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Ballmer: "We'll Outsmart Open Source"
An anonymous reader writes "Micorosofts Steve Ballmer is spouting off again in this ZDNet UK article. To an audience of Most Valued Professionals in London, he says 'We'll outsmart open source.' Among other things, he also says 'Linux is a serious competitor.' We've known ever since the Halloween Documents that they have been running scared, but this looks like a prelude to a whole new round of dirty tricks. It also looks like damage control for the statements of Microsoft's Sr. VP Brian Valentines last week."
to outsmart perspiration.
fp niglets
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
yeah, our several thousand employees are smarter than the rest of the world . . .
JWL.Freakwitch.net
Obviously they're afraid of what open source can do and they should be.
Developers, developers, developers, developers.
Interesting: they aparently are abandoning their whole total-cost-of-ownership argument. Balmer states, "We cannot price at zero" and "We can't beat them [Linux] on price" - thus implying that Linux's price is zero. Quite the opposite from "it costs you more in the long run!"
My guess is they want Linus to write linux for a palladium system so they can send him to jail or sue and end up killing linux. If linus never ports it to palladium related hardware, then linux will effectively be dead on x86 and will scare IT managers away from Linux because they do not want to invest in another os/2. Very clever strategy. Since palladium will be in the cpu and bios itself, I wonder if it will even be possible to turn it off?
http://saveie6.com/
That can be seen running around, screaming: "Give it to meeeeeeeeeee!!" in an MPEG file that has been mirrored all over the world... =)
Who can take anything Ballmer says seriously after seeing this movie clip? Certainly not Linus Torvalds, that's for sure!!
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
A more bloated product maybe. But currently open source can cover 95% of everybody's needs; imagine the future...
I said this once on newsforge but it's worth repeating:
The way to beat free software is through the psychology of value. "You get what you pay for." Us free software guys like to think that we are the exception, but business guys think it's true. And they'd rather pay lots of money for the backing of the Microsoft brand name than get an OS which they perceive as a "college kid's project" for little or no money. The reality is different, and we know this, but it is the PERCEPTION that counts.
Between Beowulf and MOSIX, Linux pretty much has low-end clustering sewn up. It's at the cutting edge. Microsoft will beat Linux at clustering in the business sector, by creating the PERCEPTION that Windows NT clusters are reliable (even if it takes a huge support infrastructure just to tell the MCSE monkey to reboot the damned machine) and that Linux clusters are somehow less reliable because they lack said support infrastructure. That is my prediction.
When it comes down to technology, Linux wins. When it comes down to people's feelings, and perceptions, and their sense of security, Microsoft wins because they can afford to hire the people and purchase the companies necessary to make it happen. In the end, it's people's perceptions that really count... not the technology.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these
"Micorosofts Steve Ballmer"
Hey what a neat idea. Change the name of the company to hide from all of the proposed/settled on settlements.
"You see "Microsoft" agreed to all of that. We are now "Micorosoft"."
Developers Developers Developers.... Developers Developers... Developers Developers Developers.. Ahhh, karma well spent.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
Microsoft, even with it's thousands of programmers, has no hope of "outsmarting" the millions of Linux programmers. I'll bet you that some Microsoft programmers support Open Source and even work on it for kicks in their spare time. Just another spouting off by Steve.
If you don't know what Zoo Blacklisting is, click here.
According to this, Only Windows Server marketshare grew, while Linux was stagnant according to IDC Windows grew from 42% to a whopping 49%. This in Linux's supposedly stronghold server market
"Every operating system out there is about equal in the number of vulnerabilities reported," he said. "We all suck."
That's the truth.
~S
Micorosoft is a web portal
I never seem to be able to take anything Ballmer says seriously.
DANCE MONKEYBOY!
Must Be Anti Microsoft Day here at slashdot. 4 articles in one day.
As for the article, So what else is new. it's not like microsoft never said Linux was competition. if Linux Competition makes Windows better and vice versa, isn't that a good thing?
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
They made security a priority long before it was a blip on open-source's radar. Such smarts deserves the contents of my wallet.
Err...logical fallacy there. Some company has to be the nicest in the world. That doesn't mean they have to be nice, just nicer than the rest...
--
Edsger W. Dijkstra
Less is more !
I always thought that one area where MS has an advantage over the typical open-source application is that their developers are all on salary. So when marketing (or whoever makes the decisions) determines that there should be an integrated spell-checker, someone will code it up because that's what they're paid to do. As opposed to the open-source problem of finding someone who wants to do it.
Let's face it, lots of the little things that make an application "full featured" in the eyes of the typical home or business consumer are a drag to code.
Technology like clustering would be better in Windows than Linux eventually, said Balmer
Intimidating.
"We will beat Linux on clusters."
Good luck. There's a lot more researchers doing distributed Linux work than there are on Windows, though I'm sure MS is blowing lots of money on it in their private labs. Windows is not great for a headless cluster machine -- lousy remote administration, high CPU/RAM overhead, not the best performance, costs more.
As for their distributed filesystem beating Linux...well, might happen, but they're building on a database (overhead implied), whereas Linux has the excellent AFS (openafs and arla implementations, both free), Coda, and Intermezzo, plus some other fringe ones. All the filesystem people I know (CMU is a big distributed filesystems research place) do Solaris or Linux...not Windows.
Microsoft is considering extending its shared-source initiative
You don't get it, do you, Microsoft? Seeing the source is the smallest benefit of open source to your customers. *They* mostly care about less immediate license costs, and (the biggie) no vendor lock in in the Linux world. Open source strongly facilitates this. Your NDA and smartcard supported limited shared source program doesn't interest these types in the least -- especially the NDAs, which are designed to *increase* lock-in.
For nine years, the company has designated users with particular skills -- usually seen by how often they intervene helpfully in newsgroups -- as "most valued professionals". Currently there are about 1,200 MVPs, half of whom are in the United States
Whee. Linux never needed a formal system for this because it already happens. Stop by any of the channels on irc.openproject.net. You can get hours of real-time help...not just one lousy newsgroup post. Good luck on this one, MS.
"We do not anticipate offering software on Linux. Nobody pays for software on Linux."
Hell, I'll bet there's a lower percentage of Linux users pirating *any* Linux software than there are Windows users *pirating Microsoft Windows*! The only reason anyone pays is because MS does aggressive business audits and has OEM deals.
The big issue there [with IBM], he said, was a reluctance to accept legal liability for open-source software.
Well, fuck me senseless. MS must be planning on accepting legal liability for their own closed source software. Hot damn. I've wasted more times fixing problems that their software has caused than I can count. Windows Updates that bluescreen and render a computer unbootable. Crashing Office installations. You name it. I've been wrong about MS all along! They're going to come through and actually support their software! Tech support will be free, not expensive "incident-based" issues! Woohoo!
May we never see th
I
don't
think
so.
Dirty Trick #1, astroturfing...
I agree with you in many ways on the client side. I disagree strongly on the server side however.
This daft Terminal Services, or Remote Desktop or whatever that won't allow multiple sessions on the same username. 'tail -f whatever.log'? Impossible on Windows without extra software. Little things like that are getting vastly overlooked.
However, on the client-side I have to say I'm with you for most of the way. We part company when you describe Mozilla as 'not even semi-close', and serious technical authors will laugh at your description of Office (there's a reason FrameMaker still exists...), but on the whole I agree with you.
Visual Studio IDE integrates everything wonderfully, integrating a really slick editor, a world-class debugger, and a high-quality compiler.
Yes. And it's all going .Net. And this is where the carping about Mono and DotGNU and whatever else should cease - getting a viable .Net environment on to Linux means you can start using Microsoft's tools to target Linux platforms. Then you get the best of both once more - good client tools from Microsoft, good server tools from Linux.
Cheers,
Ian
Well, this just might be a flame. Here goes that have at every turn out smarkted us. Just look at MONO and how "friendly" they are to Migual. And Raster even said that they won the desktop. If he are going to play with them we need to be as dirty has they are. Or in the end, we will stand like apple..dumbfounded on how they got by us...
because it was created by Linus Torvalds, the worlds future leader. Let's all take a moment to worship Linus Torvaldos.
sir bard
a MOSIX cluster of these ?
Yep... we'll outsmart Open Source.
You see, we're going to order this rocket sled from Acme...
-Todd
"The details of my life are quite inconsequential..."
This is an interesting perdicament.
You see, open source does not compete with proprietary software.
On the other hand proprietary software does compete with open source.
Now, there is no reason to get up in arms. The best open source can do is to keep on what its doing. Make good software.
There is no point spending cash to fight against MS. Open source won't die, because, as you all know, its done for free on developers free time (with exceptions).
So, there is no fear of open source being ousted by MS. The best they can do is try to prevent companies from going the open source route. Now, does that truely harm open source?
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Open Source tools than my competition can do with Microsoft tools .. ole Steve is outta luck!
My customers are not after platforms, they are after services I can provide them.
Sorry Steve,...the OSS juggernaut will roll on. Learn what you can from IBM about what it means to evolve into a company that contributes standards but no longer solely owns them.
The genie is too far out of the bottle.
"The big issue there, he said, was a reluctance to accept legal liability for open-source software. Ballmer said"
Last i checked any software from MS it did contain a nasty EULA that prevents me to take any legal action now matter how much the product was faulty. Its really ugly to pretend that they themselves give any when the never do and use that as an argument against linux.
I think we are really in for a spin against linux from Microsoft. The bad news for them will probably be that since their trust account is completely drained none will listen to them. The more they spin the more they tend to look like bad loosers.
To lay so much effort on making all competition look bad indicates that their own products doesnt have enough value to compete.
HTTP/1.1 400
The Visual Studio IDE integrates everything wonderfully, integrating a really slick editor, a world-class debugger, and a high-quality compiler.
I'm not sure exactly what compiler you are using but the C++ compiler is truly terrible. Besides that fact that they are using an outdated version of the STL libraries, the compiler will let all sorts of crazy errors through that gcc will catch. For those of you who use VC++, I would encourage you to set aside perhaps 2 weeks where you compile both on VC++ and gcc. You'll be stunned at the number of errors that gcc will catch but VC++ will let slip through. Lord only knows what the VC++ compiled code is actually doing...
GMD
watch this
we screw your multi-million-dollar efforts with a few lines of open source perl code :)
My personal opinion is that if they're running scared, then they will be with regards to servers. Not the desktop.
Disagree with me all you want, but you don't see vast numbers of people jumping the Windows ship to run Linux with Gnome or KDE.
However, you do see them moving off IIS and onto Apache. Which is what I think they'll target with their campaignes.
"slapper" springs to mind. Yes, IIS has plenty of its own, but Microsoft's advertising budget is far higher than that of Linux's and therefore they'll reach more people with their voice.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
"Linux is a serious competitor"
Wow. Somebody give that guy a banana.
And the masses cried out, "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0!"
... a new sig coming on ...
"Linux is a serious competitor"
- Steve Ballmer, Chief Executive Microsoft Corp.
You are mixing 'bloat' with 'best'. 90% of the work that MS products do can easily be done by other tools. The rest 10% is not justified by the price tags.
Wow, it takes big balls to post a comment like that here :) I for one agree with you though. On the client side, Linux just is not able to keep up (yet). On the server side I think Microsoft is inferior...but they're trying to close that gap (and they need to--the licenses for W2KAS are SO much more than W2K Pro that it's easy to see where MS makes its money). The next few years will be interesting. Will desktop Linux get its act together? Will IIS conquer Apache? Stay tuned...
I'd say it's weird to give a buyer no other option but MS
Trying is the first step towards failure.
Does anyone have a good collection of copies of and/or pointers to good Microsoft quotes like Herr Valentine's? I've been thinking that it could be very useful in the coming FUD war to have lots of their own words to use against them.
A year or two back, some MS exec was widely quoted as saying something like "Our products are designed for functionality, not for security." I've since been very sorry that I didn't keep a copy. Anyone know who, where, and when this was said?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
For example, they don't even mention some of the BSDs even though they are at least as good as linux on almost every situation. But BSD was not pushed as a brand as Linux was.
Asked by one lateral-thinking MVP whether Microsoft planned to offer applications software on Linux, Ballmer said no. "We do not anticipate offering software on Linux. Nobody pays for software on Linux." Even StarOffice, sold by Sun, was originally a free product, he said. And IBM, arguably the No. 1 player in the Linux market, promotes Linux to big users, but does not actually sell Linux: "It's weird! IBM says 'Hey British Aerospace! Buy Linux.... From SuSE."
a) What's wrong with SuSE?
b) What's wrong with IBM using another company to push compatable hardware/software? MS doesn't do the same thing with Intel/HP/anyone else?
c) Nobody pays for Linux stuff? I paid for my distro and if a suitable BASIC/Office/Exchange/Development clone came out for Linux, I would be using it in a heart beat. Further more, if I had something that I could reasonably create in Linux, I'd probably release my stuff as open source whether or not I paid for the tool or app or program.... Linux has to go to the masses and not play catch-up - free or not free.
d) Considering MS is usuall morally bankrupt, I'd rather be financially bankrupt for a change.
I wonder how much he was chuckling when asked whether MS would do anything for Linux.
This is one man who will die of chronic assholism.
This space for rent.
Consider this:
From an MVP
If you read some of the code you will notice that there is the ability to run SQL of your choice on the page.
For those not ASP literate the line is this:
The problem is the "Request.QueryString("id")". He is injecting what he gets from the querystring right into his SQL and then running it. That is a HORRIBLE security flaw, because a bad person could inject some SQL to destroy his database.
Its kind of ironic because how to remove this type of attack was the topic of the Security column
...to bad-mouth a competitor:
It's not like Novell, it isn't going to run out of money
Just because you can't, doesn't mean you shouldn't.
Office is so capable that even LaTeX can't compare anymore,
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
cough.
[straightens tie]
[puts on a stern face]
ha ha ha HA HA HA!
Aw man, how can you be a moderator here and NOT have seen the Ballmer video where he can't even keep up with himself as he chants "Developers! Developers! developers!"
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
and find out that this is NOT offtopic.. It's steve Ballmer prancing around the stages repeating the word developers!!! Sheesh.....
So when marketing (or whoever makes the decisions) determines that there should be an integrated spell-checker, someone will code it up because that's what they're paid to do.
Actually, that's not really true. Microsoft doesn't code many of the nice features you find in their products, they buy out smaller companies who have already done the work. Check out the "About..." dialog box of your favorite Microsoft Office product and read the fine print. There's a hell of a lot of features in there that are copyrighted to a third party.
Since so much of the code in Microsoft's products is developed by third party sources, it sometimes makes me wonder what the hell their army of programmers actually does all day long...
GMD
watch this
Before you call me a Microsoft groupie, think about it. Windows XP, despite the draconian licencing (which is honestly their right), is so much easier to use than Linux it's not even funny, and it's just as stable. Internet Explorer is -- bar none -- the best browser today. Mozilla doesn't even come semi-close. Groupie is not the word i would use toady or minion is a little more like it. Either way, please stop repeating the endless out of date FUD that Linux is hard to use. It's not and hasn't been for quite a while. Pretty much any modern distribution will install out of the box on pretty much any hardware. When the installation is finished you get a fully functional working system. Administration of the system can be performed via gui tools (if you so choose) and it is very straight forward and simple to do. Sure it's different, but it is certainly no more difficult, and if something goes wrong, usually it's pretty easy to figure out and fix. Windows is only easy if everything goes right, if something screws up, you are toast reboot, reinstall, reconfigure.
""Linux is a serious competitor," said Ballmer. "We have to compete with free software, on value, but in a smart way. We cannot price at zero, so we need to justify our posture and pricing. Linux isn't going to go away--our job is to provide a better product in the marketplace."
Sob! Woun't you do it for...the coders?
Don't keep us waiting Ballmer.
"He acknowledged there was more to Linux than free software--the main benefit of the open-source movement was the community developing software and sharing ideas. "Linux is not about free software, it is about community," he said. "It's not like Novell, it isn't going to run out of money--it started off bankrupt, in a way."
He's partically right, but the free aspect is also important. Does anyone thing people would be participating in Linux development if one had to pay to access the code every time?
"Technology like clustering would be better in Windows than Linux eventually, said Ballmer: "We will beat Linux on clusters. We can't beat them on price, but we have to add value."
Unfortunatelly "eventually" doesn't work anymore. The problems that clustering was invented to solve are NOW.
"The MVP initiative will be a big part of Microsoft's efforts to promote a sense of "community" among users and developers, connecting its own product developers with the users most in touch with product issues. "
You mean MS didn't have a sense of community before? I can't thing of a more damming statement of how far the "disconnect" has advanced than the above.
"Microsoft is considering extending its shared-source initiative, currently limited to large users such as governments and universities, to MVPs. This would give them smart-card access to much of the Windows source code, he said. There will be a decision on this in the next couple of months, said Lori Moore, vice president of product support services at Microsoft. "There are many options on the table," she said. "There are many ways to be more open, and we are reviewing ideas."
Has the vague-legal issue of viewing MS code been resolved? Is ALL the code viewable?
"The title is highly regarded, said Thomas Lee, a Windows 2000 MVP who specializes in directory issues, and has just been appointed as chief technologist at QA Training. "You are recognized by your peers, not by an exam that you can cheat in." Linux and its community have a symbiotic relationship, he said: "You don't have that same thing at Microsoft, but there are people who are passionate and technical who are committed to doing a great job."
Why whatever EXAM could you be talking about???
BTW yes there are people who are technically proficient and passionate. However saying you don't have symbiotic relationship shows how big the gap has become between you and the people who promote you.
"While Ballmer stopped short of advocating Microsoft's old "security through obscurity" policy, he pointed out that publicly posting bug fixes often prompted attacks. "The hacker waits till a fix is posted, then writes an attack and sends it out," he said. Such attacks are based on information in the fix. The answer is to make sure that fixes are easier to distribute an implement so the user base is up to date, he said. "
Script kiddies maybe. The real pros don't wait for a "fix". The real solution is to be pro-active instead of re-active.
"Asked by one lateral-thinking MVP whether Microsoft planned to offer applications software on Linux, Ballmer said no. "We do not anticipate offering software on Linux. Nobody pays for software on Linux." Even StarOffice, sold by Sun, was originally a free product, he said. And IBM, arguably the No. 1 player in the Linux market, promotes Linux to big users, but does not actually sell Linux: "It's weird! IBM says 'Hey British Aerospace! Buy Linux.... From SuSE."
"Nobody pays for software on Linux". Anyone know were I can get a free copy of Maya, seeing as how I don't want to "pay" for it. Gee I want to be a "talking head" when I grow up
If by "outsmart" he means "make more money", he may be right...
Je t'aime Stéphanie
Could someone stuff Mr. Ballmer with more Twinkies please.
He could be a walking Eric Cartman, however, he'd have to be cool first.
"...the shortest distance between two points may be straight line, but it is by no means the most interesting."
Just ignore it. If the chips don't work with linux, buy other chips. Will the chip vendors ignore the leading server (apache) and the #2 unix (linux), leaving tons of cash on the table, just to give Microsoft a woody? I don't think so.
sulli
RTFJ.
There are two main thoughts that run through my mind when I think about competing with Open Source and the IBM model. The first is that, the main problem with competing with Open Source is that it's always faster to copy than to innovate. It may take years, multiple focus groups and millions of dollars to produce feature X or behavior Y in some commercial product but after that it usually takes a fraction of the time for that feature or behavior to be replicated in competing products. This is much compounded by Open Source which is also typically free (as in beer) thus undercutting the original innovators. A good example of this is commercial Unix and Linux.
In such an arena, it seems inevitable that the only way to slow the inexorable march of Open Source is to resort to Intellectual Property. So far no one has done this to any significant degree (the MP3 patents don't count because they are a different issue) although there has at least been discussion amongst Linux kernel hackers about patent liability which will only continue given the proliferation of software patents and the more features that various Open Source projects copy from their proprietary brethren. It is food for thought.
The second thing that comes to mind is that Open Source is shifting the balance of power from software developers to software consultants. For companies like IBM with huge consulting divisions (their Global Services division is at least thrice as large as all of Microsoft) this a great boon which they are willing to sacrifice a lot of software development to gain which explains their intense support of the Linux and Apache projects. To compete with this, I believe large software companies will have to use similar tactics including providing more source code to customers, making more software available free of charge and providing more extensive consulting services. Of course, this would significantly change the landscape of the software industry. Open Source and Linux would indeed have changed the game.
Disclaimer: This post is my opinion and does not reflect the thoughts, strategies, intentions or opinions of my employer.
"Internet Explorer is -- bar none -- the best browser today. Mozilla doesn't even come semi-close."
What? I apologize. I am only a simple professional web designer. I do not understand what you're saying. It sounds like... "standards are bad?"
Speaking as a guy who has almost finished his Masters in Industrial Economy, I still believe the biggest issue is the time that will inevitably be necessery to train monkeys to use Linux (and yes, I've seen employees that have *no* understanding of computers and need a step-by-step instruction to perform the most basic tasks.)
c e/KOffice and switch between them with no big difficulties, I get around the menus and know what I'm looking for. But I know quite a few that just couldn't grasp it on their own.
Nobody says that "Start, Shut down, Restart" is a sensible sequence to restart a machine. But they have learned it, and it's stuck (unless they just push the reset button btw). Try *unlearning* a monkey and tell them you now have to pick something else (even if the choices make more sense if you know your way around a computer), and they'll be stomped and need time to adapt.
And this goes on for a number of things that are so basic, that you would never even consider it a problem. I can change to IE/Opera/Mozilla or Textpad/Wordpad/Word/Textpad//StarOffice/OpenOffi
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
... and Brian Valentine is excellent teacher:
"We all suck."
From Inforworld article
-- Reality checks don't bounce.
When will Microsoft 'get it' that people (with authority to make purchase decisions) are getting tired of the dominate-the-world B.S.?
Microsoft (or any other company, for that matter) will never be able to provide the solution for every IT need. The right solution for each need is unique for each customer, so interoperability is the name of the game. These blatant and often arrogant anti-interoperability campaigns just sour the audience and remind us of how difficult it is, and will continue to be, to integrate some Microsoft products with other non-Microsoft products.
Its amusing to watch Microsoft struggle with its mid-life crisis. The market is now so big and so broad, yet Microsoft can't get past its prepubescent experience dominating a much smaller, less savvy market. One day it'll smack them in the face (as it does all of us) that they just aren't capable of doing the things they did in their adolescence.
Don't know if this is still true, but...
MS's backup environment was all UNIX based. They hired a HUGE storage services company to design/install/implement backups for them on Win2k servers with Veritas Netbackup.
This all happened AFTER the UNIX news was leaked.
Imagine being a UNIX Admin working for Microsoft? Scary thought.
"...the shortest distance between two points may be straight line, but it is by no means the most interesting."
Looking at NTs heritage (Dave Cutler et al) from VMS, which had transparent, reliable, cick-ass clustering 15 years ago which is unmatched until today this is a pretty sad statement.
Mind you, I'm not doubting your statement. It just shows that M$ aparently threw away all the goodies in exchange for "usability" and a string of pretty crappy lowest common denominator wizards.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
You've got to be kidding me. SPECIALIZING in directory issues? Assuming "issues" means.. problems, it's a sad fact that there are so many issues with Active Directory that one of these highly praised MS "MVPs" can actually SPECIALIZE in fixing them. Thats like specializing in DNS administration. Wow, I think i'd shoot myself in about 1.5 days at that job.
Let me count the ways....
1) My 9yr old nephew installed Mandrake on his computer without any adult supervision, got it on the net, and got his web server running. In an afternoon. Isn't that the very definition of easy?
1-a) My Father got his RedHat system running in under two days (and he's 70yrs old with NO computer experience to speak of). So it's easy on that scale as well.
3) XP completely crashes daily on three systems I know of... Multiple times on one of them. I havn't seen a Linux box yet that crashed without a total screw up with an application, a boneheaded move, or bad hardware. So, that stable thing just isn't true IMHO. (And don't even get me started on security).
4) Office? Capable?? Well, I suppose it is capable, but doesn't do anything I can't do with OpenOffice. Even the MS bigots where I work are switching to OpenOffice. They say it's easier to support (less time/trouble for them).
5) I don't develop outside of vi so I wouldn't know about Visual Studio... But then again, I don't need Visual Studio because I just do it all in my head before I code (personal style / preference thing).
In other words.. MS hasn't won due to quality, features, or anything else other than the ability to maintain a corporate (and partner) focus on delivering their message..
To paraphrase Jim Carville "It's the Marketing... Stupid!"
Which (unfortunantly) means that a company that has been FOUND GUILTY in a Court of Law of doing illegal activity in the realm of limiting competition (i.e. dirty tricks) will most likely fall back to what they know best.
One thing I think is a misconception about open source software is that it is done 'for free'. Certainly a proportion of it is, but if, for instance, you look at the linux kernal list, you will see that the vast majority of contributors are actually employees from big companies.
Before, I think Bill&Steve thought that Open Source software was crappy, so they kind of ignored it or mocked it. Now they realise that it isn't crappy, but they think they can defeat it because they believe that it isn't created by people who are getting paid (directly or indirectly) for it. I think this is a real misconception.
I think this article raised some interesting points.
Ballmer is publicly acknowledging that Linux is a threat, and Microsoft will have to change its ways to beat open source. He seems to believe Microsoft can add some sort of 'value' to their products that will prompt people to drop their open source software and switch to some sort of expensive Microsoft product instead. Monkeyboy also said, "It's not like Novell, it isn't going to run out of money" - why the Novell bashing?
Further on in the article, Thomas Lee (some Windows 2000 MVP) says, "You are recognized by your peers, not by an exam that you can cheat in." - is this a jab at MCSE and other certifications? He seems to believe many others that many certs (especially Microsoft's) are practically worthless, because of braindumps, the fact that they are a dime a dozen, etc.
Every day is Anti Microsoft Day on slashdot! : )
You can't take the sky from me...
The one thing you're missing is that in 99% of the cases, Linux/Open Source doesn't have a bottom line they have to meet. Since the (vast?) majority of programmers working on OSS projects are donating time, there's no need to pay them. This translates into better project planning because they're not always worried about meeting deadlines that their jobs rest on. Not to say that OSS isn't stressful, just that you don't have bigwigs worried about their jobs because a deliverable wasn't met.
I'll admit, I like VC++ and Office for most tasks. However, after attempting to configure an NT/2000 box as a DNS/Web/FTP server that I can remotely manage, I will take Linux anyday. On my first attempt it took me roughly three days (~12 hours) to install and configure a box with 2 websites both DNS'd through the box with an ftp server and some basic user recognition on the web site. This was without ever having done it before. With NT, it took me weeks to figure out how IIS worked the first time, let alone trying to figure out how to do remote management and multi-user functions. When MS comes up with an easy multi-user OS that has literal plug and play (read: like RedHat's rpm or Debian's apt-get functionality) packages, give me a holler.
--trb
we have cheapbytes among others. here you can get pink tie linux-which is redhat 7.3-for $5 + shipping. they have all of the major linux distros, and the nice thing is that when the cd's get there you can install it on as many computers as you want.
-- john
The approach that they seem to be adopting is to build up a set of legal measures (DMCA, patents, ...) that will then be uneashed against open source products to either: force the removal of useful features; or make people afraid of being sued if they use it.
Remeber: with their new licencing in place and the continual updates mechanism they can quietly roll out a new protocol in a server one month and make the clients depend on it the next month. That could really make life hard for open source replacements - Samba watch out.
Microsoft has granted so many stock options to so many people that they have lost their leverage to force employees to do what Microsoft wants.
Ballmer said it himeslf, "Everybody around here thinks that they own the company!". That's because many of them do own a piece of it, albeit, with ~5,000,000,000 shares outstanding, a very small piece! Aha! Nobody owns Microsoft!
Just try and tell a "Microsoft Millionaire" to code up that really dreary bit! That's what temps are for! But do you think that temps hold a competitive advantage over open source programmers {or any other kind of programmer, for that matter)!
On another topic, that's why I don't expect to see "Trustworthy Computing" from Microsoft "real soon now"!
From Ballmer: "It's weird! IBM says 'Hey British Aerospace! Buy Linux.... From SuSE."
Why is that weird when a lot of consultants say 'Hey customer, buy Windows.... From Microsoft."
Anyone got 20c for a cluegram?
hmm, admittedly I did give up with SuSE after several non working installs that messed with my HD (and I'm a pretty experienced computer user) and returned to XP, but this will not be the case forever.
Firstly with the input of all the people all over the world working on it linux will get easier to use to the point of at least equalling windows in a year or maybe two at the most. As for stability, yes XP is stable, but we all know it's not as secure as linux, and with Wi-fi and always on broadband that's more important than ever.
Secondly price does make a difference, at least to me. I have XP because it came with the computer, but when I build my new system piece by piece (with an opteron processor) I do not intend to shell out £150+ for a 64bit recompile of an OS I already have. It'll cost me £20 at the most for a decent "beginning linux" book, and anything after basic groundwork I'm sure I can work out/ask one of the many linux communities.
And as for IE/Mozilla, the only thing I miss from IE is the middle click scrolling. Honestly, that's all, and tabbed browsing more than makes up for that loss.
Finally, yes office is good, but again its expensive, and again the new opensource products will be good, or at least adequate. If you really want to use office then there's Lindows too, which would also let you use progs such as photoshop.
"We do not anticipate offering software on Linux. Nobody pays for software on Linux."
-S. Balmer\end{quote}
Wait a minute. You mean the money I spent on Crossover as well as the money I shelled out on the Linux version (actually the student Linux/windows version) of Matlab was not for Linux software? While I suppose the Crossover was actually in the end for MS software, I wasn't paying for MSOffice, I was paying for the ease of compatibility (without much technical knowledge on my behalf).
In fact, Crossover may be an example that at least some of us are willing to pay for something we would scoff at on a windows system. Yes, in most cases there are free alternatives to software available on Linux today, but some of use are willing to pay for a better quality product if it is just that... better.
As for Microsoft trying to make their product more valuable so that people will choose to pay for it, as opposed to electing to partake in a free operating system with more free software... well that is exactly what they are supposed to do. However, they have relied on being the "only" (read to mean the "primary") operating system in use, and therefore could charge a price that may not necessarily reflect the quality of product they put out.
And finally, this deserves the "I'll believe it when I see it" clause, because we have all heard songs like this come from Microsoft in the past.
1) My 9yr old nephew installed Mandrake on his computer without any adult supervision, got it on the net, and got his web server running. In an afternoon. Isn't that the very definition of easy?
One swallow doesn't make a summer.
Last time I tried installing Mandrake on my laptop, it crashed during the install and would go no further.
The same goes for SuSe 8.0.
Simon
[Reason? Oh, it just doesn't like the graphics chip. But it thinks it knows which one it is. Which it isn't. And it doesn't. So it hard crashes the machine.]
Coming soon - pyrogyra
I crack up when I see the "Developers" line. Let me compare thee to Linux (which will represent the open source community as a whole), MS development environment:
COMPILER:
Linux:
Many compilers for many languages. Free. LCC and GCC for C, G++ for C++, Eiffel, *ML, more than I want to go through. If you want, you can also buy commercial compilers like icc.
MS:
Killed most compilers for their platform (except the oddball ones) by squashing them with their own. Visual C++ generates pretty tight code, but you're just screwed if you run into a bug with it. Oh, and it costs lots of money. Most compilers commercial. Mingw/cygwin exists but not supported well (MSDN support bitterly hates both).
DEBUGGERS/DIAGNOSTICS:
Linux:
memprof, debauch, debug mode on malloc, gdb, strace, ltrace....many, many, many more. These were the ones I used on my last small project. All these are free, and there are many more.
MS:
Um...ntinternals put out regmon and filemon. Apparently MS puts out WinDBG for free, though I haven't used it and apparently it isn't too popular. No free high level debuggers. Few diagnostic programs for already compiled code.
DEVELOPER SUPPORT:
Linux:
Email the developers for the kernel, libc, SDL, XFree86, or whatever library or kernel bit you're working on if you find a weird corner case or bug. Get response, bug fix, patch. Most exchanges between core developers documented on publically available (and searchable) mailing lists, so usually you don't even have to email. Lots of IRC channels of developers who are interested in talking about their work.
MS:
Guess at what's going on underneath the covers, most of the time. No source to look at. Some newsgroups, mostly for higher level problems. Can purchase extremely expensive (though usually effective) MSDN incidents.
SAMPLE CODE
Linux:
Tons. Usually, if it runs on Linux, you can see the code. If you're using a library and you find an unclear bit in the documentation, you can take a look at the source.
MS:
A fair bit, in certain areas. Game developers, in particular, have built up some web sites that have lots of snippits. Usually hard/impossible to get library source code.
GENERAL DEVELOPER COMPETENCE:
Linux:
Many new programmers, but most are interested in technology for its own sake and doing cool things with it, so learn the system inside out. Some accessable very skilled systems developers.
MS:
Many, many Visual Basic coders. MS dug its own grave with Visual Basic. Very low barrier to entry, very difficult to scale above a certain height ("Well, you *can* do this advanced thing in Visual Basic...you just need to also know how the underlying Win32 API works and how Visual Basic chooses to interact with it"). Some contractors that should be shot before calling themselves developers (I remember an expensive contract with a GUI-coding-tool using developer at one company...). Some competent ones, as well.
APIS:
Linux:
Some UNIX cruft. Usually, APIs are pretty clean. Emphasis is on keeping things clean for the many developers -- if something is unclear in gtk1, fix it in gtk2.
Windows:
The most godawful APIs in the world. Win32 is so full of cruft, poor conventions, inconsistent conventions, and unnecessarily complicated *crap* that it's amazing. Most advanced MFC programmers end up having to interact with Win32 as well to do certain things that MFC can't do. Has some great snippits on MSDN, along the lines of "Do not use this argument, as it represents a security risk and has been obsoleted. Some developers may wish to use this argument for backwards compatibility with Microsoft CSPs."
OS CAPABILITIES:
Linux:
Pretty much if you could want it in an OS, it's there. I've yet to miss something (well, Linux *does* need disk priorities on processes for scheduling, but Windows lacks them as well).
MS:
No fork()? Damn, that was a pretty convenient syscall. How about file deletion...can I delete or move an open file? No? Nuts. As for the registry...well, it's one ugly, giant unregulated hack that lots of programs directly modify and end up screwing up all sorts of stuff. The number of times I've seen borked file associations because a program was writing straight to the registry and prevented Explorer from reading or coping with the file association is ridiculous.
I could go on, but the point is that any MS claims of being ahead on making life good for developers are absolutely ludicrous. The *worst* thing about Windows, easily, is doing development for it.
May we never see th
Internet Explorer is -- bar none -- the best browser today.
Nope! OmniWeb beats it IMHO.
Office is so capable that even LaTeX can't compare anymore, and Office has more functionality than Corel and any of the open-source efforts combined!
i.e, it's obfuscated, it's over-featured, it's bloated.
The Visual Studio IDE integrates everything wonderfully, integrating a really slick editor, a world-class debugger, and a high-quality compiler.
ProjectBuilder works a whole lot better. It's free (beer) and is based around a world-class debugger (gdb 5.1) and a high-quality compiler (gcc 3.1). InterfaceBuilder's UI & layout beats anything VS has to offer, etc, etc
And these are all availble at reasonable prices.
And these are all available .... free! ;-)
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
Looking at NTs heritage (Dave Cutler et al) from VMS, which had transparent, reliable, cick-ass clustering 15 years ago which is unmatched until today this is a pretty sad statement.
I always thought they would push harder with clustering to diminish the problems caused by hung servers. They could even have each box automatically take it itself temporarily out of the cluster and reboot itself every 40 hours or so without disrupting the overall cluster.
IOW, manage reboots if you cannot eliminate them.
Table-ized A.I.
Before you say "But linux is free!", consider that you need training to use it.
And you don't need training to use MS products?
Microsoft doesn't always have the better product, but because they've had a monopoly on the desktop they can put all their applications and middleware in a position to compete (unfairly) with better offerings.
And $400+ for WinXp Home + Office isn't a reasonable price, especially when most home users will never do anything as complicated as a mail merge.
-dameron
For what most people use apps like M$ Word for, the feature set was sufficient in M$ Word 2.0. Most of the new features are just shiny things designed to make people go "Ooooh, neat! I must have that!". Most never even use the feature that persuaded them to buy the product.
In my opinion a word processor, for home use, only needs to have a spell checker and the formatting capability to make paragraphs. All other functions are bloat that keeps the progam running at the same speed a previous version did on a 386. If it is a requirement that you be able to layout your memo like the front page of a news paper 1) you need to rethink if what your writing is in fact a memo, and 2) you probably don't want to use a jack of all trades word processor.
Maybe ease of use was your deciding criteria.
The answer to this question will steer you to your answer of which is superior. And remember if you don't like a feature in an open source program or OS you can change it, but if you don't like a feature in a M$ product the you are stuck with it.Question: what is easier to use out of the box?
Yes there is a learning curve with linux, but there is also a learning curve to all of your favorite M$ apps and OSes. Before slamming open source programs for lacking the ease of use most WinDoze monkeys are used to, remember two things.
1) that most open source programs are not designed for newbies but for the programmers themselves(who, by the way, are not afraid of learning curves)
and
2) remember what the windows platform was like in its infancy, it was not pretty, or user friendly, or intuitive it had a learning curve just like linux has today.
"You get what you pay for."
But that's the beauty of Open Source / Free software -- you can pay for whatever level of support and brand name you want. You can choose to get everything for free, or you can get a million-dollar support contract -- or anything in between. This is the truth, and I think we've done a fairly good job of getting that perception out there -- and of course IBM's advertising dollars help too.
If I were running Microsoft, I would focus on the ability to produce finished, refined software that results from having massive numbers of developers on payroll - control over goals and marketing-directed development allows a large corporation producing closed-source commercial software to produce certain kinds of results faster than the Open Source slowly-rolling-ball approach. In other words, it takes time for major Open Source undertakings to gain community momentum, and even longer for Open Source projects to develop user-friendly polish, when more common, non-developer users get involved and start driving development with feature requests.
Microsoft also needs to deal with the fact that they sometimes put consumer demand in the back-seat to their own interests and big business interests in general. NOBODY demands DRM. Pushing it down people's throats is a major mistake. No endeavour yet has been successful at getting people to adopt a technology with DRM capabilities or any such non-feature "security features". In the future this may become a drag on the bottom line with Palladium et. al. losing popularity. It's hard to convince Joe Sixpack right now that Linux is cool and he should be using it. If Windows becomes so crippled by DRM and "security features" that Linux (or some OpenBeOS-alike or other Open Source OS) can serve as the basis for a fully capable operating environment for desktop PCs, the bottom line will suffer.
Outsmarting Open Source is really more a matter of keeping in touch with what people want. Frankly, MS has done a good job of this in the past, cutting many corners, and infuriating many developers, but they have gradually improved the Windows platform - with Windows XP they have started down a path of backtracking on their advances, getting a bit too high off the hog with their monopoly. If they are trying to outsmart Open Source, they need to go back to thinking about what users want, and not what the MPAA and RIAA tell them they need to get securely in bed with them, so they can jointly 0wn the set-top box market and media-on-demand markets they have their greedy eyes set on.
How do those tail lights look, Steve?
Does this have some value or purpose that I just don't see? Letting people look at your source code doesn't have any magical effect.
Do they think people will squash bugs for them? Make other improvements? Finally start using some of those undocumented APIs that don't exist?
What's the deal?
-Peter
I agree with most of you posts. I have installed many different distros of linux and it is just as "easy" as Windows.
OT comment to list item number 3. I would check out those computers that are crashing on a regular basis... I 'dout that this is a Windows stability issue, but a third party software/driver problem or hardware.
So, there is no fear of open source being ousted by MS. The best they can do is try to prevent companies from going the open source route. Now, does that truely harm open source?
Oh, you mean like this, or like this? What about this?
Sounds like they're trying. REALLY hard.
GIR: I'm going to sing the Doom song now. Doom doom doom doom doom doom de-doom doom doom doom doom doom doom...
Ballmer said: "It's weird! IBM says 'Hey British Aerospace! Buy Linux.... From SuSE." What he doesn't get is what IBM and HP have already realized: supporting a proprietary OS in order to sell hardware isn't cost effective anymore. As the cost of hardware continues to fall, the price pressure on software is going to increase. It'll be fun to watch if MS finally gets this before or after the PC hardware and Windows software price curves cross.
Internet Explorer is -- bar none -- the best browser today. Mozilla doesn't even come semi-close.
Excuse me? Does IE have tabbed browsing? No. Does IE block pop-up ads? No. Does IE have mouse gestures? No. Is IE infinitely configurable? No. Is IE slower than Mozilla? Yes.
What can I do in IE that I can't do in Mozilla?
The fact of the matter is that M$ has hardly added any features to IE since they won the browser wars. Mozilla has added tons of new features in each release and just keeps getting better.
This space left intentionally blank.
In a parallel story by InfoWeek:
Microsoft pushes on in server OS market
By Stacy Cowley
September 24, 2002 9:18 am PT
LINUX IS THE only serious threat to Microsoft's increasing dominance of the market for server operating systems, according to new research from IDC.
Microsoft's share of new server operating environment license shipments grew from just under 42 percent in 2000 to nearly 49 percent in 2001, IDC of Framingham, Mass., said in a summary of its recently released "Worldwide Client and Server Operating Environment Market Forecast and Analysis: 2002-2006."
On the client side, Microsoft's already overwhelming 92 percent share crept up to 93 percent in 2001. IDC analyst Al Gillen attributes the company's continued growth to its licensing programs and to customer transitions from older Microsoft products to its current software.
Click Here for the rest of the story.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
HA!
XP is easier and "just as stable"? By that logic, you should be using a Mac, because Jaguar is 10 times as easy to use as XP, and has a core BSD *NIX underpinning for stability. And it doesn't feature draconian licensing (it has no activation numbers, no shutting you down if you alter the hardware, nada).
IE is the best browser today, if you enjoy being hacked. It and Outlook and Office are interconnected open doors to the big bad world with screaming neon signs saying "Steal my data. Own my machine."
Office personally has enough bloat to float the Titanic, and yet it still finds ways of screwing up fairly basic activities.
Can't comment on Visual Studios IDE.
Finally, the time/money one spends on training for open source is half the time/money one spends on crash recovery, hacker recovery, data recovery, machine administration and security fix installs with Windows. Sounds like a bargain to me.
Read...we do not want to be bound by an open source license...that Linux Zealots will try to interpret anyway they feel proper to steal our IP...in order to do serious work in the open source world we need to use open source tools(and Libs) which would then bind our products by open source license rules...
Before you Mod me down I don't agree with him, but thats what they are thinking after all...
I will say however that they are right in a way...
if the OSS licenses were a little less restrictive and the community a little less over zealous there might be a bit more commercial initive. Unfortuantely, the way the community seems to see tihngs is, you used and open source lib, or other tool, to make your software...we demand the software be open sourced....
Sorry if its unpopular to say so, but that is how they think, and damn it I think they are actually justified...
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
steve jobs said the same thing back in the early eighties , while microsoft trampled upon them
Internet Explorer is the best browser today? Do you not use any sites that produce popups or something? Do you never block cookies or ads from a site? Are you not concerned about any of the holes that keep being shown in it?
As for Office beating LaTeX, Office has always been much easier to use and LaTeX has always produced higher quality output. That won't change unless Office moves to a whole new font and layout architecture. Knuth is still years ahead of the competition in quality.
You like Visual Studio? It's really slick editor is a joke to people that use emacs, its "world class" debugger may well be good but not *that* much better, and it has a decent compiler, but lacks lots of other supporting development tools like the whole GNU suite.
May we never see th
This guy has done more for FreeSoft and OpenSource than us geeks. Let him keep speaking! The fact that most users in the world use MShit means that we all have to worry about the fundemental intelligence of everyone.
Rien n'est plus beau que le creux du 0.
Reading the responses it seems like Microsoft is right.
I see... "Oh, you can turn it off!"
Yea, technically. But the network effect will make you use it just as surely as you need to create a Word doc to find work in IT.
Oh, you can live without Word! Yea, right.
Then I see... "Oh, Palladium will be under BSD!"
Microsoft hold PATENTS. You must remember Thompson and MP3. Maybe not.
Of course, there "It only pops up a warning if the code is unsigned!"
No. It stops unsigned programs from running. Period. Remember how Microsoft cooks the frog slowly? Bait, hook, enforce? Oh, again, maybe not.
One good one goes..."They'll build this for Linux, soon enough!"
No, they won't. Without the Microsoft "signiture" Linux won't be Palladium. If you modify the source code, it won't be Palladium. You know, if they let you insert code between a Palladium application and the CPU -- they lose. But, I guess "trusted computing" is too hard for us to "get".
Then, here's my favorite... "The Sen. from Disney says the implimentation should be Open Source!"
Utter crap. First, just 'cus you can read the code doesn't mean you can use it. Look at Microsoft's "Open Source" license. Further, it doesn't mean it will run as Palladium without Microsoft's signiture.
Gees, looks like Balmer is right.
They already have outsmarted us - hook, line, and sinker.
Please GET THIS people. "Trusted Computing" means your computer is TRUSTED AGAINST YOU! YOU HAVE NO ACCESS TO THE SYSTEM EXCEPT BY APPROVAL OF THE TRUST AGENT -- MICROSOFT.
If you "turn it off", you will have zero interoperability with the mass of machines being operated under the monopoly. Why? Because the legal default under COPYRIGHT for EACH AND EVERY document ever created is PROTECTED!
- Buy the competition,
- "Cut off their air-supply,"
- Intimidate the OEM's into not including competition on their machines,
- Copy whatever they want, "embrace, extend, extinguish" to get the de facto standard, and then,
- Sit back on the piles money coming in from Microsoft Windows/Office while the army of lawyers hamstring the competition in court.
Rest assured "outsmart" is going to be one of these tried-and-true ploys or else is going to be lobbying for new laws to make non-M$DRM computing "illegal."I continue to wonder how well windows would do if people were being charge for the real cost of the software up front when they bought a computer. That is, would a consumer pay $600 for a computer and then pay and addition $200 to get window or would they take the chance and save the money and go for $100 for a copy of Linux? As it now stands windows just comes with everything and people don't really think about how that impacts the price. Would be interesting to see how they'd react if they actually had to pay for it.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I'll bet you that some Microsoft programmers support Open Source and even work on it for kicks in their spare time.
Of the four people that I indirectly know that work at Microsoft, three prefer using and developing for Linux (one has a Tux doll in his cubicle at Microsoft), and only the least competent one doesn't know or like Linux (but he's also a Visual Basic programmer, as opposed to the others).
It's hard for MS to *find* competent developers that dislike UNIX. UNIX was designed to *be* a developer's baby.
May we never see th
We'll just have to outsmart our customers,our stockholders,our employees and pull the wool over our own eyes.Then Microsoft will beat opensource.
(steves brainscan translation courtesy of flyneye)
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Sing to the tune of the common march tune, and visualize Steve Balmer in a leprechaun outfit dancing and singing:
We will outsmart Open Source! we will, we will
We will beat Gnome with the Force! we will, we will
Linus and Red Hat will agree
Paying for Windows sure beats "free"
We will outsmart Open Source! We Will! We Will!
I wonder if Ballmer also finds it odd that IBM does the same for Microsoft. That quote could easily read, "It's weird! IBM says 'Hey Company X! Buy Windows.... From Microsoft.'"
You remind me of a phrase that sticks in my mind, from one of the Dilbert books,
"You'll Never Survive By Your Wits Alone!".
But I'm sure that the ~$50 billion in Microsoft cash will tide you over for a while!
P.S.
Microsoft, Microsoft we are all laughing at you!
Quite the opposite from "it costs you more in the long run!"
Kind of like Apple claiming that an 800MHz G4 is faster than a 2.5GHz PC. They gave up on that frivolous non sense and started selling Dual processor motherboards.
I'm going to assume that you've tried Linux and its apps for more than 5 minutes before posting your message. I'm sure it didn't cost you a dime to do so.
.NET costs over $1000 for retail licensing. The company I work for spent about that much for the set and they even get a discount.
What trust fund do you live off of to be able to afford the 'reasonably priced' apps you described. You mentioned the following classes of products: OS, Office Software, and IDE.
Windows XP, Office XP, and Visual Studio
Out of the pocket, you can't compare apples to oranges here. For the features MOST PEOPLE use in an OS (surfing the net, games, etc.), or Office package (write letters, balance checkbook in spreadsheet), or IDE (whatever they feel like doing if they're technically inclined to do so) only comprise the basics of the functionality. Why should I spend $299 for Office XP just to write letters if Open Office will do what I need?
I would wager to say that 80% of the home PC owners with an MS Office package don't use more features than is outlined in a beginner's training course (some people need training for Microsoft products, too). With that knowledge, they can use Open Office effectively.
If the highly advanced portions of the MS software is 'better', then I say go ahead and buy it. But if you don't use those advanced features, you wasted a whole lot of money. All you've done is made a decision that lacks common sense.
I'd rather spend my $1000 on a new PC or a vacation.
From first hand experience, XP did little for me after an upgrade. I was required to have 2GB free space to perform an upgrade from 98. The upgrade used ALL of that 2GB of space. I had to get a new hard drive because 2GB was all the space I had left. Great value, huh? XP plus an additional cost of a new HD. Although I notice a newfound stability in the OS (about time Microsoft), all I really see from the 2GB of junk that got installed is a bunch of eye candy. A 2GB installation of a RedHat or Mandrake installation gives me a plethora of software to play around with to discover the many things a computer can be used for.
I'm just glad I didn't spend any of my money for the upgrade. This was on my work PC. I support an existing application within the company, so I have little choice. But I can do without the upgrades, and instead, use Linux at home.
Considering that it took Malda 21 attempts to supply his Windows XP installation with his correct IP address and time zone.
Yeah, it will be real tough to outsmart him.
If I were a Microsoft employee I'd be a bit worried that the #2 man in the company has such an appalling grasp of economics. Open source/free solutions are nothing but added value. You start with a box of electronics which is worth nothing on it's own (unless making irritating noises is worth something to you), you install linux off a CD you downloaded for free, and presto, you have a system that can be used for work and recreation. Value value value.
The only way Microsoft products will have any value compared to open source/free is if they can do something that open source/free products can't do (crashing twice a day, taking 15mins to boot up, and having more security holes than my underpants aren't exactly unique selling points). Microsoft would have to start innovating to sell their bloatware (today, pretty coloured GUIs != innovation). How likely is that?
Personally, I reckon open source/free software could clean Microsoft's clock in about a decade if more work was put into educational software and entry-level programming tools. Get linux in schools! Schools'd rather be spending their money on library books and heating than licenses. They are the softest targets in the world for increasing the mindshare for open source/free software, but the effort going into office productivity apps (a market Microsoft has got sewn up tighter than a gnat's chuff) dwarfs that spent on educational gubbins.
Microsoft only exist because of kiddie hackers who could transform Windows 3.x into a working system and install hardware for nothing as a favour. Otherwise all the refunds to users forced to return that unusable heap of shit would have killed the company like the MSX fiasco should have. If all the kids who keep PCs running around the world for nada were brought up on linux, rather than windows, they'd be selling those solutions to the grown-ups and bringing them into the workplace as they grew up themselves.
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors - Plato
It's 'losers'.
Not 'loosers'.
I bet you use 'might of' too, huh?
By their own account, Linux has gone from a cancerous, unamerican toy to the greatest single threat to Microsoft in about one year. Just extrapolate the trend lines - at that rate, MS will NEVER be able to catch up! In another year, Linux will be bitch-slapping god around!
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
The working geek spreads the vibe, the working geek recommends the software, the working geek writes the code that makes things work.
The working geek says Linux. How are you gonna out smart that?
Hint: try DRM and buying a couple new laws
It's proven itself time and time again that word of mouth is more important than any advertising campaign ever ran.
Psst. Fanta is better than Coke or Pepsi. Pass it on.
The Shared Souce Initiative has gone worse than expected. Microsoft seems stunned that noone wants to look at thier source. Perhaps it is because any enhancement you make to the source code, Microsfot owns... the company gets stronger and better, by things you do. If your a Database Vendor are you going to make Microsoft more dominant, so they can put more money into MS SQL. If you are a media company are you going to enhance media capabilities so they can put you out of business with Media Player?
I support and encourage competition. Apple ships homegrown products with thier OS, but they in no way try to use an unfair advantage.
It is more than Source, and it is more than "creating" a community. You need to have a real community of people who trust the company/code/operating system they are working with. Capitalism is divided by the Landowners and those that do the labor. Who is willing to do Microsoft's Labor to have thier own fruits crushed?
"just to tell the MCSE monkey to reboot the damned machine"
How many MCSE's does it take to change a lightbulb?
Answer: 2. One to sit and babysit the broken lightbulb and the other to go fetch a Unix guy to change it for them.
I'm sick of hearing this stuff about the cost of Linux being in training etc.
Training is learn once, use everywhere. For example when I need a webserver, I set up Linux and Apache. I done this countless times. I don't learn anything to do it again, its FREE.
If I wanted to do the same on Windows I still need a windows license, even if IIS is free(cost).
The first is that, the main problem with competing with Open Source is that it's always faster to copy than to innovate. It may take years, multiple focus groups and millions of dollars to produce feature X or behavior Y in some commercial product but after that it usually takes a fraction of the time for that feature or behavior to be replicated in competing products. This is much compounded by Open Source which is also typically free (as in beer) thus undercutting the original innovators. A good example of this is commercial Unix and Linux.
I'll disagree (partially) with the statement that it takes millions of $ to innovate. It can be done, but it takes more than hacking code. You must understand your users and what they actually need (not what they think they need). In general this is a hard process and it is not surprising that it takes a business so much money, they are driven by marking and rarely by what the users actually need. And just because it takes a company so much money that doesnt mean it needs to be that way. That is like saying it must be expensive to get into space, look at all of the money NASA spends. It doesnt need to be that way.
A small group of people can do a rather good job of figuring out what is needed. Once that is done you have a good idea of what features your software should support (the things that are currently broken in your user's work process). Take a read through Beyer, H & Holtzblatt, K. (1998) Contextual design: Defining customer-centered systems. This gives you a process of going from start to finish of figuring out what should be innovated.
Given this process, there is no reason a couple of open source people couldnt go and figure out what to innovate on, and then actually build it. You wouldnt need to copy other companies applications.
MS has no choice other than defeating Linux. It may become the IBM of late 80s/early 90s if it fails.
It is sad to see that MS become the only enemy of free software/open source. MS can live happily with open source, actually. However, our business world do not allow it to happen. If MS loses its monopoly, the stock price/rating/etc will fall and the whole company may even collaspe.
Thanks, Steve, thanks a lot for focusing on a worse product instead of innovation (known to the civilized world as: Making a better product)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
You do want him to go away right?
Microsoft has 90% of the desktop market, but enough just isn't enough for them. Their hunger to assimilate every last person on the planet is insatiable. If your tastes or working styles disagree from theirs, there is just no room for you. Microsoft's hunger for market domination is pathological. I suspect that they really do know deep down that their software is just an incoherent collection of marketing-driven features inplemented in a haphazard manner, and it scares them to think that the public at large realize that; that's why everybody with a brain needs to be assimilated before they can create resistance.
What Microsoft just doesn't get is that different people have different preferences. People use Linux not because it's cheaper in some absolute value metric, but because they like it. To Microsoft, "value" means more features, more buttons, and more conformity in terms of appearance. To many Linux users, "value" means fewer features, fewer buttons, more configurability, and standards compliance at the API level. Microsoft can't add that value to Windows; to achieve it, they'd have to subtract stuff from Windows, a lot of stuff, and they can't do it.
Sorry, Ballmer, but unless Microsoft gets the government to mandate Windows, you'll have to be satisfied with 90% market shares. And they may even go down as Linux (for better or for worse) steadily and unstoppably adds your kind of value--as an option for those who want it.
Steve's got it wrong. He's going to hoard bananas, but he doesn't realise penguins don't eat them - only monkeys like himself.
It is hard for microsoft to lock out open source with the product mix they have. They only succede now because they were early and managed to win, but they no longer can compete on features, price, or IBM granted monopoly. (Though they can dictate hardware specs, something that is worrying to me)
Once you have a working version of a word processor nothing much changes. Once in a while the spell checker might need an updated dictionary or import filters for you compition, but open source can get them too. What new useful features can they add. There might be a few, but most fail the useful qualifier, and the rest are useful only to a small group. If you are in the latter group there is a chance that only open source will consider it worth the bother to add your feature, and then only because YOU can hire whoever you want to add it. (your choice to open source it or not unfortunatly)
Remember software is easy to copy. When an architect draws up house plans carpinders need to build it, which takes a team of four, 2 or 3 months, each house. With software once it is built, copies can be made easially. Open source is even easier than closed because it is free so they don't have license keys or the like. Open source: one person can put it in the default install CD, and once it works put it on all workstations in theory, closed source takes just a little longer because you have to handle license keys and legal issues, but still nothing compared to the house.
Once something has the features you need and is free, it has a compelling argument to switch. I do not see how Microsoft or anyone else can keep coming up with new features that are compelling enough to be worth the cost.
I have already switched to Kword. I admit that it still isn't nearly as good as MSWord, but it is good enough, and free. Many computers are coming with WordPerfect installed because it is cheaper, and most home users won't see a need to switch so long as the import/export filters work right.
It may take 100 years, but I suspect that for software that everyone uses, you will soon find that only free software is used. Only the software that is used by few people, or changes often will survive. (tax preperation for instance)
from the article: While Ballmer stopped short of advocating Microsoft's old "security through obscurity" policy, he pointed out that publicly posting bug fixes often prompted attacks. "The hacker waits till a fix is posted, then writes an attack and sends it out," he said. Such attacks are based on information in the fix.
In related news, I've noticed that the more dishes I clean, there more there are to get dirty, so if I don't do the dishes, then there won't be any clean ones to get dirty, and I'll be saved a lot of work.
c-hack.com |
Zapp: "Killbots? A trifle. It was simply a matter of outsmarting them."
Fry: "Wow, I never would've thought of that."
Zapp: "You see, killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down."
"What thou shalt not, I shalt did!" -Bart Simpson
If you work in a technological field, you would be well served by learning something other than how to click the "next" button.
Sincerely,
Original poster.
Oh and you should watch your mouth. (What would your mother say if she heard you using language like that?)
He's saying
"We'll outsmart open source"
and not
"We'll build better software than open source"
or something like that.
Like Cringley said in one of his pulpit pages a while back. It's all about winning, not providing better value for customer.
His choice of words is a slap in my face as a customer, and I'm not even an open source activist like most of you guys seem to be.
I just want to see him dance like a rabid monkey again...
"Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely."
I think you are mistakenly taking the "developers" comment out of context. Ballmer's shout phrase "DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS" was from a good old pep rally Ballmer was speaking at. He literally ran around for a minute, like a sweaty pig in heat, screaming "DEVELOPERS" over and over again.
Here is the video. See MONKEY DANCE 1
http://www.msboycott.com/media/
It's more of a slam, than a cry of the pro-microsoft crowd.
Thought it said, "We'll Walmart Open Source", and I was ready to cry out dupe!
Don't forget Microsoft's current advantages, such as control over PC hardware. They have lots of resources to hurl at the Opensource community.
... that they cannot and will not change:
#1: They cater to businesses, not to people.
Linux is the exact opposite - it caters to people and not to businesses. Considering that businesses are outnumbered with people by a few hundred million to 1, I see this as their biggest problem. Granted, they are trying to buy legislation that will level the playing field (make it illegal not to be *for corporations*, and Linux will have to change), but for now, they're in deep trouble.
#2: The *need* to make even more money.
Overcharging their customers year after year will eventually catch up to them.. most likely within the next 2 years. Linux is becoming even more user friendly, and continues to gather mind share among college students (who can't afford the cost of (or won't pay for) Windows' systems, even at the student rates). Today's college grads are tomorrows CIOs.. and they will talk with the CFO's about the massive savings that Free Software brings to the table. This doesn't bode well for Microsoft.
"To make a mistake is only human; to persist in a mistake is idiotic." Cicero
I'm no fan of Uncle Steve, but unless I'm missing something, he himself didn't use the word "outsmart". He said "We have to compete with free software, on value, but in a smart way." ZDNet inexplicably translated this to "outsmart", and the anonymous poster takes this one step further to "We'll outsmart open source."
Sloppy and dumb. Keep right on lowering your standards, everyone.
-- http://frobnosticate.com
I remember the days when the Amiga computer was popular and competing (somewhat successfully - despite Commodore' marketing failures) against the inferior IBM PC / Windows combination. (But we all know who won that battle, since the keyboard I'm typing this on has two windows keys where two [ A ] keys should be.)
The battle between Linux and Windows is similar, although there is no real hardware advantage between the two platforms, as existed between Amiga and PC. Linux has to fight the same thing that killed the Amiga: people are lazy, and are going to use the computer system that they encounter the most on a daily basis: the PC / Windows combination provided by all of our kind and generous employers. Windows is firmly entrenched in the workplace for the same reason that the QWERTY keyboard is standard; it was the first to get a foothold.
What this means, and this kinda sucks, is that we can't really expect LINUX to take over WINDOWS in any real significant manner. Which is a moot point anyway, since everyone should be using Amigas.
MS:
Mingw/cygwin exists but not supported well (MSDN support bitterly hates both). And icc and many of the free tools you mention for Linux are also available on Windows.
Maybe true, but MinGW works quite well. MAME is compiled with MinGW. And it works just as well as GCC does on Linux.
DEBUGGERS/DIAGNOSTICS:
MS: Um...ntinternals put out regmon and filemon. Apparently MS puts out WinDBG for free, though I haven't used it and apparently it isn't too popular. No free high level debuggers. Few diagnostic programs for already compiled code
Ummm... ever hear about Purfy and BoundsChecker? Also GDB works on Windows just fine?
GENERAL DEVELOPER COMPETENCE:MS: Many, many Visual Basic coders. MS dug its own grave with Visual Basic. Very low barrier to entry, very difficult to scale above a certain height
Very true, but how else are you going to get someone with a philosophy degree to program? The same fool would be out of his element on Linux.
APIS:Linux: Some UNIX cruft. Usually, APIs are pretty clean. Emphasis is on keeping things clean for the many developers -- if something is unclear in gtk1, fix it in gtk2.
No guarantee of binary compatibility between versions of GTK?
I could go on, but the point is that any MS claims of being ahead on making life good for developers are absolutely ludicrous. The *worst* thing about Windows, easily, is doing development for it.
For the record, I am not a MSFT schill, but they do have some things going for them and Linux is not perfect. It is important to recognize that they do have some advantages over us. Resorting to distorted "fact" sheets like this is just as bad as MSFT.So Ballhead said he was going to try to make more competitive software. No big revelations in this article, other than the mistaken assumption that you can't sell software for Linux and make a profit. But so what if he does? So what if he makes better software? Thinks of better ways to perform clustering? Develops more efficient user interfaces? All the ideas and themes will trickle down to Linux if they're good enough anywho. Of course, we're all assuming that Ballhead's definition of "Add Value" == "Embrace and Extend" == "Steal Ideas and Make Them Proprietary"
as a last resort, they will give windows away? Maybe it will be a stripped down version and they can call it Freedows (c).
And you disagree with Ballmer, the horror of it!!!
That in the eyes of Microsoft, is considered to be treason!
You are, therefore, declared to be a traitor, a non-person and an "Enemy of Microsoft"!
No one at Microsoft will any longer pay any attention to you, your copies of Windows XP will be invalidated and your stock options will all be revoked!
So there!!!
[mini-rant]
BTW simple enough to fix your problem, just because the autodetect doesn't work doesn't mean it won't run, fix it manually and stop complaining.
[/mini-rant]
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Take a look at DRM. Microsoft has already won.
1. Build DRM into operating system, and patent operating systems with built in DRM.
2. Convince content providers to ( hollywood, music industry, government, service businesses ( health care providers, insurance companies, etc ) ) to protect their IP with DRM.
3. Lobby government to make it illegal to manufacture computers without DRM built in.
4. Threaten computer manufacturers until they build DRM into their CPUs (as Intel and AMD have already both stated they will. Apple will follow when MS threatens to stop making MS software for them if they don't ).
5. Lobby government to pass law to make it a jailable offense to possess tools to allow you to get around copy protection ( DMCA ).
Worst Case Scenario:
--------------------
All online media is protected by DRM. Computers can not view any intellectual property on the internet without running a DRM compliant operating system. Running a non DRM compliant operating system on a computer with built in DRM violates the DMCA. Microsoft owns the patent on DRM in operating systems, so any competitor has to pay microsoft for the right to include closed source DRM code in their operating system.
A lot of the things necessary to make the above happen, are already in place.
It doesn't matter if Linux can compete with Microsoft on a technical level. Microsoft has billions of dollars to spend on lobbying the government for new laws, and with their monopoly power can threaten other businesses to support their DRM standard. They also have powerful allies in Hollywood and the RIAA, who both want microsoft to succeed with this vision.
Time to wake up.
The thing is that Windows will always have more polish than any Linux desktop. But it is the *gap* between Windows and open desktops that is shrinking. Soon (within a couple of years, IMHO), there will be many large corporations who will likely take the plunge with Linux as their standard desktop environment because:
All of these items are linked to cost to the enterprise. As soon as it is proven (and obvious to all) that there is little downside to perceived productivity and huge upside in reduced costs, the migration will begin. And I haven't even mentioned the issue of freeing your data from proprietary formats: as important as this is, most organizations haven't been stung by it yet and don't see it as critical.
Patience is all that is required. Well, that and fighting against the only thing that *can* keep MS in their current dominant position: government legislation handcuffing open software. You can bet that they're quietly trying to figure out how this can be accomplished!
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
Microsoft's advantage is not that it controls PC hardware (if it does). The real advantages is that they have money to pay people to do work. If something needs to be done they dont need to worry about waiting for someone interested in fixing that problem to come along. They pay someone to do it. Most open source projects dont have that capability.
Ballmer couldn't outsmart open sores.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Do what Apple did with OS X but use Linux instead. Ignore X-Windows and any kernel development that is made you release under GPL. Now Windows will still be a proprietary system (like OS X) but they will have a system that scales, is secure, cost them next to nothing to develop (the base OS like darwin) and will be very competitive with any Unix variant free or not that is thrown at MS/Linux (no GNU necessary as there is no GNU/Darwin/OS X) or better yet just call it MS Windows/NX.
If MS did this it would kill, Linux, OS X, Solaris (and all the Unix variants). Granted this is just my opinion but realistically there is nothing to stop them from doing this. Hell even better yet just take the Linux code out there, freeze it and make your own MS Linux Kernel fork and that will REALLY piss some people off, but there isn't a damn thing they could do.
Being an OS X fan I hope to hell this never happens but beware of your fears (as this is one of mine!).
that as long as the clueless IT managers are running/purchasing equipment, os and apps based on marketing promos, the world will see the domination by MSFT. However if someone on the top with a clue gave the IT managing jobs to propelerheads then we might see bigger and faster adoption of Linux in the corporate offices across America and the whole world.
Until then it is the <sarcasm>IT management </sarcasm> that will drive MSFT bid for the world domination.
PS I cringed recently when I saw Canadian Prime Minister Jean Ch. mingling with Bill G.
Well come again when you speak swedish like i speak english.
Du är ett litet missfoster som inte har egna argument och istället klagar på stavningen. Skriver du brev till böglordtidningarna när de stavat fel också ditt növel? Ringer in till din lokala tevestation när de råkat sända ditt favorit program (elefantbajs 2000) för sent?
HTTP/1.1 400
It's just too funny that they think these tactics really work for them. Since they are sharing source with trusted partners, they can get beyond the "several thousand employees", but they just don't get what it is all about. The question is, what is the motivation? The profit motive is central to everything they and their partners do, and it shows.
It is really dangerous for them to share their code even in this limited way, because it is likely to get out when they do. Since it is a given that security is never perfect, it will get out, and possible make their code even more vulnerable. They still try to say that Linux has just as many security bugs, while freely admitting that they have not designed for security in the first place. I find this statement particularly humorous:
With the launch of the initiative, Microsoft halted production on new code in all of its products and charged employees with scanning through every line of existing code in search of vulnerabilities.
That's from the Valentine article. I hope he isn't as clueless as this statement suggests. The idea that you can find security holes with this method would suggest he is not competent to hold the job title. Security takes a systematic approach starting from architecture, and including a lot of theoretical work to back it up. Only then can you expect to find security bugs by looking for hazards in the code. If they had done this in the first place, there are a large number of features that never would have gone in.
Admittedly, the open/free source community is a bit smaller than "the rest of the world", but they have the right motivation. Just how receptive do you think MS will be to reported problems? Is MS going to give your company a discount on licenses for some future product, or more likely will they attempt to minimize the importance of any flaw because it means more work for them to fix it?
When commercial companies embrace GPL practices, they are motivated to solve the problems that relate to their own products. This only works because you can't get without giving. GPL means that your competitor can't get the benefit without giving back the enhancements they make as well. Unless you are big enough to do it all yourself, there is always way more that you get from GPL than you give. If anyone attempts to cheat, it's all out in the open.
To close, I'd like to point out the FUD line that closes the article:
The big issue there, he said, was a reluctance to accept legal liability for open-source software.
I guess we are to assume that they will be replacing all those standard disclaimers with a statement of fitness and accept liability when they fail to deliver.
MSoft will win this war by one small tactic. Keep the users ignorant!
That is what everyone is basically saying. Keep the users dumb, just let them point and click, and soon you will have a whole lot of ignorant and fearful users bowing to your command. All we have to do is try to wean these folks off. But that my friends will be a tough tasks since it is not in our nature to accept change so easily, specially when you have to think as well!
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
Anyone remember how MS was so proud of W2K's security model that they put up that test server, and said - hey "hack it if you can!". Later on it turned out that they had some major upstream filtering to keep it safe, and yet it still went down. My mailbox has an equal amount of security bulletins from Microsoft and spam these days. And so much for the vaunted "Read my lips - no more reboots" bullshit. Many of the security updates (880 at last rough count) require a reboot.
"We do not anticipate offering software on Linux. Nobody pays for software on Linux."
Ahem. Last time I checked, we had to pay IBM for Lotus Notes/Domino. Practically bulletproof on Linux. Unlike that NT server we replaced it with that we renamed MONICA because it went down every morning. Guess our money doesn't count.
What happens if MS opens up their code to just enough eyes to allow someone to cut/paste ms code into OSS code? When MS yells "copyright infringment", what happens?
It would be most helpful in the future if you would only comment on those things which you have some knowledge of.
Obviously developing on the Microsoft platform is beyond your capability.
YES and NO!
Beat This....
Cisco PIX Firewall, $22000
Linux NAT Router, $400 PC (486/dx66/12megs)(+ 40 hours my time to configure it)(40 hours! you say I was being generous ok.) $5000 total.
Does the same thing.
I can now stamp out 100's of them.
You could always try to install in textmode, it's not as nice but hey ... :)
If only I could come up with a good sig
I know, we'll dig our way out!!!
No stupid, dig Up!!!!
I couldnt find in the article where he actually said "Well outsmart opesource". His comments seemed more directed at linux than open source in general.
He says..
"Linux is a serious competitor,"
Yes it is.
He also says:
It's not like Novell, it isn't going to run out of money--it started off bankrupt, in a way."
No, it isnt like Novel. Thanks for pointing that out.. Bankrupt? Whatever, WorldCom, Enron, Global Crossing, etc.. are bankrupt.. Linux being bankrupt doesnt even make any sense.
He also says "Linux is not about free software, it is about community," . I disagree.. I think its about the fact that unix / *nix, Linux, etc. is simply better at a lot of tasks than what MS has produced. If Windows had Telnet service, FTP, X, SSH, etc. etc. etc.. from the start, it wouldnt be so threatened.
I do agree that price isnt necessarily the deciding factor, rather performance is. He doesnt seem to address the fact that they cant compete on performance either. I wish he would. I dont hate MS at all, but he even admits that MS isnt competing on the high end, when he says "We will beat Linux on clusters. We can't beat them on price, but we have to add value."
What?
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
Here's a gem:
While Ballmer stopped short of advocating Microsoft's old "security through obscurity" policy, he pointed out that publicly posting bug fixes often prompted attacks. "The hacker waits till a fix is posted, then writes an attack and sends it out," he said. Such attacks are based on information in the fix.
Attacks are not based on information, they are based on vulnerabilities. Open source information is freely available, this hasn't started an avalanche of attacks on systems that use open source software. Only vulnerable software can be successfully attacked.
The answer is to make sure that fixes are easier to distribute an implement so the user base is up to date, he said.
Translation: We'll download our bug fixes without you knowing it. Trust us.
Good heavens Miss Sakamoto - you're beautiful!
>Well come again when you speak swedish like i
>speak english.
I don't need to learn Swedish.
I learned the right language the FIRST time around.
We've known ever since the Halloween Documents that they have been running scared
I think it's pretty clear that Microsoft is unconcerned with Linux and rightly so. When you run Linux, you have to be very paranoid about what scanner or digital camera or video card you buy. We've all been there. There have been slashdot stories about it. The bottom line is that the fundamental differences between Linux and Windows and MacOS are very few, when it comes right down to it. But switching from Windows to Linux, assuming you do more than just download MP3s and browse the web, is a big pain in the arse. The restrictiveness that comes from not being able to walk into Best Buy and get whatever it is you want--application, game, new video card--is frustrating. It isn't worth dealing with unless the alternative gives you something that's way, way, beyond what Windows gives you in a tangible way. And speaking as someone who runs both Linux and Windows, that isn't the case.
wasen't microsoft just at the linux world convention to prove to the liunx community that they weren't against them?the only "dirty tricks" that linux pulled was being cheaper, faster, better, and more efficent.
This project needs a few people with lots of time, not many people with a little time.
My own opinion:
self-organized programmers are useful only to find the way or the direction when noone can see it. When the way is clearly seen and defined and the project is well managed and organized then the crowd will be alway beaten by the team. So, if Microsoft will decide to really address the really defined problem - they have their whole chances and open source should stay away and look for someting that Microsoft is either overlooked or ignored. Open source is effective to invent something conceptually new. Microsoft is professional to re-invent the wheel, by shaping it better and wrapping it nicier. No matter that it won't runoff-road, although :)
Less is more !
As soon as anyone looks at any piece of MS code, they will have been outsmarted. Any code you write thereafter, MS can claim you stole from them. They simple show a non-technical judge how your code and theirs looks very similar. Look at all those lines that contain if, for, printf, return 0; and exit(0), see how they stole our ideas. All though this looks rather ridiculous, keep in mind that some lawyers were able to convince several judges that telling people how to play a legally obtained DVD on a Linux box was a despicable criminal act.
This does not only apply to free/open source software authors, this applies to anyone who rights code. If you look at MS code, you are risking ownership of anything you ever write afterwards. Maybe you will win the case, if you have the kind of money it takes to fight it. So, where do you want to be led to today?
We've bested Steve's Ballmer's spaniard and we've beaten his giant. Like we didn't see a battle of wits coming....
Compare and Contrast
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
The big issue there, he said, was a reluctance to accept legal liability for open-source software.
You know, I find it thoroughly amusing that they're "reluctant" to accept liability for OSS, but they don't have a problem avoiding it for their own.
Especially when you've got your EULA that says that you don't own your software....
Karma: Non-Heinous
They would give the core OS code back to the community as GPL states. However, like Apple whatever they decide to run on top of it can still be proprietary. There is not 1 thing in the GPL that says I cannot produce a GUI that runs on top of Linux (I think you're confusing Linux and XWindows as the same thing).
Again how does anything your saying differ from what I said in the earlier post? As soon as you can post the source code to OS X (which is not Darwin or it would be running on x86 right now) then I'll believe MS couldn't kill Linux, etc. Until then actually try to read my post before commenting (I realize this is slashdot and there is a 1 line minimum of reading before commenting).
i hope you get severely bitchslapped today :)
Good Gob!
In open source if somebody notices a bug, they either don't know how to fix it, so they ignore it or they post a notice to the bug traq or mailing list and it is ignored there (anybody claiming they are not ignored is challenged to find one that was really fixed due to the bug report rather than claimed "we know about that and are working on it"). Or the *do* know how to fix it, so they fix it. They might, just maybe, try to tell another person how to fix it, but by the time they are finished it is so frustrating (because they know the answer) that they say "screw it, I'll fix it".
In closed source if somebody notices a bug, they either don't know how to fix it, so they ignore it or they post a notice to the bug database and it is ignored there (anybody claiming they are not ignored is challenged to find one that was really fixed due to the bug report rather than claimed "we know about that and are working on it"). Or the *do* know how to fix it, so they fix it. They might, just maybe, try to tell another person how to fix it, but by the time they are finished it is so frustrating (because they know the answer) that they say "screw it, I'll fix it".
So "Fixing" is the wrong term. However it is true that "adding features" is different in closed source. It is possible to hire somebody to add a feature, and this is done all the time. Features are treated like bugs in Open Source. You can make an argument that this is good because it avoids bloat, but that is about the only argument for it.
To quote a line from the article that the original post was sparked from:
Asked by one lateral-thinking MVP whether Microsoft planned to offer applications software on Linux, Ballmer said no. "We do not anticipate offering software on Linux. Nobody pays for software on Linux."
As a Linux user, I have to disagree with this. I have purchased software for my Linux development box, most recently Insure from Parasoft. This is yet another great example of Microsoft's ability to open mouth-insert foot.
Well done to the person who marked it interesting.
don't foget the 60 lillion US dollar deal with HP. (to help out .Net)
Thankfully the GPL, in many ways, makes open-source software and Linux distributions immune to Microsoft's wrath. For one, most people developing applications and distributions are giving their work away for free, under the GPL. Even if Microsoft took it upon itself to buy up RedHat, Mandrake, all of the other "friendly" Linux developing companies and dismantle them, they would still be legally required to provide -all- of the GPL-licensed work that was contributed to the distribution..which means everything, in most cases. While it's unlikely it would happen immediately, passionate users would likely pick up where the now defunct company left off, and Microsoft would be left with a few dead facilities in its claws, a few hundred million down the hole. Not a lot for Microsoft, certainly.
What Microsoft is attempting to do now, however, is gain unequivocal control of the PC world. Not just your operating system..they want to tell you what you can do with your files. They want to know whose movies you're watching, and they want to be able to sell that information to the movie industry. They want to know everything about you and your computer. They want you to -rent- your software rather than -own- it, because it'd mean more money and less liability. Now that the Palladium initiative has been revealed, it's become clear that they plan to accomplish this by handing over control to the actual -hardware- of your PC to them, and a few close friends that they'll probably eliminate to gain control. Windows isn't exactly uncommon outside the United States either, by the way, so despite the fact that U.S. legislation -should- only affect the U.S., changing the very architecture of computers will affect the entire world. And don't think open-source software won't be harmed by that. If they had their way, every Linux developer who wished to create open-source software would have to pay to the keys to their system, more or less. Imagine having to send your car dealership a cheque each time you wanted to unlock the door, or obtain special permission from the RIAA to backup your own CD's (some people actually do this). And imagine being physically locked out of full access of your own property if you don't respond admirably to their wishes.
Eventually, these same people that are using and are beginning to use Linux at work will want Linux at home, to be consistent with what they use at work. So that is part of the tide.
For Linux to finally put the screws to Windows, and to truly start the death toll for Microsoft, two things need to happen:
1. An AOL Client for Linux
2. Native Games for the hardcore gamers
(Unreal Tournament 2003 is a step in the right direction)
Unfortunately for Microsoft, it's not a matter of outsmarting Open Source Software, it's a matter of not being able to remain relevant. Microsoft has nothing coming in the pipeline outside of *ahem* "security" and Palladium. While users will clamor for security, no one outside of the RIAA and MPAA are really clamoring for DRM and Palladium, and people (and companies) are realizing that for security Linux is the better choice for your OS.
Granted, Windows will probably never go away, and I don't think it necessarily should, but the days of the Windows Monopoly are coming to an end, if you ask me.
If Microsoft put as much energy into creating quality software as they do trying to "outsmart" the competition, Linux wouldn't be such "a serious competitor."
The fact that /. won't run an article from yesterday which discusses Linux server marketshare in unfavorable terms is more than proof enough of exactly who is "running scared."
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-959049.html
I think this is the realbone of contention in the whole open source battle. Philisophical aspects of intellectual property and what-not are peripheral to what is essentially a power struggle between people who produce software and people who sell software.
Developers are make their living producing the best, most valuable code to their customers (other companies, if they are consultants, management if they are producing code for internal use). Developers, who keep the lights on and water running by the quality of their code know best that open source is generally the best way to produce a reliable and effective piece of software, all other things being equal.
People who sell shrink-wrapped boxes of software, on the otherhand, know that closed source software is the way to go when it comes to bringing in the cash money. If you're a business exec and you have to report sales and profits at the end of every quarter, you probably dont give 1.5 hoots as to how good your software is, as long as long as customers keep paying for it.
Now i'm not advocating either position (or perspective really) however I think its interesting to get past the rhetoric and strike at the more base motivations.
Yesterday, once again, I helped a lady sign up for a Yahoo email account. It took nearly an hour. She didn't know how to sign up. She disn't know she could click on the 30 point letters that say "SIGN UP NOW!" on the Yahoo mail home page.
She couldn't tell me how she got on the Internet or what ISP she used. There's just this icon on the desktop that she clicks, and the Internet just appears. She uses email. She doesn't know if it is Outlook, WebMail, or Pine. It's just mail. She doesn't know if she has a modem or broadband although she's noticed that when she uses a machine connected to a T-1, "it goes a little faster."
The day before that one of our employees complained that Office wasn't installed on her computer. It turns out she didn't know to click Start -> Programs. There was no icon on the desktop, so she thought the program didn't exist on her machine. Computer Services had forgotten to install the shortcut, so it was all our fault.
The day before that a fellow complained he couldn't get on the network. It turned out the last person on his machine was administrator, but my colleague had forgotten to sign on just once as the employee, thus ensuring next time the computer was started, the employee login would appear automatically instead of administrator so said employee wouldn't be confused.
Geeks may rule. Linux may be "better," but the people above inhabit the earth in numbers unmatched by the Linux uber alles crowd, which sneers at anyone who can't do C, perl, or cgi scripts, or cook up a passable web page in a few minutes.
The fact is, you guys don't count. The three people mentioned above do, and they outnumber you. You say those poor slobs don't get it, when, in fact, it is you who don't get it.
And that is why Microsoft has nothing to fear from Linux.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
This is a nice idea. The only problem is that the users of Linux 'LOVE' their OS. I've never met anybody that 'LOVES' much less 'LIKES' Windows in any of it's forms. That's one big hurdle to overcome Monkey Boy!
... now this is just wrong.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
someone will code it up because that's what they're paid to do. As opposed to the open-source problem of finding someone who wants to do it.
But that in fact is one of free softwares greatest advantage! Self Selection
Consider this: people who like to do something are generally better at it than those who dont like to do it. (they like it because they are good at it, and they are good at it because they like it)
In a salaried developers time he may find himself working on pieces that hes not thrilled about. In a free software environment, the developer is always working on whatever grips his interest.
When someone comes around to wanting to do a spellchecker for free software, its damn likely theyll do it as well as they can, with no mind to deadlines, manager politics, or the other things theyd much rather be working on.
for (x=1;x>=1,000,000;x++){
print "DEVELOPERS";
}
the loop is executed exactly 0 times, if you look close.
Andrew
Last night I saw Young Frankenstein. Anybody noticed the creature is an exact replica of Stve Ballmer?
This is a community. Some of us really, really hate Microsoft, and some of us just don't care. Some of us call them names - some of us don't. XYZ Business, inc, doesn't care about what Linux zealots say - usually zealots don't make unbiased, intelligent, thoughtful statements - no offense to zealots.
MS has zealots who hate linux, too ya know.
In the end, linux must be accepted on the merits of the software, both public/open, and private/proprietary, the distrobutions, and the overall value it provides. It doesn't have to be free to be used - it just has to be _better_. This is what Ballmer's saying, too - win through value.
Personally, I think Linux (the OS) is a tremendous product. It's the most stable, secure, capable, free-as-in-speech OS out there. As a complete system, including the applications, it is formidable as a server - and as a desktop system i've seen it grow, from "linux will never make it on the desktop," to "well, if I help my grandma set it up, Linux is great for her," to the current, "Linux is actually viable on the desktop." In 2 years - well...we'll see how it all works out.
I can be a zealot - but today, I'm just a very happy user.
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
dare, I do not agree with your assumptions, and hence with your conclussion.
.NET features state of the art innovations for large XML document handling, and in Mono we will have an extremely hard time implementing your XPathNavigator-based XSLT. Even with reference implementations (like Daniel Veillard's), this is a truly advanced piece of code. We can emulate it using slower, more inneficient mechanisms, but we wont be able to perform as well as Microsoft's .NET XML implementation.
Linux is just starting to make inroads in the enterprise and critical application markets, say it became useful in 2001. This is the area that has been dominated by Unix since 1986. So it took us "only" 16 years to duplicate the enterprise functionality of a Unix operating system.
Sometimes copying is easier than innovating: but achieving total compatibility -which can not be ignored- is a massive task. Wine has been cloning the Win32 API, and it is one of the most ancient projects from the Linux community: it was there back in 1996, and we have still not managed to clone the entire Win32 API. Yes, copying certain things are easy, but achieving the compatibility is a completely different matter.
Am going to give you another example which must be closer to you: the Xml implementation in
I rather see Microsoft stay on the innovation track, than go into a legal battle against Open Source projects.
Proprietary software has some advantanges, and open source has different ones. Open Source is making some inroads into a Microsoft-dominated world. And I do not see anything wrong with having more than one operating system in our day to day environments: it promotes open standards, it promotes well written and well documented reliable solutions, and ultimately, it allows the consumer to choose a solution that is right for him.
Miguel
does this mean they're going to stop trying to profit through anti-competitive monopoly abuse and try to sell software based on merit?
i'm not going to be holding my breath waiting for said 'product'
I think Ballmer really meant was that Microsoft will outspend open source, purchasing politicos, FUD campaigns etc.
The only way to do this is by attacking the GPL directly, via legislation outlawing "unsecured" OSes. This IMHO is the main reason that Microsoft is really pushing DRM compliant media players and Palladium.
By supporting these restrictive policies, they can then point to open source/free software and say: "GNU OSes like linux encourage piracy." Another case that will captivate the sheeple will be a statment such as "Most (pedophile|pornagrapher|hacker) sites run Apache on Linux." Of course they will fail to mention that most sites of very type legitimate or not, use Apache, but will Joe Sixpack be able to sort out FUD from fact?
Congress being for the most part clueless/paid will agree and legislate DRM compliant "Digital Rights" to be mandatory on all OSes used in the US. Also look forward a direct legal challenge to the GPL itself in the near future.
Its time to really give a shit, contribute to organizations like the EFF, politicians that aren't stupid like Boucher, and stick up for ourselves.
'tail -f whatever.log'? Impossible on Windows without extra software.
Um... technically it's impossible on Linux without extra software, too. The "tail" command is part of GNU textutils, which of course comes with pretty much every no-cost UNIX distribution. But that doesn't mean it's not extra software.
Sorry to split hairs, but let's at least be honest here.
"Fixing" may be the wrong term here.
True. What I was getting at is that there are lots of problems associated software: bugs, needed features, broken/ineffictent ways to complete a task, documentation, etc.
The key is that once a problem is identified as a problem a company can pay to have it fixed. An open source project can request to have it fixed and either it will or wont.
Of course on the other hand anyone has the potential to fix a problem in open software. Only a few people within a company have the power to actually fix a problem in closed software.
In closed source if somebody notices a bug, they either don't know how to fix it, so they ignore it or they post a notice to the bug database and it is ignored there (anybody claiming they are not ignored is challenged to find one that was really fixed due to the bug report rather than claimed "we know about that and are working on it"). Or the *do* know how to fix it, so they fix it.
I know how to fix bugs in C and C++ applications that use the Windows API. I have noticed a bug in Microsoft Outlook Express. So, I should be able to fix it right? Umm. Guess what? I can't. I don't have the source.
See the difference?
However it is true that "adding features" is different in closed source. It is possible to hire somebody to add a feature, and this is done all the time.
I'm a business and I need an additional feature in Microsoft Office. I have money and I'm willing to hire a development team to add this feature. I asked Microsoft and they said they'd think about it for the next release. I asked Microsoft's professional services and they said that they don't have access to the source either, and they dont' make customized versions of MS's mass-market products.
See the difference?
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
AHA!!
> Consumers choose Disnyland - I choose backpacking, climbing, sailing, foreign countries.
Proof you are not a UNIX lover, you almost had me ad REI's, but then this remark came out. Everyone know's the UNIX lovers equivalent of Disnyland is of course Legoland (and not legoland california, either).
Nice try, you almost had me. Go back to starbucks with your mac and pretend to love Unix.
This only works when you say that all the UN*X variants are considered as one OS
While I realize I'm replying to a troll, misinformation is misinformation.
Don't think so. Why not? I mean, they are Microsft, right?
No, they're Microsoft.
They don't need to do dirty tricks at this point in the game.
Companies leverage every advantage they can, no matter what stage of the "game" they're in. The bigger they are, the more weight they have to throw around and the more immoral they can afford to be. Microsoft's business practices have been getting more aggressive and immoral since CPM/DOS, Stacker, etc... Microsoft will only get dirtier in the future.
They've already won. And... brace yourself... they won by having a better product.
You've substantiated this? Incredible... so where's your evidence?
Before you call me a Microsoft groupie, think about it. Windows XP, despite the draconian licencing (which is honestly their right), is so much easier to use than Linux it's not even funny, and it's just as stable. Internet Explorer is -- bar none -- the best browser today. Mozilla doesn't even come semi-close. Office is so capable that even LaTeX can't compare anymore, and Office has more functionality than Corel and any of the open-source efforts combined! The Visual Studio IDE integrates everything wonderfully, integrating a really slick editor, a world-class debugger, and a high-quality compiler.
This isn't evidence. You're expressing your opinion and foisting it as fact, which it is not. If you're so readily dishonest, how is anyone supposed to believe anything you have to say about software?
I find XP irritating and avoid using machines running it (What the hell is with that 5-second lag opening folders in the start menu on a 2.4Ghz P4?). I mostly dislike it for its insistance to go ahead and do things I neither asked for nor wanted (auto-dialup on modem-connected machines. Even when you disable it, it still annoys you with a dialog window).
Microsoft's right to draconian licensing just causes me to exercise my right to choose another operating system.
One of my work machines ran Windows98 SE and crashed or otherwise needed rebooting every couple days, despite an agressive scandisk/update/defrag maintenance schedule, an updated virus scanner, a spyware scanner and a firewall.
The machine is now running Windows 2000 Professional and still gives me a lovely blue screen or locks up every week or so (what I hate most is when everything but the mouse locks up. You can move it around, but you can't do anything but hit the reset switch). It has also been well-maintained until recently. I can't install Service Pack 3 because of the EULA. I've brought this up with my manager and am now preparing to replace Windows 2000 with a flavour of Linux or perhaps BSD.
My second workstation and my main home machine both run Slackware 8. My secondary home machine runs Gentoo Linux. I've had my main home machine experience a video lockup exactly once over a year ago while playing Terminus (my home machine uses nVidia's closed-source video drivers, fyi). That lockup was fixed by ssh'ing into the box and restarting X. After a driver update, I've yet to experience another lockup.
I made the Gentoo box kernel oops once by loading up the wrong kernel module for the on-board sound chipset... It kept running, though.
Aside from the video lockup a year ago, my Linux machines never reboot unless I deliberately shut them down to save electricity, or decide to update kernels. I don't think I've ever seen a kernel panic on one of my own machines.
I would have to say that it has been my experience that Windows is not just as stable as Linux.
I prefer Mozilla over Internet Explorer. It has tabbed browsing, can block popups, and the new look-ahead find absolutely rules IMO. I can't wait for 1.2 to stabilize into a release. I also greatly prefer the interface using the pinball theme, but that's purely an aesthetic thing.
LaTeX isn't a word processor. You obviously have never used it or you wouldn't even consider Microsoft Office a contender in its field.
Visual Studio does not adhere properly to ANSI code standards and thus isn't even an option in my current workplace.
The times I have used it, though, the code-completion feature often guessed wrong or came up at inappropriate times. It was more of a hiderance than a help. The debugger was also less than helpful. UNIX trace utilities and malloc() watching on the other hand, have been extremely helpful.
GCC 3.2 also produces much, much tighter code. This is no mere opinion. Try it for yourself.
Before you say "But linux is free!", consider that you need training to use it... which takes time, money, or both, which are certainly not free.
Same thing with Windows. Just because you're used to it doesn't make it intuitive. As you've probably heard before: "The only 'intuitive' interface is the nipple. After that it's all learned."
I've found Windows XP absolutely aggrivating and getting it configured to my liking has proven not worth the effort. Learning where everything is hidden, putting up with interface-borne interruptions and even just repeatedly waiting for the slow start menu takes time I'm not willing to spend on an operating system that has thus far proven itself inferior to the ones I currently use.
I don't fear change, and as such I enjoy freedom many others do not.
(though this fact did make me try XP and suffer briefly, I regret nothing)
We will outsmart OpenSource....
... (yes most of this also runs, if not exclusively, on windoze).
Read as:
We will outsmart, PHP, Perl, MySQL, OpenMosix, Apache, Audacity, Crystal Space, MiKTeX, SDL, Vega Strike, X-Tractor, FileZilla,
Or:
We will outsmart freedom and choice.
Somehow, I don't see it. Then again, a lot of money can buy a lot of laws....
moto411.com
1) Freedom
2) Democracy
3) Justice
4) Common sence
So why shoul Linux be so difficult.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
Compare and Contrast
:)
See what I mean?
I'm not a business. I'm a person who uses computers. I don't care whether or not a business can make money off of Open Source. All I want is software that:
1) Works correctly
2) Is secure
3) Is affordable
4) I can alter to suit my needs
Open source gives me this, Microsoft software does not.
Re: sounding like someones father.
In which case the Europarliament will almost certainly have finished passing analogous laws by the time Palladium comes to market.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The irony of this statement is that Comdex has been cancelled.
Finding God in a Dog
As usual, Ballmer is either lying or deluded. I recently fielded a call for a large Wall Street company that is deploying IBM software for Linux. Considering the size of the lunch tabs picked by the IBM sales person, I can tell you this is not a small contract.
IBM sells complex, expensive products such as DB2 and WebSphere for Linux. These pieces of software are certainly not free (nor open-source) and they seem to sell very well.
Please don't start a flame war against the closed-source nature of DB2. That's not the point. The point is that Ballmer does not have a clue.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
What exactly are you talking about? I don't get it. I use linux. I have friends who use linux. It's more user-friendly than windows - my linux setup doesn't BSOD, it doesn't give me "WARNING APPP TERMINATED TO TERMINATE APP PRESS OK NOW" errors, or other mindless idiocy. You don't have to hit Start to turn the cursed thing off, just type "shutdown -h now" on a console, the -h is for halt. Now that's user friendly, just...different.
Last I checked, Open source and linux was for the user. that's what the GPL is all about, so the user doesn't get screwed by the seller - the user has the code and the freedom. The community makes Open apps to serve the community, otherwise they would not publish them and make them freely available. Contrary to what you've said, linux is for the user, while proprietary systems like to lie and tell you they are for the user, but really, they are just doing what they have to to sell product.
I've left non-linux, non-geek users to sit at my icewm setup, and gone for about 20 minutes. I come back, they are playing music, surfing the web, and doing what they have to do. A smart person can handle a different set-up. And if you must have windows, use KDE. If you can get win32, KDE is natural.
In 100 years i'll look back and laugh, and say, you know, 100 years ago we were worrying about the MS/linux debate, and linux was growing like a monster. I'll be using something entirely new and snazzy - hopefully open source still...and loving it.
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
"We have to compete with free software, on value, but in a smart way. We cannot price at zero, so we need to justify our posture and pricing. Linux isn't going to go away--our job is to provide a better product in the marketplace."
I believe this is exactly why competition exists. It's a shame that MS seems to think this is some "new" concept.
Work is punishment for failing to procrastinate effectively.
Open source developer != volunteer!
There are MANY open source developers who develop open source software because they like it AND because it's their job. Look at all the developers from Sun, Ximian, RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake, etc! I'll name 3 of them: Keith Packard (SuSE), Blizzard (RedHat), Havoc Pennington (RedHat).
You are describing the home PC, and you are absolutely right: Linux is far away from mainstream here for all the reasons you stated.
The enterprise is another story. On the server end, Linux is already well placed and gaining installations. And why not? It's stable, secure, robust, and free from nasty licences and restrictions.
On the desktop, they're getting there too. Windows will always be a better desktop OS, but the *gap* between a Linux desktop and Windows is narrowing all the time. Add to this the advantages of customizability, licencing (again), and the fact that corporations tend to frown on users installing their own new "scanner or digital camera or video card" into their PCs, a Linux desktop looks like a great platform for a corporate desktop (after it matures a bit more).
And, of course, the enterprise is where the real money is made by Microsoft (not the home users) So, I disagree with your statement: Microsoft is (or should be) *plenty* concerned with the advancement of Linux.
Bottom line, I expect *many* large corporations will be MS-free within two years. At home, it will happen more gradually, but the increased penetration at work will slowly drive home installations, too.
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
What on Earth is the man thinking.. his mind runs something like: "Oh my God, look at them! They're not making any money! Attack!" Another example of what the rampant greed innate to capitalism can do. Pigs.
Hi
So their future behavior (smart) is going to be different from their past behavior (stupid). That is unlikely, and we shouldn't buy it. Like a good magician, he's directing you to look over here (we'll be smarter) while he does some stuff over here (palladium, intense lobbying efforts, and much much more).
M$ plays for keeps, and they want ALL the marbles. Remember that.
It's modded as troll because it is.
An opposing viewpoint is one thing. Stating that viewpoint as fact and including blatantly false information is another thing entirely.
eg: LaTeX is not a word processor and can't be compared to Office. The troll would know this had he actually tried to make the comparison.
Well if they are going to outsmart OSS what are they going to do? Take us into a bar and then when we are piss drunk make us sign a contract that says we can only use Microsoft, well if that were to happen I would make sure I get my name changed to Microsoft Sucks.
No problem - I'm a hair-splitter myself.
Shall we both be content with agreeing there is no default install of Linux, whether headless server or anything else, that doesn't have the tail command in it? Whereas in the Windows world there is no install of Windows alone that does have a tail-equivalent in it?
Cheers,
Ian
The day microsoft outsmarts open source, is the day I switch back to them! :)
good luck microsoft! you're gonna need it!
"Ask me that again usind different words." --Divy
I was saying the core OS could be in the GUI not the kernel. The kernel is only a small part of an OS.
I'm trying to cpio my oracle download so what better do I have to do? I agree BSD would be a better choice for MS.
However, since BSD isn't the buzz and Linux is, that is my point. Who really cares what is underneath it.
With out breaking the DMCA you couldn't reverse engineer MS Linux and therfore prove they were violating the GPL. With 40 Billion in the bank they can afford better/more lawyers (hell they can buy laws) than the Open Source community.
That is what scares me. Personally I like OS X over windows and linux.
same ms fud. bfd.
like we fucking care what we think.
wait, of course we fucking care what the think! we're all a bunch of self-important LEENUCKS users, remember?
how come your not rich?
Uh, never mind...
MS makes 2 to 3 times what they do on Windows by selling Office. Why do you think office .x is available for OS X? Hell if you've ever used it you'd be shocked at how much nicer it is than Office XP (although most of that can be contributed to the Apple Aqua interface).
Apple could give OS X away for free but why? And the dumbest move they could ever make would be to open source (GPL) OS X (GUI). It would be on x86 so fast your head would spin. Then their hardware sales go from 3~5% of the market to 0%.
no one could give a single reason other than "everyone else uses Windows
Is it fear of the unknown? Is microsoft like the reassuring parent after they've been told a scary ghost story? I'm still trying to figure that out.
When I look at a computer, I see a box of metal, plastic and electrons. I see mathematic equations and for/next loops. I see something engineered and well planned.
As well, I should. I have a degree in Computer Science. I make my bread and butter off of it.
When the average person sees one, they see something totally different. They see something mysterious and powerful. They see a creature capable of causing havoc and dismay. In most people minds, the only thing keeping this creature from devouring their latest report is the few things they know about it.
Microsoft has nurtured this perception.
That is why business men don't/won't change their OS. They know this demon, and they know how to appease it. Why switch to another when it could be much worse? Harder to appease? More complicated to work with?
IMHO, that is the perception of value.
I don't know what advice to give you. But, I've found that education is usually the best alternative. If that doesn't work, prove them wrong by making at least one box Linux and actually use it then demo it.
I yearn for the days when computers are about as mysterious as cars.
Star Pirates
Just a loose set of thoughts with regard to this article. I don't have time to arrange them into something more cohesive. I use the term Linux to generically apply to complete distros with a desktop environment:
;) )
The quote from Ballmer at the very end of the article may be a harbinger of things to come: software is not consistently profitable. The very fact that Ballmer considers it weird that IBM would tell a company to buy software from someone else indicates that the "playing field" is changing. Sure, IBM isn't at the top of the game anymore, but I think you may start to see more and more companies abandoning the software business for more profitable fields like embedded devices and other dedicated systems that we haven't yet dreamed of. The whole problem with computers right now is that people actually have to "interface" with them in non-intuitive ways. But that's a different topic...
In Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning there was Command Line", he says that it is the fate of software to become free. Commercial UNIX gave way to free UNIX, Microsoft Word now has a respectable challenger in OpenOffice.org, etc... Or at a deeper level (the concept level as opposed to the product level), GUIs have become so inexpensive compared to the original Xerox systems that some are free: XFree86 + GNOME or KDE. I believe his observations are correct. The OS market will continue to become less profitable if the "movers and shakers" aren't always looking for the next "great thing".
The only thing propping up Microsoft right now is the Office suite and to some extent Internet Explorer. To take this crutch down would only require the provision of a application that uses a totally new and better approach to achieving the same results. No one has done it yet. But again, I digress... (
My point is... that Ballmer's comment about "Added Value" above Linux should really be about finding the next "killer app" that Windows has and Linux does not. This ensures that more people who follow that path of least resistance will choose Windows every time.
These victories are short-lived however. As soon as a concept is out in the open, it's fate is to have reproductions and innovations built around it. Witness: Apple popularizes the GUI that Xerox couldn't move. Microsoft immediately responds with their first release of Windows. Mosaic begat Netscape who begat Internet Explorer... (at the concept level, not the business/profit level).
Look at the music industry. In 1994 the Spice Girls came on the scene and were hugely successful (opinions about their music aside). So what happened immediately after that? Knock offs. Tons of them. None with a chance of making it as big as the original, even if the original was not as good as the newer acts. To a certain extent, this happens in the GNU\Linux\Open Source world more than it should. But, undeniably, there are some ideas that just can't be improved on. So, what do we do? Look ahead and occasionally check the other runners next to you. When I say look ahead, I mean look for new approaches at the user level not the system level. These are real differences that the user can see, feel and experience. Of course, this is assuming that you are interested in moving Linux out to "Joe Average".
Microsoft can't outsmart "Linux" since there isn't any one model to take down without some heavy handed help from the governments of the world. At the moment, they aren't doing to well in that arena either... Linux will be around until something better comes along. That "something better" has to be completely different compared to Linux and provide features that Linux doesn't have. However, it should also still be free. That is where Microsoft will never be able to compete.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Never do this if you ever plan on outsmarting anyone. It kills brain cells at twice the rate that huffing paint does.
Bing bong bing ... The more you know ... (Tm)
Your reply "How can I be more specific than he was just wrong? The comments about compilers were wrong, as were the API, developer support, dev tools, debuggers, developer competence, sample code, and so on and so on." shows that you can not form a coherent, logical argument. That statement is like replying to a child's question, "Just because."
There is no problem in disagreeing...but present a specific reasons for your dissent.
I have been developing applications on both platforms for a number of years, specifically ~15 on Windows and 5+ on Linux. 0x0d0a's comments are a fair and accurate accessment of the state of affairs regarding MS and Linux in the various categories selected. I have had some of the same experiences as 0x0d0a described.
It is painfully obvious you haven't done a lot of development in either MS or Linux. You need to seriously look into the state of affairs in the Linux world before you condemn. Maybe, one day soon, you will learn to recognize Micro$oft FUD for what it is...hogwash.
SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0
0 rows returned
I remember seeing a chimp with Down's Syndrome: it walked fully upright like a human. This is one of the spookiest things I've ever seen, but Ballmer running around and shreking like a chimp comes a close second.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
His point was that if you put out software that is worth the cost for Linux, Linux users *WILL* buy it. You just happen to have to compete with the open-source developers, so in order to put out a product that Linux users will buy, you have to do a *DAMN GOOD* job.
Linux games are one example - John Carmack is a genius, hence his products tend to blow any open-source effort to compete away. Same for UT and any of the games Loki ported.
Your example of Oracle is another good example - Your company paid $60,000 for it BECAUSE IT WAS WORTH IT.
I think it's best to read what Ballmer says not as, "Linux users don't pay for software", but "Our software is such utter crap that it can't compete with the likes of Abiword and OpenOffice"
Visio for Linux might be nice though. Also, I haven't seen any presentation tools like PowerPoint for Linux that I've really liked. No point in porting Turd, though.
Ximian is a good example of why Ballmer is wrong - Their commercial offerings are Ximian Connector and their commercial version of Ximian Desktop comes with StarOffice, and they seem to be doing well.
(Note, Ximian should complement Connector with MSProxy/ISA Server support. Dante's MSProxy support is unsupported and way out of date, and doesn't work with ISAServer.)
No point in releasing Deceleration Server for Linux either, Squid blows it away. I'd buy Visio though.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
As an interested observer (I use OS X instead of Windows *or* Linux) this seems like good news. While many posts here were getting into religious flame-wars, I noticed this:
"Linux is a serious competitor,"
"We have to compete with free software, on value, but in a smart way."
"Linux isn't going to go away"
In just the first paragraph, we have the CEO of the worlds most powerful technology company acknowledging, for all the world to see, that Linux is a serious competitor that is here to stay!
Congratulations to the Linux community for doing what no private company has been able to do - if M$ is serious, this can only be good for computer users in general.
That is what I thought OSS was about, choice and competition in the marketplace driving all participants to create greater value for the user. Please keep in mind that it is NOT about the obliteration of Microsoft - thousands of men and women, and *their children and families* work for or are supported in some way by that company - they can't all be demons from hell! Can they?
"That naive cube! How long must I suffer this!" --Sheldon J. Plankton
Invention is 99% perspiration. He delegates the inspiration to others.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
It's true that Linux wins on technology. However, it isn't technology that's going to win it for us.
... heck, think NeXT, think BeOS!
Think Betamax
What matters is ease-of-use by the computer-illerate-end-user who has a task to perform or, more realistically, just wants to play a game.
In the corporate world it's about being able to pass blame if something goes wrong. Management throwing blame downhill can make "choosing Linux" stick easier than dealing with the counter of "it's Microsoft's fault, you know how their trackrecord is."
Just generating the perception of "we've been on hold for 70 minutes trying to get through to someone who knows what they're doing" creates more illusion of 'doing something' than a Unix guru going "oh, look, it wasn't Linux afterall -- it was this hard drive that burned out because you didn't replace it when I told you to."
This sig no verb.
Please post the Steve Ballmer "DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!!!!" clip link....
thanks
100% Insightful
'Shared' source locked behind smart-card access and the value of developers determined by what they post on discussion forums? I haven't really participated in a large open source project, just done some fixes and changes to free (or free-to-academics) scientific software for my personal convenience. I have never done any of those to programs that require sending paper agreements over snail mail or signing NDAs, let alone being given a 'valuable person' status by the authors, in order to read the source. MS is not building a community. A club maybe, but a community is not what they will get this way. Source to Windows is a very different deal from source to an obscure molecular modeling program, I admit. People may be willing go through some trouble to get access to it, but still, I think the way you get to read and change Free source is worlds apart from what MS is doing.
for (x=1;x>=1,000,000;x++){
:)
print "DEVELOPERS";
}
It has a bug
I'm not saying they would close the linux parts they were using. They could close anything they build that installs on top of linux, for example Oracle.
When you run Oracle on linux do you get the source code? Is it free? Are they violating the GPL? No is the answer to all of these questions. I'm not saying MS could hijack the kernel I'm saying they could build a proprietary system on top of it. And that would avoid breaking the GPL.
It's not a gurantee that it will go away if we ignore it.
Sometimes you can ignore things, sometimes you have t actively fight...or at least educate people as to how & why to choose against it.
Hey miguel,
Linux is just starting to make inroads in the enterprise and critical application markets, say it became useful in 2001. This is the area that has been dominated by Unix since 1986. So it took us "only" 16 years to duplicate the enterprise functionality of a Unix operating system.
Linux is only about 11 years old but your point is taken. Also you should note that a number of innovations in proprietary Unix especially in the area of memory management end up back in Linux in much shorter than a decade.
Sometimes copying is easier than innovating: but achieving total compatibility -which can not be ignored- is a massive task. Wine has been cloning the Win32 API, and it is one of the most ancient projects from the Linux community: it was there back in 1996, and we have still not managed to clone the entire Win32 API. Yes, copying certain things are easy, but achieving the compatibility is a completely different matter.
Duplicating functionality is not the same thing as creating exact duplicates of API functions. For example, it's one thing to create a standards compliant, fully functional web browser (i.e. Mozilla) and another to try to duplicate Internet Explorer's behavior and APIs feature for feature and bug for bug.
I rather see Microsoft stay on the innovation track, than go into a legal battle against Open Source projects.
I completely agree.
And I do not see anything wrong with having more than one operating system in our day to day environments: it promotes open standards, it promotes well written and well documented reliable solutions, and ultimately, it allows the consumer to choose a solution that is right for him.
Nothing is wrong with multiple OSes and in fact I run Linux and WinXP at home (although I could probably do with an upgrade on the Linux box once I find a free weekend).
That is exactly what I was trying to say. And if it doesn't scare you it should.
MS can easily do this with about 1-2 years of effort (well actually 3-4 because they are a tad slow).
The only reason I believe this will never happen (or at least not until everyone stops using Windows) is it would be like apologizing to your wife after a fight. It's right, it's what you should do (when you're wrong), and it hurts your pride (MS has a lot of pride).
The king is dead, long live the king.
it's much simpler than that, business execs don't understand software, it's a black pandora's box to them, along comes M$ and says "give us some money and we'll take care of everything" and they have all the answers tightly integrated with a huge available and (realatively) inexpensive (especially compared to a good unix admin) labor supply as well as having th ebenefit of being the established standard..
those are all things which shouldn't be taken so lightly, not everyone cares if linux is technically superior in one area (clustering or wahtever) if they have to replace their entire infrastructure with their operating system (especially if they assume that Linux "solutions" are comparably priced to those of M$)
my $.02, maybe i've just had a long day of economics class
In other news, the once monolithic software giant Microsoft has been ordered to make good on prior rulings by the US supreme court, declaring Microsoft an illegal monopoly and a threat to global security. The groundbreaking trial lasted three months, as witness after witness presented evidence on the 874 claims made against the corporation, ranging from freelance programmers whos works had been stolen, to
schools and hardware vendors who had been forced to submit to Microsofts "bully tactics"
with software licensing.
The judgement was effective immediately: All trading by Microsoft is to cease and the company is to be completely dissolved. At 9am eastern time, all assets held by Microsoft, including reserves, were confiscated and distributed to the benefactors of the Gates Foundation and other charities.
All patents owned by Microsoft Corporation and its subsidaries which were issued under the old "stop-people-using-it" patent system are to be released to the Free Software Foundation under the new GPL Patent, preventing the witholding the technology from other developers.
The board of directors and lead programmers of Microsoft, now unemployable in the technology industry, have been offered positions in parking lots and soup kitchens around the country. All other employees have been given redundancy of 1 years full pay, and some have already started rebuilding their former businesses which were bought out or squashed by Microsoft over the last twenty years.
This news follows eight years of steadily dwindling interest in Microsoft, as
the corporation has not managed to adapt to the market, and their policies on
such software as their legacy flagship "Windows" has steadily been replaced with the Open Source business model.
William Henry Gates III, who has been under house arrest since June for attempting to bribe
the Chief Justice with a large Hawiian island, was unavailable for comment.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I take it, like a Bone world rat creature, he is going to outwit us to death.
wouldn't it be great to have an anti-palladium pro-linux or pro Apple ad during this years superbowl that shows a user who hasn't paid his palladium tax and now can't access word, photos of family, anything.
His friend next to him is using Linux or Darwin and says that because it's open source, no-one can sneak in any traps like that.
Or something equally enlightening about linux and scary about palladium (non unfounded FUD, if you will).
I'd love to see joe six pack realize in a 30 second ad that microsoft has the power to turn off his computer. BOOM. and there isn't a damn thing he can do about it.
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
Hehehe... at least the Linux users can continue to write. Emacs, vi and pico work perfectly fine without X. But those pesky Windows users are busy finding their rescue disks...
You know, I REALLY wouldn't dislike NT/2000/XP so much if it had a really robust command line/non-GUI mode.
Disclaimer: I use Unix and Windows about 50/50.
BSOD Blue Socks of Death
What he says doesn't amaze me.
What amazes me is that people listen.
Linux, on the other hand, is fragmented by its own nature, and has no "central voice" to counter absurd MS FUD. For example, if IBM makes a statement about MS, what would the press do, but go to MS for a counter point and publish it. MS makes a statement about Linux, what does the press do? There is no single obvious place to go for the real story, so our voice is never heard, unless someone happens to stumble across Slashdot or another such site.
How about a central Linux Marketing/Advocacy Project, with a budget, and a few dedicated people on staff, to deal with MS FUD, and promote the real advantages of Linux and other open source initiatives; I'd toss in $100 a year to such an organization; if a few thousand fellow geeks did the same thing, it'd be funded enough to make a difference, and have the visibility needed.
Now, getting the Linux community to agree on a central voice might be an exercise in futility, but it would sure help stop the MS steamroller, and wake up the public a bit.
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
You don't have to install linux on all the desktops. When the representative from Microsoft or the BSA comes around next week, just make sure they see and hear about your linux trial run on 10% of your desktops with openoffice and evolution!
:)
If you are backed into a corner, you need bargaining power. Even if it's not what your company needs, it's a powerful, low cost bluff, and your business associates should be able to understand that.
I suggest you call a meeting.
Oh, and do be sure and get feedback on your trial run anyway, even if it's just a ruse
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Unlike Mircosoft with Windows the majority of effort put into Linux is not profit driven. Besides anyone with decent programming skills can contribute to Linux. Even the firms that sell Linux for profit have it avaliable free for download.
If the OSS community got hold of the Aqua source, how long do you think it would be before it got ported to x86?
That would benifit the Linux-on-x86 community greatly, but would pretty much be the end of Apple's rather overpriced hardware.
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
...he didn't have an install base
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
Yes and it has only taken the ReactOS project 5 years to clone the nt kernel. You are not thinking out side of the box dude. Wine is but one part as X is only one part of a *nix clone.
Linux = Kernel
X = interface
GNU = tools
Now you have
ReactOS = Kernel
WINE = Win32api
Mono+WINE = Windows.Forms
GNU-mingw = everything else
In another 6 months++ its not going to matter what they do because the cat is out of the baf and nothing can stop people from writing to the lowest common and in this case its still 9x.
If you really want to see change and bring OSS to windows while helping linux, we should be working on a IDE for gcc on linux and Mingw on windows that could use and build from the same sources for Win32/GTK. Adapting such a enviroment to mono shouldnt be to hard either once it is done.
You could even call it the CrossOver Developer Studio =)
Free Unix? Free Windows. http://www.reactos.com
The MVP initiative will be a big part of Microsoft's efforts to promote a sense of "community" among users and developers, ...
Real nice community there. One that doesn't share source code, charges for tech support, gets all testy about its 'intellectual property', screws the users, and everybody sues everybody else. I REALLY want to be a part of that. Maybe that's why the word is in quotes.
"Screw causalilty!" -- Prof. Farnsworth
Same thing for the added features. Here I see paying somebody actually works, if you pay somebody to add a feature, it gets done.
I think the reason is that the knowledge that a feature could work involves less work than implementing the feature. That is not true of bug fixes, as it takes more effort to explain the bug and how to fix it than to fix it yourself, and saying "find and fix this" is usually noneffective because it usually means it cannot be fixed. Knowing it can be fixed requires almost all the knowledge needed to fix it, so by the time you know that paying somebody is cost-effective you can fix it yourself.
My company has been using a product on HP-UX for the past ten years to do real time tracking and interfacing with embedded systems on our our production lines all around the world. This is a mature, beautiful, reliable beast that we use with either Oracle on Solaris or DB2 on our 390's.
The policy of our company on using MS IIS and SQL Server is (and will continue to be) "not on anything business critical, and nothing outside of the intranet"
Now, the developer of our application has told us that in two years they are going to stop supporting their *NIX version and they are pushing everyone over to their new app, which is written entirely in VS .NET and requires Win2k with all the .NET server-side and client-side stuff, and hasn't even made it out of beta yet, since we spend half our time rebooting and troubleshooting the box they sent over to us.
When I asked "Why aren't we just saying to hell with their support (now very minimal - less than 60 hours per month), and keep going with what we know works?" the answer is ".NET is the future and it's what the developer is going with.
So it is perception and it is developers, and I am not looking forward to our first implementation of this stuff nex year, because I haven't seen anything yet to prove that it's better than our current workhorse.
Wu-Tang Name: Half-Cut Skeleton Get your own Wu-Na
Am I correct in assuming you have not reported these difficulties? [Side note/mini-rant, what is your guess as to why it thinks it knows what it is when it actually doesn't? 99% chance - poor standards or lack of standards, which means we _need_ you to report this broken hardware so it can be worked around! Don't expect it to go away on its own.]
Sort of interesting, but not really relevant because the article only takes in to account server license shipments, which makes up only a fraction of actual Linux deployments.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Obviously developing on the Microsoft platform is beyond your capability.
Ah? I've done two Win32 projects professionally. I think I'm reasonably qualified to make criticisms about its shortcomings as regard developers.
May we never see th
"Open Source" is not a competitor
.NET in New Zealand ?) when hey can use something that costs less than their car?
Linux Never would have got all this "Windows Killer" press if Microsoft was not a monopoly already
I used DOS, I used Win 3.1, in 1994 I started Duel booting, in 1998 I upgraded to win95 because 1 application needed it.
People develop because:
1. The Enjoy it
2. There is nothing that does what they need already
3. The Ego factor
1. Would Joe citizen buy Visual Studio for $4962.50 (list price for VS
2. If Microsoft had made a Kickass IE for X/GNU/Linux for no $ would Mozilla have had such an effort behind it?
3. Again people would develop for windows if it wasn't so expensive and if it was actually documented and understandable.
Let's forget these holy wars
DOS/Windows was/is the only thing out there, people wanted choice, they couldn't find anything that Microsoft's Bullying hadn't killed (OEM Deal with IBM over OS/2 Anyone?) - I was keen on trying OS/2 Warp way back but nobody was selling it, and there was no software.
We Are NOT Competitors Microsoft
We are Customers who you have upset
If you did your Job Right and Stopped the Bullshit and Childish Behaviour, No other Corporations try to Destroy the Competition, then "Open Source" would not be a problem
To Quote Tommy Lee Jones in "Under Siege"
"It's A Revolution Baby"
Revolutions happen because the People believe they are Oppressed, Stop oppressing us!
Type unto others as you would have them type unto you.
Carnage,
Re: the 16 vs. 11 year discrepency, Miguel is refering to the entire GNU project -- not just Linux. WRT: the Wine project, I remember that going all the way back to fall of '94. I think it started in '93ish...
Good thread, BTW.
posting as AC because I'm moderating this discussion...
Cheers,
--Maynard
Yes, you can do CreateProcess(), but because Windows doesn't have support for copy-on-write, it's massively expensive in memory and CPU time, and destroys the fork() programming model where you can spawn off copies of servers that can be done so elegantly in Linux. Instead, you're required to use threads. Now, there *are* a few tasks better done with threads, but generally, developers in Windows are forced to use threads for tasks that they really should be using processes for.
Also, while mingw does work (I use it whenever I'm in Windows), it has a number of issues.
First, there are bits of the headers that are always out of date -- I had to send in a couple of corrections while doing work with mingw. Granted, the mingw team fixed them immediately (thank you, open source!), but they're still forced into a situation of necessarily playing perpetual catch-up with Microsoft.
Second, the support for mingw with third party tools is less than good. You can cobble together a decent toolkit, but it takes work and a fair bit of knowledge of what you're doing. There's a resource compiler (and a free resource editor) that you can make work together with a fair bit of poking. You can compile libraries, after learning about Windows and mingw name mangling and calling convention issues. I could never get gdb working, though it's possible that someone else could. And snippits of source and third party tools do not tie in well with mingw.
This is not meant to be criticism of mingw -- I'm very impressed with their tool, but they're in something of the same position as the WINE folks -- they're deeply invading what Microsoft considers to be its own turf, and compatibility issues will come up unless they're on top of any changes like hawks.
May we never see th
And the dumbest move they could ever make would be to open source (GPL) OS X (GUI).
;-)
:-)
Wrong. What OS X needs is Applications! While it makes sense to develop FIRST for MacOS X (fastest return of investment), after an established MacOS product is ported often to Windows - thats the point where those apps start to suck (Word, Quark, etc.).
While I agree that it makes no sense to give away the total integration and plug&play of MacOS X (which is far more than Aqua/Cocoa), it would make sense to Open source Cocoa. I could be ported to Linux AND Windows (Yellow Box anyone?). They could make stubs for all those "magic" libraries, and the community of freaks could fill those. Those who don't think thats fun will just buy a Mac for the "real thing"
My proposed name for this is "Lucy"
Anyway: how long should Apple wait to do this? Until GNUStep is really up to par with Cocoa??
And yet, it doesn't seem like this is such an issue for the Linux world, since software is distributed in source, rather than binary, form.
I expect that package systems will become even simpler over the years...probably eventually simpler than InstallShield (which doesn't have the ability to get, say, dependencies).
May we never see th
ns for 20 years. I've left, and I have no plans on returning. Have a great life.
Gizmos Gagets For Ninjas
A Google search on the phrase "boycott Palladium" returns no results. Not one. That's unbelievable.
We have a chance to defeat Palladium in the cradle if we, as consumers, simply refuse to upgrade to any Palladium chip. But we're not doing it. We're not even organizing an anti-Palladium movement. We're just sitting here smugly joking with each other about how much better we are than Microsoft.
Wake up, indeed.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
And to think Ballmer talking about "dirty tricks". That's a wierd statement coming from microsoft.
Jonahweb.com has stuff.
Try reading Microsoft's EULA sometime. They have no liability, even if Microsoft Windows XP somehow manages to cause the destruction of Earth.
The same goes for Linux. So why do people insist that companies don't choose Linux because there's 'no one to blame'?
Sure, you could legally challenge Microsoft if its flawed software caused grave harm to your business. On another dimension, perhaps - for what company could dare to stand against the Gorilla in court? None.
What's the problem then? Why don't companies use Linux, which they can't blame, if they can't blame Microsoft, either?
The truth is that liability has nothing to do with it. It's the support, stupid.
Microsoft is the Gorilla. It kills where it wishes, and none dare resist. It laid low the software companies of old, and their like are not seen in the world today. (Apologies to the Master. Mr. Tolkien, feel free to kick my ass for that one in the afterlife. I deserve it.)
Microsoft has been around for decades, where Linux has not - at least in the business world. Microsoft is invulnerable, even to the Department of Justice! Linux.. Have we even seen a true test of the GPL in court?
The fact is, companies looking at software take judgement on many issues, and support is one of the key issues. Microsoft is all but guaranteed to be around in ten years. Linux? Who knows. Sure, it'll be there in the form of people playing with it on home boxxen, but who can say whether RedHat will even be here next month?
Apple's move to OS X was in response to MS's move to the NT code base; both have an underlying unix-ish heritage (much more so for OS X). Did you ever notice how DOS gradually acquired more UNIX-like features as the years went by? Of course they did make that dumb mistake about forward and back slashes... In both cases, of course, there's a massive windowing system that's been hacked on top of the underlying "unix"; just like X itself. I suspect the next step will see MS working on a "CNT" (completely new technology) OS based on Plan-9 ...
Energy: time to change the picture.
And if you upgrade your home PC to Windows XP you have to be "very paranoid" about what periphials (scanner, digital camera) you own, since they may or may not have drivers. It's the same on either O/S my friend. At least with Linux you have some hope that your periphial won't just be abandoned one day.
You need to start learning to recognize Linux FUD for what it is... hogwash
is not about fact. It's about making their shareholders feel good. Duh!
[Side note/mini-rant, what is your guess as to why it thinks it knows what it is when it actually doesn't? 99% chance - poor standards or lack of standards, which means we _need_ you to report this broken hardware so it can be worked around! Don't expect it to go away on its own.]
Its already been reported, and has been a known issue since 1999. It doesn't appear to be going away any time soon.
Basically, the video card autodetection probes for an S3 card, and in the process, appears to kill the bus on the laptop with the S3 mobile GPU in it. Regular S3 systems work fine; it's only the laptop model that gets killed. But when it goes down, it drops everything else with it.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
It's brute force and consumes resources causing scalability issues. Every time you create a copy of your program with fork() you consume another large chunk of memory.
The Trolls must have stayed out past sunrise.
There may be a 5% difference between human beings and chimps, but between human beings and Steve Ballmer it's got to be an additional 10%.
But we should wait for the results of further studies so we can be objective about it all.
If the average linux developer is as intelligent as the average slashdot post, Ballmer may be on to something.
Ballmer blurts: 'The big issue there, was a reluctance to accept legal liability for open-source software.' Yeah right. So let's see: Mark Joseph Edwards and others firmly laid the blame for ILOVEYOU at Bill Gates's feet, and they made the bill out for $5 billion. Now let's add on AnnaK, Nimda, and Sircam - how much are we up to now? And Slick Willie apologises to the world for the misery his crappy software has caused - But like Ballmer is really going to pay out that money to someone? Like Microsoft - those inept morons - are ever going to accept responsibility? It's exactly the other way around: When the open source community finds a vulnerability, they fix it - and fast, and right there and then. While half a year later MS are still denying the vulnerability exists and/or trying to play it down. Ballmer is so full of it. Look at his figure, it's obvious.
It's also worth noting that I've seen several systems that weren't able to install Windows due to strange incompatibilities (which I was unable to diagnose due to the setup initialization design).
I said I was qualified to comment on the state for developers. Every statement above I made is backed up by my experience, which is no less valid than your own. If you want 15 years of Win32 development to make a simple evaluation, sorry, can't do it.
In any event, if you feel otherwise, you're certainly more than free to post your own evaluation of the situation for others to critique. I'd be interested in something more than negative personal criticism, if you're up to it.
May we never see th
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Quoth the article: For nine years, the company has designated users with particular skills--usually seen by how often they intervene helpfully in newsgroups--as "most valued professionals". Currently there are about 1,200 MVPs, half of whom are in the United States.
Wow, 1,200 ultra suckers, is that all? I was sure there were at least 5,000 microsoft trolls at Slashdot alone. Oh well, it just goes to show what a few loud mouths can do to a useful conversation. Has it really been nine years since Steven Barktoo? You gotta love the M$ community where advocating M$ profits is more valuable than code.
Seriously, there are no new dirty tricks here. It's the same old BS that's been used with the MSDN and what not. M$ has attempted to build a community around purchasing their software. Tools developed by those members are shared, but they are routinely broken by M$. If M$ were free, or even just open, a real community could exist. What's there instead, at it's best, is simply a loyal group of ever abused consumers. At it's worst, these folks take their frustrations out on other communities.
You can fool all the people some of the time and some people all the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time. M$ will eventually run out of "developers". Is there realy anyone out there who develops for M$ platforms because they think it's the best platform? Most people who do write for M$ tell me that they "have" to know how to do it simply because of it's prevalance. That's not a situation that can last.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Obviously, Microsoft hasn't outsmarted hackers yet who continue to find security vulnerabilities in their products.
What makes them think they will outsmart Open Source developers? We are all people.
Does that mean "we'll make more money from our software licenses than Linux does?"
It's a pointless comment, in the name of a pointless battle.
The bottom line is: If you feel that spending huge amounts of money on Windows software licenses is the only way your business can survive (whatever the reasons), then spend it.
On the other hand, if you're able to deal with the OpenSource stuff out there and everything it implies, go at it...
Why should one be better than the other? Do we all buy GM cars? no...
Do we all live in the suburbs? no...
Do we all eat vanilla ice cream? no...
Then why should we all use Windows? Or why should be all use Linux?
Having the choice is really the important thing here.
An alternate explanation is that there's many that wish they could do the Turbo Capitalist thing and be like Bill G, but lack the balls or have some interferring residue of moral fiber. By helping line Bill's pockets, it's a vote for that system or ideology and, maybe, somehow, they'll get rich, too.
Probably not dissimilar from the phenomenon where slow, out of shape, fat guys put on sports jerseys and yell at the lean, fast guys on the television.
Or it could be another version of the lottery mentality-- comfortable, but utter denial of reality.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Micro$HIT SUX! Windows is total $hit.
u lt.asp
Want a virus? Just install windows!
Want to loose all your work, email, docs, etc??
Just boot windows!
Want hackers to steal your credit card info and
drain your bank account at pr0n sites?
Just boot windows!
Want to spend all you time FIGHTING with a P-OS trying
to keep it from crashing?
Just install windows!
I made the switch, I run Mandrake 8.2 now.
(I think I like redhat better though, Mandrake seems too windowish and isolates you from the nuts and bolts too much)
Now I have only two machines left (out of 7)
in the house running windows. I HAVE to keep a few
windows boxes around because I support several people
that run windows and I have some specialized apps that
only run on windows.
As soon as I can get Linux down 101% pat I'm going to
beat the drum and convert my customers too.
I was having an issue with a disapearing mouse and win2k.
I went to the win2k website to look it up.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/support/defa
"Search Support
Search the Microsoft Product Support Services Knowledge Base of more than 250,000 articles, created by thousands of support professionals who have resolved issues for our customers."
*250,000* freaking "ARTICLES" BULLSHIT!! That tells me that Micro$hit is acknowledging that there
are *at least* 250,000 PROBLEMS with win2K alone.
I consider 2K the best of the worst. I can tighten down
the security in 2k pretty damn well, forget the other
versions, 9x/Me is total trash. DOS with a GUI.
XP is total spyware and fancy pants $hit for mouth breathers. Part of the settlement of the
anti-trust suit is that M$ will act as an agent for BIG BROTHER by installing SPYWARE in everyone's
home, namely XP. XP is your modern day wire tap for BIG BROTHER. Want people SPYING on you?
Install XP. Do your part for the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. ACT and install XP.
Windows is shit. It's over priced and it's pure trash. It's a friggin monopoly too.
I went to Wal-mart and told them I wanted to buy the E-machine they had for $600.
I told them to open the box and remove ALL the software, that I only wanted the hardware and that I would give them $500 for the hardware, minus a $100 for the M$ crap.
They told me too bad, no machines for sale without windows XP installed, included and priced in.
KISS MY ASS MICRO$HIT !!!!
Linux is about putting the power back in the hands of the people. Micro$oft must be toppled, they are evil to the core and unless they are stopped they will enslave the world.
Free your soul, boot LINUX!!!!!
drm won't be enough to sway people in the linux or mac (hell, any non-windows) direction. drm will be implemented, some smart kids will come up with a crack, people will install it and life continues on like it did. look at copy protections on commercial software if you don't believe me. ppl crack them and that's it. move along, nothing to see here IOW.
Say, anyone up for coding freenet download/play plugin for winamp? With freenet news for WA minibrowser?
Stallman: "And monkeys will fly out of my butt"
If Mr Edision thought a bit more he wouldn't have to sweat so much.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I'm not a business. I'm a person who uses computers
Actually, you are NOT just "a person who uses computers".. Considering your #4 requirement, you are a person who has the ability to modify code, which, while you may be in the majority of Linux users, puts you in a negligible small (under 1%) minority of all "people who use computers". That Linux advocates cannot understand that is the #1 hurdle preventing the widespread acceptence of Linux.
Dos adopted Unix features with DOS 2.0, when directory structures were added. Since then, Nothing.
Flash, Dreamweaver, Freehand, Filemaker, Oracle, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Quark, Premiere, After Effects, Maya, Office .X, ...
Now which OS needs Apps?
If you think open sourcing OS X is a good idea maybe you should try running a business that way. Call me when you succeed (or leave a note on my grave stone when we reach eternity and you succeed).
Not going to happen.
Ballmer talked to Mr. Kurt Beck yesterday.
www.kurt-beck.de
about a police system for the government developed by MS *lol*
and about license policy.
Did you know that MS PR agency Hunzinger caused the drop of social democratic voters.
Avoid "the viral GPL" and its "Intellectual Property Rights Restrictions(tm)". Most everything can be had from BSD. Build a proprietary, closed, WinBloze compatible (for support of legacy stuff) GUI on top (like Aqua has an AppleOS "compatibility box").
I'm not afraid of this. If they wanted to market UNIX, the Empire had a clear title to it in the mid-80s. They sold Xenix to SCO instead, and entered into an agreement which promised that they'd never compete in the UNIX market.
Without debating the long-term value (or lack thereof) of Imperial "promises", if they'd seen any value to an M$-UNIX they could have easily bought SCO/Caldera any time over the last fifteen years and had it all ready to go. The monopolist sees UNIX as snake oil, preferring to reinvent the wheel.
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
That day may be coming rapidly, but so far it is STILL possible to produce patentable ideas and put them out unfettered into the world- like academics used to do before academia became a profit center.
NOT YET! Slow down! Don't be talking 'GPL Patent' until it's really unavoidable! It may have escaped your attention but free distribution of ideas IS still possible, even though patents do exist.
This may be merely temporary, depending on just how much patent examiners expect the courts to do the work of checking to see if something's got prior art. If it's up to the courts, then everything will be patented, by companies who can afford to threaten legal battles against the true, ill-funded inventors- and that'll be real 'piracy', as in 'arrrr! give me that, no you can't have it!'
The GPL itself would not exist or have to exist were it not for copyright that was automatic. The equivalent in the patent sphere would be a legal admission that no possible idea can exist in the wild free for use- that everything was someone's property. And that's not happened yet!
Have you tried passing it any boot parmameters (Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt)? From the sound of it you could probably work around it.
Palladium is in such a nebulous, unimplemented state that nobody's even been putting the words 'boycott Palladium' together yet. Hardly a surprise- where DO you go to buy a Palladium anyway? How do you boycott something you can't buy yet?
What you mean is, "Microsoft has already got a long-term plan". Big woop- that's their job, and that's served them well in the past. Now it's time to make their lives hell if they mean to implement this one. They'll wind up with 1/3 of their desired goals and like it. It's a time-honored technique, of aiming way high and then 'reluctantly settling' for what you would've been happy with anyway...
The GPL is only a subset of open source. The GNU GPL forces you to GPL anything you derive from it. That's what the authors of GPLed software chose. Their decision. If you don't like that, don't use GPLed libraries. [Example: if you link with GNU readline (like bash does), the program linked to it has to be GPLed.] The LGPL forces you to GPL or LGPL changes to LGPLed stuff, but you can link anything you like to it. [Example: GNU libc, the standard GNU/Linux C library, is LGPLed. If you make your own C library based on glibc, you have to place that under the LGPL, but if you just link a proprietary product like Netscape Navigator with glibc, you can keep it as proprietary as you like.] Just using a GPLed/LGPLed program isn't a problem. You can write proprietary software in a GPLed text editor (e.g. GNU Emacs) and compile it with a GPLed C compiler (e.g. gcc), and you're not required to open-source it at all. Most open-source licenses are considerably less restrictive than the GPL and you can incorporate them into proprietary software quite happily. A couple of examples: - Xiphophorus use a BSD-style license for libogg, libvorbis and libvorbisfile (the Ogg Vorbis libraries). Unreal Tournament 2003 uses Ogg Vorbis for its in-game music, and sure enough, its System folder contains ogg.dll, vorbis.dll and vorbisfile.dll. Hmm, I wonder what those could be? Epic Games are entirely free to do that; it would also be legal for them to compile the same code into UT2003.exe, if they so wished. (They don't, because the command-line dedicated server, a separate executable, also needs to access them for some obscure technical reason.) - Many, many commercial products incorporate zlib. If an author decides to open-source their code, they get to choose which is more important to them - ensuring that users' freedom is preserved in the license of modified/derived versions (the GPL is a good choice if that's important), or giving proprietary software authors the freedom to incorporate your code in their work (the zlib license is pretty good if that's important). The LGPL is actually a pretty good compromise, although its originators (the Free Software Foundation) discourage its use, because they value the first of the freedoms I mentioned over the second.
The GPL is only a subset of open source.
The GNU GPL forces you to GPL anything you derive from it. That's what the authors of GPLed software chose. Their decision. If you don't like that, don't use GPLed libraries.
[Example: if you link with GNU readline (like bash does), the program linked to it has to be GPLed.]
The LGPL forces you to GPL or LGPL changes to LGPLed stuff, but you can link anything you like to it.
[Example: GNU libc, the standard GNU/Linux C library, is LGPLed. If you make your own C library based on glibc, you have to place that under the LGPL, but if you just link a proprietary product like Netscape Navigator with glibc, you can keep it as proprietary as you like.]
Just using a GPLed/LGPLed program isn't a problem. You can write proprietary software in a GPLed text editor (e.g. GNU Emacs) and compile it with a GPLed C compiler (e.g. gcc), and you're not required to open-source it at all.
Most open-source licenses are considerably less restrictive than the GPL and you can incorporate them into proprietary software quite happily. A couple of examples:
- Xiphophorus use a BSD-style license for libogg, libvorbis and libvorbisfile (the Ogg Vorbis libraries). Unreal Tournament 2003 uses Ogg Vorbis for its in-game music, and sure enough, its System folder contains ogg.dll, vorbis.dll and vorbisfile.dll. Hmm, I wonder what those could be? Epic Games are entirely free to do that; it would also be legal for them to compile the same code into UT2003.exe, if they so wished. (They don't, because the command-line dedicated server, a separate executable, also needs to access them for some obscure technical reason.)
- Many, many commercial products incorporate zlib.
If an author decides to open-source their code, they get to choose which is more important to them - ensuring that users' freedom is preserved in the license of modified/derived versions (the GPL is a good choice if that's important), or giving proprietary software authors the freedom to incorporate your code in their work (the zlib license is pretty good if that's important).
The LGPL is actually a pretty good compromise, although its originators (the Free Software Foundation) discourage its use, because they value the first of the freedoms I mentioned over the second.
Does Slashdot read Slashdot?
Have you tried passing it any boot parmameters (Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt)? From the sound of it you could probably work around it.
I did work around it in the end, using VESA drivers (which makes it crawl). But that's not the point; if I wasn't technically literate, then I wouldn't have had a hope in hell of getting that system up and running with Linux.
Any time you have to resort to the manual, and the manual doesn't contain the information you need -- such that you have to go online and do searches for a few hours to figure out the problem -- Joe Schmoe user is going to be screwed.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Tough talk from Spinless providers weak OS. Bring it on.....Its not like the Linux Community has every been concerned. NixerX
Steve and Bill's egos cannot fit in the same state at the same time. That's why when Bill was at the Expo announcing the MS stock purchase it was via satellite.
Notice you never see Steve and Bill in the same room, Hmmmm kind of like Clarke Kent and Superman!!! Only in this case it's super ego and super dork (both can be used for either person).
Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near
the earth's surface relative to other matter; second, telling other people
to do so.
-- Bertrand Russell
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