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Ballmer Sees Free Software as Enemy No. 1
geekinexile writes "Bloomberg is running this Microsoft vs. Linux article as a top story on the Bloomberg system. Not so notable for what it says about Linux, but rather for the fact that the financial community is starting to actually get open source."
Michael Tiemman (sp?),CTO of Red Hat spoke to our LUG last night. He said that Wall Street is starting to use Linux to run custom number crunching software and I think Oracle. Big computational farm sort of things.
Free and low-cost alternatives to Win32/Office like Red Hat's imroving desktop and OpenOffice.org are being looked at seriously now.
Linux may have gotten alot of hype and speculative investment in the 90's, but the current economy is where its price/performance potential becomes evident.
Not only is Ballmer scared, but Sun announced 4,400 layoffs today. The demand for commodity operating systems is kicking them in the pants, and their quality, but proprietary hardware seems less of a bargain as commodity hardware improves in price/performance.
FWIW, open source is sending some proprietary UNIX employees to the unemployment lines already. Next, it's Redmond's turn as the desktop improves.
> ``I don't know what you do [...] except
> to out-innovate the Linux community.''
Hmmm - usually M$ has the reputation to out-innovate competitors by
a) including the same features "for free" in the next release of Windows
b) buying the product/company.
Where Do You Want to Go Today?
Well, first of all, I`ll nitpick out that Linux is a kernel, not an OS, and that while it may contain some low-level innovations, it certainly doesn't innovate. In any case, I'd like to point to Liquid War as an example true innovation. In fact, this is probably the most unique game I've ever played, and it's GPLd. Most games are just variations upon simple themes, and the simple games are usually clones of games which are very old. However, Liquid War shows that innovation on a fundamental level is still possible, and can be created by the Free Software community.
true && more || less
It's kind of a shotgun effect. Sourceforge and freshmeat are perfect examples. At freshmeat you just need to filter on popularity to see what I mean. The well run projects that are tools community finds useful and stable will tend to be at the top. But you will typically have a choice among several project. You don't have to take the top one.
Microsoft can't do that in public. We've seen proof of that time and again. Their closed source model has gotten them in trouble time and again.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Let's see, 20,000 inboxes times about $6/seat is $120,000 -- versus -- free. Yeah, Exchange does more than just e-mail, but for that kind of cash in a cash-strapped educational institution, it's just insane. Add in the need to retrain some of my unix systems administrators or fire and rehire (not easy in a government institution) and it approaches an impossible scenario...
This is a very shortsighted attitude. I'm working on a project for a small consulting firm that is developing software for a couple of big commercial conglomerates. We're doing almost all of our work on linux, with Windows and a few Macs around for testing from the user viewpoint. The free and open nature of linux means that we can get quick answers to questions (or read the source and figure it out ourselves). As a result, we can deliver much faster results than people working on proprietary systems, where they often can't get straight answers to critical questions.
With a closed, proprietary system, our clients are at the mercy of a single vendor. With linux (or the BSD clones), GNU, and other open source software, they aren't at the mercy of anyone.
But, of course, the DP departments in the big conglomerates are your typical bumbling bureaucracy who can't program their way out of a wet paper bag. So they hire a small team of hotshot linux hackers to do the job.
Computers will always need programming, for far longer than any of us will be alive. Most people will never be programmers, just like most people will never be mechanics or accountants or surgeons. There will be a lot of work for a long time, unless the economy goes totally flatline.
Having a quality OS and libraries that are open to study and modification is nothing but an advantage for everyone, both the programmers and the people who pay them to program.
Microsoft makes shoddy software, and hides the details from users and programmers so they can't fix problems. They survive solely because they still have a humongous marketing budget (and the power to bribe politicians and top management). They deserve to fail.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
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China is a communist country. The government controls the majority of the chineese economy and can mandate standards and shared cost allocation. China may ban Microsoft products from all state run businesses and government functions, although I doubt they would interfere with sanctioned, entreprenual computing systems.
- China has unreliable relations with the United States. China needs control over its critical infrastructure, including its computing systems. A sudden change in relationships with the United States, e.g., an invasion of R.O.C. (Taiwan), could cut of imports, upgrades, and technical support from Microsoft. It is as prudent to mandate self-determination of operating systems as of electrical power.
- China can take a long term view. China is the Middle Kingdom, with thousands of years of continous civilization. China, unlike the United States, could decide to embark on a path and resist pressure until it pays off.
- China is large, really large. The factbook states China is 1,200,000,000 (1.2B) people with a GDP of over $5,000,000,000,000.00 ($5T). China is the only country that could easily decide to commit a million people to full time Linux development and support.
The nighmare senario for Micosoft is that China makes the Linux operating system and open source applications a national security priority. Think of the effects of this quadrant of the planning grid:China leverages support for open source to build tighter relationships with countries besides the U.S. Open source authors are invited guests at massive conferences in Beijing. X-windows is replaced in two years. ChinaLinux preconfigured desktops surpass Microsoft in terms of reliability, ease of support, and scalability. Attempts to foster opposition in China due to massive revenuse from 100,000 person export-only support center.
A good future.
Cheers,
Chasm
I don't understand why you guys keep pinning your hopes on China. China has a long history of ignoring IP rights. Why should the GPL be any different? Is the source code for Red Flag out yet? (Has anybody looked at it to see what it's doing while it's booting w/a totally blank screen? Installing a keystroke logger, maybe?)
They're already pirates on a grand scale, so what revenue would Microsoft be *losing* if they switch to Linux?
And despite all warning signs, the US government sucks up for the
communists. They believe that China will fully open up their markets
for American goods, but forget it. China wants to be self-sufficient.
That's why they build their own Linux version, their own CPUs, their
own motherboards etc. The communists doesn't see the west as a reliable
partner, and just as you stated... they want to be able to say fuck off
to the west if necessary.
I make a big distinction between the Chinese people and the communists.
(after all, the Chinese communist party just have 50 million members.
The Chinese people are in general very nice and hardworking people, but
the communist regime is a bunch of unreliable liars.
The DRM thing could be a problem too, but I really think it will be such a disaster that it will be completely rejected by consumers. The sticking point is not the basic erosion of fair use copying, but that it is going to be so broken in implementation that it will keep people from doing what they are supposed to be allowed. Average comsumers don't have a lot of patience for bogus technology that won't do what they want, and DRM is likely to screw them over and over. At least the single function DVD player will play the DVDs they rent and buy reliably, and a DRM enabled PC will fail to do this often enough to make them royally pissed off. Put that in your business model and smoke it!
I've seen more than a few companies that simply will not run Linux (or BSD, or Plan 9, or BeOS, or whatever). My wife's company is going to bankrupt itself because it *has* to get on the MS license subscription bandwagon. Which is fine. If MS can sell that bill of goods, then bully on them. But the people at my wife's firm think that they can't even run Linux. They don't even consider it. I don't know why that is.
If they need to run Exchange, then so be it. Does that mean their web server needs to be IIS? Not at all. They don't know that.
You're right: MS is competing with Linux. But there's a lot of room to move in the small server/edge network/whatever area; it's a huge playground, and they choices don't have to be mutually exclusive.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Yep.. Indeed, everyone keeps saying the XBox is a test for Palladium. I think perhaps they are correct. In fact, all evidence supports this rationalization. MS has patents in the works for their DRM operating system. Intel's working on the hardware, and AMD is playing follow the leader.
That's precicely why I'm scared; once all new computers are hardware secure*, open source will have to relegate itself to older platforms (or ones that have no hope to run software designed to be run on a secure platform). It's a sad state of affairs, and a future I think could come about.
*As the XBox has illustrated, hardware security is a laughable--unless one is willing to take extreme (and expensive) measures. Anything short of strapping a small block of C4 on the motherboard, and rigging it such that any attempt to circumvent the hardware causes it to blow the thing to hell, will fail. Hardware will be cracked; it's a function of how badly it needs to be done, and how many people are working on it. Though, in all practicality, draconian legislation like the DMCA will criminalize anyone attempting to distribute that knowledge. Freenet may be our savior after all.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
Eventually someone very visable is going to point out that the OSS community is a giant, loose-knit volunteer organization, among the largest in history.
It won't be this year, next year, or the year after that, but politicians around the world have already noticed the movement.
That's where I think the 'Then you win.' comes in. Someone makes a speech that encapsules Microsoft's position in two or three easily understood sentances, that sends public opinion through the floor.
I am a science fantasy fan
Jeez... are you serious? Come on, Unix is one of the more important platforms for research, if not the most important. It is flexible, it is reliable, most of the scientific community is familiar with it. And these days it is also free!
Just talking about Linux I could point you to Berlin, some guys with rather interesting ideas for building user interfaces. Or the Beowulf Project, for massive distributed computing. Or RTLinux (and KURT), for full featured real-time operating systems. How about ReiserFS, that takes database-like balanced trees to the filesystem level. Or SELinux, a research prototype of a high-security operating system.
And the list goes on and on (forgive me for not looking up links, go Google for these ones): SPIN (a dynamically extensible operating system written in Modula-3, runs on Linux), all the research stuff at Mosix (including distributed shared memory, grid management, network RAM and more), the Hello Project (an operating system in Standard ML atop Linux), all the emulation stuff which hardly needs to be introduced, and all the kernel work for supporting different processor architectures.
Also note BDS's Kame Project, an advanced implementation of IPV6 and IPSec; the evolutionary scheduler for Linux; the networking kernel stuff, including the QoS work; OpenBIOS; the User-mode Linux kernel. Look up also the "C10K problem" for an interesting paper on server performance, (and while you're on that, khttpd and TUX kernel webservers).
Unix gave you the Internet, for root's sake. How much more "innovative" does it needs to get?
I saw this quote from someone working for the state of Utah and found it rather interesting (not surprising of course) "We buy Microsoft products, and we have this sort of love-hate relationship with them like everyone else, I suppose," said Phillip Windley, chief information officer for the State of Utah. "Last year, they forced us to conduct an audit, which was very painful. And it turns out that the bottom line was that we have overbought. They didn't offer to refund any of those overbought licenses. But if we had underbought, they certainly would have required us to pay more money, I trust."
That is a rather serious point. As everything stands now, packages get released with trojans in them. Just imagine the amount of source that would have to be checked if one million engineers were churning out code?
It would be nigh on impossible for, shall we say, Americans to chechk through that much source. There simply arent enough developers to do this. We would end up simply having to trust that the Chinux source/packages were entirely benevolent, or, not use them.
The latter will not be an option by the way, since it will be the defacto world standard. Hmmmmm sounds VERY familiar!
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