Meet Martin Taylor Of Microsoft's Open Source Test Lab

securitas writes "Martin Taylor was recently appointed as Microsoft's open source and Linux strategist and is responsible for Microsoft's open source and Linux test lab, mentioned on Slashdot last week. Taylor says his goal is to change Microsoft's competitive strategy by pursuing a fact-based approach instead of continuing the previous discredit-and-undermine strategy that was characterized by calling open source and Linux software 'a cancer, un-American and bankrupt' among other things. Taylor says he plans to focus on (and fund) studies that 'will highlight Microsoft's advantages in areas such as security, feature-completeness and total cost of ownership.'"

Comments

Submitter should RTFA

[kylef]

If you read the article, Open Source Initiative President Eric Raymond was the one who said that Microsoft's previous strategy was claiming Linux was a "cancer." Taylor never used those words and never suggested that was Microsoft's previous strategy, as the headline suggests.

All Taylor admits is that previously Microsoft had defaulted to an "emotional" argument, and that now they are switching to a "fact-based" one, whatever that means.

The only reason I'm correcting the submitter here is that it makes no sense to put words in people's mouth, even if you hate them. It is counter-productive to legitimate debate and argument.

Re:Submitter should RTFA

[Vainglorious Coward]

Taylor may not have used the word "cancer", but Steve Ballmer certainly did, in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, June 2001. Unfortunately, I can't find the otiginal article on the CS-T website, but a quick google for "Ballmer Linux cancer" yields more than 200 hits, of which this is a typical sample.

Ballmer said, "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches."

What was that you were saying about legitimate debate and argument?

Re:What the heck *is* FUD anyway?

[shaitand]

I hope your joking and I'm wasting my time, but if not...

Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt

Re:What the heck *is* FUD anyway?

[Megaslow]

Fear
Uncertainty
Doubt

Msft is afraid, but not very afraid

[kneels_bore]

MSFT's stock price performance since the beginning of this year, where it has badly underperformed its peers, is very telling. The market senses the worm is turning, MSFT has acknowledged the threat, and now they are beginning to take it seriously. But the more attention they give to opensource competition the more publicity they give it. That's the beauty of the OS model, MSFT marketing dollars go to raise the OS profile.

Re:What the heck *is* FUD anyway?

[hummassa]

Yeah, yeah, coined by some guy I can't remember to describe IBM's way of splattering sh*t in other company's products.
"Nobody was ever fired for buying IBM", or something like that.
Except that this was in the 1980's and now IBM is our friend (or at least, foe of our biggest foe :)

Re:What the heck *is* FUD anyway?

[red floyd]

coined by some guy I can't remember

Gene Amdahl.

Re:What the heck *is* FUD anyway?

[innosent]

Gene Amdahl

Who used to work for IBM, then founded his own high-end computer corporation, getting a large number of government contracts. He is also the person who discovered Amdahl's law, which applies to the amount of speedup accomplished by parallel computing.

Re:What the heck *is* FUD anyway? (Amdahl)

[cyber_rigger]

FUD (Fear Uncertainty Doubt) was coined by Gene Amdahl about IBM.

Yah, yah, yah, and BSD is dying, too

[leonbrooks]

Linux will never truly become a 'desktop' system.

I think the main reason for this is because it already has, it's just that the dopey and the terminally stupid have failed to notice it.

Can I quote you a for-example? This is a bloke called Christopher Dawkins who runs his whole school (Felstead, in Essex) on Linux desktops. Kim Perkins, who runs his entire school (Strathcona, in Melbourne) on Linux fat clients, would say pretty much the same thing. And of course neither Munich or Largo would be of a mind to disagree with them:

I have been using thin clients of many sorts for over thirty years. I have tried three or four ways of thin-clienting Windows, and reckon that's the problem: you can't. It's just not thin-client-friendly. It's not network-friendly either: networks weren't anywhere in the minds of those who designed either Windows or Macs. You can network either system now, of course, but with expensive snags. Thin-clienting is an extension of the network idea, and neither system likes it.

I run here a large number of KDE thin clients, and basically (given the assistance of a guru - this is vital) it's easy. It just works. All the apps are sensibly written to accommodate the multiple-user highly networked thin-client (or thick client, as you wish) paradigm. I look at the things that concern other people and just wonder what planet they're on. Viruses? What's a virus? Expensive? Yes, BT do charge a lot for ISDN connectivity. Point of failure? Failure? Yes, being in the country we do have nasty power cuts. Slow? Yes, I agree, I find my 40MHz clients too slow now and am upgrading to 166 and above, and I have now changed both my personal desktops to 200MHz. Hacking? Have you tried to hack FreeBSD? VPN? World-wide access to our system seems to have been built-in from the start. The default assumption seems to be that you can do the same whether a metre or a megametre from the server, though granted it is faster to be closer.

I may have exaggerated a little! I had serious server congestion with classes using StarOffice from 20 clients concurrently when there was one 500MHz 256M application server four years ago. That was fixed by spreading the load over four or five similar machines (no licensing costs of course, and discarded Windows machines made good servers), and last year by adding a new one with twin 2.4GHz processors and a gigabyte of RAM. I am now re-allocating the 500/700MHz servers.

I am sure that the Linux (in my case FreeBSD) RAM-sharing system is a lot more efficient than the Windows one, and I suspect multi-user context switching is too - certainly at all times in the last eight years of using these servers I have noted that schools using other platforms generally have servers of around four times the power of mine for roughly similar loads.

For example. From April 2001 till August 2002 our main server was a 700MHz Athlon with 256MB RAM. It did all our DNS, DHCP, local Web serving with dynamic PHP pages, MySQL databases, printserving to half a dozen printers and running POP/IMAP/SMTP services for around 1500 emails a day. I was conccerned about it being overloaded: it did slow down at times, processor usage often exceeded 100% during that last term. So we investigated, and found the BIOS had disabled the processor cache, giving it an effective speed of 100MHz. We turned the cache on, and it's breezed along for the last year, mostly around 20% load with no problems. Were you running last year with your main server at 100MHz?

Slower machines use less electricity, of course, and that's now becoming quite an issue. I've just bought a C3 VIA mini-ITX machine, and I reckon it's the shape of things to come. No fans, for a start!

I therefore agree with you - thin clients aren't viable in the school classroom.

If you have to use Windows.

Get it? Got it? Oh, never mind...

Microsoft remembers its history, that's why

[Atario]

You'd think that a gargantuan behemoth like MS would think "who cares about some snivelling little toy OS like Linux". But you'd be wrong. Remember, a young, nobody upstart (MS and DOS) shoved aside the top dog (DR and CP/M) not by being richer, or smarter, or faster, or better, but by being more alert. Gary Kildall was semi-unavailable and/or not that interested in talking with IBM, and Gates and Allen were very available and interested, and here we all are.

MS sees this whole Bazaar/Cathedral thing and it makes sense -- faster updates, more solid code, thousands of eyes, etc. It's a lot of alertness (and is thus a threat), plus it's got that magic word: FREE. But the whole premise of Bill G's life is that software should not be free -- that was his major contribution to the old Homebrew Computer Club, where everyone freely traded/borrowed (??AAs would say "stole") software. Thus, MS's dilemma: how to beat someone at their own game, when their game is completely contrary to all the rules they live by.

For further (this time, actually good) reading about MS and Linux, see this. For another possible reason MS wants to get inside Linux's head, see this -- a.k.a. "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em".