is that most of Microsofts recent sales falloffs have not been attributable to OSS. Rather, we are seeing a general falloff in sales, mostly due to the fact that people don't need to buy more MS software. Thus, we have seen many of the recent (scared sh*tless) tactics that MS has been using. I'm sure Linux is still on Microsofts radar, but their real worry right now is how to get people to pay for something they really don't want or need, because their current business model is unsustainable long term. Therefore, they are making stupid moves that just serve to make people mad (licensing, Passport, copy protection). This is both good and bad news for Linux. It's good news because Linux has an opportunity to move in and usurp the reigning king. On the other hand, it could be very dangerous for OSS in general. There are few things deadlier than a cornered animal, and right now Microsoft has been backed into a pretty tight corner.
"If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for everyone else."
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.
Notice that the one thing that for-profit, closed-source developers cannot do no matter how hard they try is ship bugfree software on a hard schedule. No one can. What they can do is ship version 1.0 when they said they would, and charge you for the service pack, and then charge you again when version 2.0 comes out with the features that you paid for in version 1.0 actually working.
Here's where the libre software is so wonderful. The total cost of ownership may be higher, lower or just the same as the closed source stuff, but the total benefits of ownership are generally much higher.
Folks like to say that you get what you pay for, and that's almost true: when you buy something you won't get any more than you pay for. The payment makes an upper bound on what you get. That isn't true when someone gives you something. The initial cost of $0.0 makes a lower bound on the value.
With libre software you get what the developers claim they're delivering, and sometimes a lot more. You don't have to wait for a deadline or an official release to start using the latest version of GNUfoo; you can keep trying it and start using it when you say it's ready.
Ask yourself: is it really an advantage for the closed-source companies to ship buggy crap that isn't ready, so they can meet a deadline? It is for them; it lets them gouge you and make a payroll. Is making a deadline that way really good for the customer?
See what I've been reading.
"Unfortunately, (emphasis mine) the story about Linux saving Amazon millions [cnet.com] was not as bad for Microsoft as it was good for Linux."
What is so unfortunate about something not being harmful to MS? Does harming MS somehow benefit others? Somehow a large, or at least very vocal part of the linux user base thinks so. I see the same feeling in the article:
"Reproducing what is available on a Microsoft desktop will win some users, but it is not enough. It may yet turn out, however, that Microsoft's licensing will provide that impetus to switch."
Now for the authors here, I can almost see a reason to want MS to lose market share. Their readership is made almost entirely of linux users and they are operating under the assumption that for there to be more linux users, there will have to be less MS users as if the number of potential computer users were a finite quantity of persons and organizations that will use MS *or* linux.
This assumption is just wrong. Number one, a majority of those who use linux on the desktop also use windows on desktop via dual booting or have multiple machines. Secondly, this is grounded on the notion that everyone who wants to use a computer for anything is already doing so and that the odd individual who purchases his/her first pc tomorrow will not possibly be a linux user. This might be the case for someone who heads to best buy and picks up a new system with winME preinstalled, but it neglects the guy who is first introduced to computers at his linux using friend's home or the second grader who browses her first website in a volunteer supported, linux based school computer lab. These are the people who will most likely stick with linux because after a few months becoming familiar with kde, mozilla, etc, they will have litle patience to "wait while windows builds a driver information database" or reboot for every "general protection fault in crappycode.dll"
Even so, this is only beneficial to people who make their money from a linux using market. As a user who loves linux and uses it almost exclusively, I don't care how many other linux users there are. I certainly don't feel like it's *unfortunate* when something doesn't hurt MS. I use linux becaues it does what I want it to, and as long as it meets that requirement I could care less what liscense the new MS product is released under or how many people buy their products.
The state is the great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everybody else. ~F. Bastiat
I agree with you. I bear no animus toward MS per se, though they've employed some some crummy marketing tactics at times. I don't like their licensing overmuch (in fact, I think it's horrible), nor some of (what I consider to be) their anti-user attitude (everything possible to get rid of MP3s), high prices, ever-shifting file formats, etc, but there's either nothing or little that *I* (speaking for myself, no one else) believe ought to be criminally liable or lead to government interference. However, I feel that way about most things, not just MS ;) I wish well for my friends who work or have worked there, and think MS has some very good aspects.
...") I like to argue for Free SW as being similar to blueprints -- would you want to hire an architect who refused to let you have a copy of the blueprints and other technical documents? If MS didn't exist, the argument remains.
... at a certain level, sure, one system's gain means other systems' loss. But naturally, not that simple -- the market for OSes isn't static, and won't ever be static. I prefer Free software philosophically (and because it's often outstanding, philosophy notwithstanding), but I'd rather people use multiple operating systems anyhow, even if some of them are proprietary. People learn that way, projects are cross pollinated with different ideas. (Also, this enourages universal file formats, my personal small utopian wish.) As you hint, the person computer relationship is complicated, not simple at all, and you can't just start subtracting "them" from "us" to get any meaningful numbers. Them is Us, and sometimes vice versa.
/. readers (80? 75? 85?) are reading with IE on a Windows machine, or [IE,Netscape] on a Mac running Mac OS. Sure, I hope they're at least somewhat intrigued by Free / free SW, but it's just not the case that most readers are MS free. A lot of people feel trapped, and say they "can't" get rid of it, even if they (otherwise) want to, because they have a certain game / piece of hardware / etc. that they want to continue to use. Hard to argue against, but then again, humans are always balancing wishes. If you don't want to use MS, it's still possible to live a relatively productive life, sleep at night etc.
:) That would perhaps make the box worth buying, take advantage of the MS name, etc.
My arguments for non-MS software aren't dependent on Microsoft (if it wasn't them being Microsoft, someone else would be the largest closed-source vvendor, of course), but it does serve as a convenient example sometimes. ("You'd rather have a proprietary WP format from a crash-worthy, bloated program? OK, give me $400
You wrote: "Now for the authors here, I can almost see a reason to want MS to lose market share. Their readership is made almost entirely of linux users and they are operating under the assumption that for there to be more linux users, there will have to be less MS users as if the number of potential computer users were a finite quantity of persons and organizations that will use MS *or* linux."
Well, there are a couple of statements in there
Speaking of which: I dunno current numbers, but I bet way more than 50% of
I'm writing from an iBook which is destined to hold Mandrake 8.1 (when it's ready for PPC) but in the meantime has an OS as proprietary as Windows, depending on who's counting*). Compared to my linux desktops, there are good and bad things -- one of the bad is that I can't just loan the OS to friends so they can, say, use the GIMP, which most people want to do after even a quick demo.
My personal hope, too, is that MS becomes the world's largest Free Software vendor. I can't say there's "no reason" they couldn't be that in 18 months from now (though I have said that on occasion), but it certainly would be posssible. Imagine MS-branded cross-platform free software, with certificates for limited MS support instead of an insane license agreement
Anyhow, just a small rant re: what the authors think (rather, what one of the thinks), and the conflict or imagagined conflict among various OSes and devpt systems. In sum, I like Free but respect closed source software as one way to organize things which is perfectly within the rights of the developers to choose. OTOH, speaking as a taxpayer, for anything the government buys, I think Open sure makes a better investment in the commonweal, encourages pursuit of happiness better, etc, discourages horrible code on teh taxpayer dime, etc.
Cheers,
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I don't have a link handy, but a while ago I read a very interesting essay where the author made the observation that the government doesn't have to legislate or force standards in order to affect a change. The government is such a large purchaser of computers and software that they could simply use their huge purchasing power to influence the market in the direction of open standards if they wanted to. If the government refused to buy into proprietary standards, many companies would support open standards rather than loose a customer that size.
True, most projects don't make it out of the gate, but they don't all have to. Just because most projects fail doesn't mean that others don't succeed. The fact is that there are projects to fulfill just about every desire you could have on a computer. Web browser, instant messaging, servers, office suites, some games, programming tools, etc. etc. Sure, lots of projects fail and die, but enough succeed to make the system viable. If you don't believe me, try running a linux system for a little while.
Straw men. What does this have to do with the previous argument, where you said OSS projects are all stillborn? Here you point out two that are actively in development and consistently improving, contradicting your earlier statement. Both Windows and Linux are moving targets, and just because both projects like to tout improvements with varying degrees of rhetoric doesn't mean that one is less viable than the other. Where's the argument here that says OSS is bad?
As far as I can tell, no such thing has been shown. Granted, OSS may not have lived up to all the Windows-killing hype, but that doesn't make it any less competitive. The availability of free tools that you have near total control of is a very powerful incentive for a lot of people, and will continue to be so in the future. The OSS promise isn't really "World Domination" as so many like to talk about, it's actually the opposite. It's about freedom from world domination by any one entity, and it's about personal empowerment. Linux, *BSD, et al. are still going strong, and in this sense they have completely delivered on the OSS promise.
I've really never understood this argument. True, OSS is a non-commerical hobby for many, but for many others they have been hired to work on OSS as their job. Companies use what they create as "tools" to make money, not as money makers themselves. How many software companies make money off of MS Word sales? One. How many companies make money by using MS Word as a productivity tool? Countless. Paying someone to develop GPL software is like purchasing a bunch of MS Word licenses. You're paying for your software (which you get complete control over BTW) and you make your money actually using the thing rather than selling it. That's where the profit motive actually lies. And even then, how does this relate back to the overall premise of your post that OSS is bad? Just because someone makes something as a non-commercial hobby doesn't mean it's a bad piece of work, nor does something have to be a commercial success to be a good product.
Overall, your post is a load of shit troll-boy. There are plenty of disadvantages to OSS, but you sure didn't hit on any of them.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."