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Cringley on Microsoft and Linux
brentlaminack writes "Time for this week's dose of I, Cringely. This week the Cringe talks about Ballmer's Orlando comments from this week. He compares Ballmer's comments with Linus's. Nothing new here for the /. group, but a good read for the non-technical."
I liked the part where he describes how most bad open source projects die in a darwinistic fashion while most bad microsoft projects limp on forever.
Read a similar article at OSNews today: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=4898
Cringley's article is a good non-technical explanation of why freely developed and freely distributed open source software can and often does work better than Microsoft's commercially developed and commercially distributed closed source software.
There may be some technically oriented people who want to inform their non-technically-oriented friends, relatives, and acquaintances about what's been going on in the World of Slashdot, but cannot simply forward their acquaintances the original slashdot articles because they wouldn't make as much sense to someone not familiar with all of this already.
Cringely is useful for this purpose, if nothing else, since he is good at taking technically-oriented "stuff" and presenting it in a manner palpable and coherent to totally non-technical people. Which makes good e-mail forwards.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
So in UPNP the people that worked there were C-Class players... ok, but then, where are the A-Class players for Microsoft? In the NBA? Because they don't seems to be working on Windows neither.
First off, I'm not defending Ballmer. He's an idiot. With that said...
I agree with holding back Open Source releases 'until they're ready.' Personally, no software SHOULD be released until it's ready. The tendency to ship software out the door as soon as it boots has given us a market full of buggy, slopped together code and numbed the public to what amounts to poor craftsmanship. All in the name of the Holy Schedule.
The one thing Open Source lacks, and despite the holding back -- clearly needs, is structured testing. There is no real testing of Open Source. No Test Plans, no Test Matrices of test cases. Pre release versions are dumped to the public to use as they will in a blind, shotgun approach to testing. Exceptionally sloppy QA at best. The frequent patch history of Open Source is testament to this weakness.
Unfortunately, I don't have a suggestion as to how to solve this problem. Open Source by it's very nature doesn't lend itself well to any form of centralization, which is necessary for structured testing.
On the other hand, you have Microsoft and others that USE structured testing, but they ship based on schedule, not the number of P1 bugs still open. End result? Garbage.
Open Source at least is a labor of love. I'd just like to see SOMEONE commit to solid testing so that in the future people wouldn't have to put up with such bug ridden software.
At the risk of being labeled a MS apologist (I try to be rather neutral), there are in fact things that a corporate entity like Microsoft provides that open source may or may not: - Reasonably consistent consistent APIs across products (at least in recent .NET times)
- Product cohesion across the platform
- Great documentation
- Simple installation (sometimes)
My experience with open source has been that the "bazaar" of Open Source is indeed a noisy, dirty one, and that it takes real effort to separate the wheat from the chaff re: product quality and completeness. Even if you argue that MS products are of lower quality (which is improving because of competition), some customers are willing to accept the quality hit because of the reasons listed above.
That's the sound that Open Source makes as it screams at high speed over your head...
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Nothing new here for the /. group, but a good read for the non-technical.
/. readers. But thats irrelevant. What is important for Microsoft is keeping the non-technical with them.
Isn't that the group Balmer addressed in the first place? My guess whould be that Balmer perfectly knew that it would be a clear to the
"When Ballmer talks about rears being on the line, what really counts at Microsoft is meeting shipping targets -- meeting business goals -- not quality targets. It is all about revenue. And there is nothing wrong with that if we all just say it out loud and admit the truth. But we don't."
He's right, Microsoft frequently gives away "Ship IT!" awards to managers who get the product out the door on time. This is the reason so many products that could have been great, are not.
If C-level players did an Open Source project, nobody would ever see it.
Cough cough Sourceforge cough cough...
So much stuff there is untouched by human hands its incredible.
Open Source at least is a labor of love. I'd just like to see SOMEONE commit to solid testing so that in the future people wouldn't have to put up with such bug ridden software.
Ask and ye shall receive - ever hear of this place? They employ a few really good programmers, BTW...
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
No, they were both invented by SCO.
"To lead the people, you must walk behind them"
"There is no road map for Linux, nobody who has his rear end on the line."
Right, why does Ballmer think Microsoft includes an EULA with their software? To void them of the responsibility for the trillions of damage their software has caused through security vulenerabilites and generally poor design.
Yeah, trillions. We've all seen the way damage is estimated each time a virus grinds everything Microsoft to a halt. Usually in the hundreds of billions, and it's probably happened at least a dozen times. This let alone unrelated individual incidents companies around the world have on a daily basis.
Oh, and don't forget about the kids that get locked up for writing viruses and other mischevious software that exploit said vulnerabilities. They're an easy scape goat to relieve Microsoft yet again of any responsibility what so ever.
I'm tired of this bullshit. The day Microsoft gets hauled in to court to take responsibility once and for all is the day I go skiing in hell. I bet I'll see Gates running the resort.
-kidlinux.
I like what Cringley said, but I don't think he goes far enough. The argument becomes more lopsided in linux's favor when you take into account the ways that linux has changed microsoft's products.
When I started to use linux, people who worked with windows pretty much accepted that you'd have to reboot several times a day. This wasn't just because of the need to preserve backward compatitibility with DOS. Even NT 4 was pretty buggy before sp4 or so.
I remember telling people that sun servers often stayed up for years without reboots -- no one believed it. Computers crashed, that's what computers do. Microsoft, and to a lesser extent apple, convinced most casual users that's the way computers worked.
But obviously, this wasn't something that was caused by an immature level of technological development, because other companies, like sun, were shipping machines that didn't crash all the time.
I believe that linux is responsible for a huge percentage of the core improvements that MS made to windows. They never felt it was a problem to ship OSs that crashed until they saw an alternative that didn't crash, on the edge of their radar screen. An alternative that people could install on their existing PCs, an alternative that people running ISPs could use to do server work.
Linux's quality, for the most part, doesn't come out of competition. There are efforts to make linux better at doing certain specific things, efforts that are driven by benchmarks. Most of the time, these little competitions seem to be waged with FreeBSD. But it's a historical fact that people wanted to make linux more reliable way before windows had any stability at all.
Microsoft *needs* linux to push it. If linux wasn't out there, does anyone think they'd be trying to tighten up security? Does anyone think that they would have delivered stable versions of windows without the pressure of competition.
My point is that even if you don't use linux, you benefit from it in a big way. In fact, I would say that most of the real benefit that linux brings to the world comes in the form of competitive pressure on microsoft, and those benefits are seen by windows users, not by linux users. Who knows how much they'd be charging, what the net would look like, how often windows would crash, etc., if it weren't for linux.
It's hard to get this across, but every discussion of open source vs. commercial development ignores the effect that open source exerts on commercial developers. The discussions are simplistic for that reason.
If you were going to compare open source development vs. monopolistic commercial development in a realistic way, you'd have to talk about what a horrible job commercial developers did before open source developers started to hold their feet to the fire.
Conventional wisdom suggests that the people who had been paid more would be more apt to change their minds, but actually, the reverse was true. The explanation is that the people who were paid could resolve the conflict in their mind between the beliefs they held and the contradictory statements they were writing by saying "heck, I still don't believe this, I'm not writing it because I believe it or anything, I'm writing it because I'm being bribed to." But the people who didn't have that "out" had to resolve their own cognitive dissonance another way, and for some of them, at least, the way was to realize that maybe there was something to the counterargument, after all.
Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that I was eerily reminded of it while reading Ballmer's arguments that Microsoft's commercial software is "obviously" better because it's written by professional programmers who are paid for it.
But if you're getting paid to write code, and the code is (for whatever reason) crap, that you can't take pride in, you can at least feel good about all the lovely $$$ you're being paid. The open source programmer, on the other hand, who is doing it for love rather than money, doesn't have that out, so has a much higher incentive to write code that's not crap, because feeling good about it is the only reward.
If you are a good programmer, you program for a living because that is what you're good at. This is something that economists and Ballmer/Gates understand. Might as well get paid to program if you're good at it and enjoy it.
That's what's confusing about open source/free software--what do the developers do for a living? Are they students? Are they unemployed? Are they underemployed (e.g., working McDonalds)? If under/unemployed, why? If you are a good enough programmer to contribute to open source, can't you get a job with MS/IBM/Apple/Adobe/Oracle/etc.? Why would you program for free, in your spare time, instead of getting paid to do so?
Microsoft is producing the software to make money; that's a given. And it's often stated that Bill is driven by a Borg mentality to beat the other players in the industry and to own everything. Which makes a lot of sense; a lot of the evil illegal things they do can not be explained just by a motivation to get money, they already have the money.
And it stated in this article again that open source software development is based on a desire to make this software free. And personal reputation of the developer. And other motivations. But here's the one major driving motivation to Open Source Software that no one else seems to be willing to state:
Open Source software is largely driven, and will continue to succeeded, because of a hatred of Bill Gates. It's as simple as that. People hate Bill Gates so much that they are not just willing but glad to donate tens or hundreds of hours of their time to anything that would make projects that Microsoft competes with better. And the more illegal things he does to try to destroy other software and to take over the software world, the more this will continue to be true.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I have my own opinion on this matter. It seems even open source develpers don't understand their development model. Many - possibly the majority - of open source coders are not writing code for purely altruistic reasons. They are writing code because it doesn't do what they want it to do. Since the developer is the customer, the developer has a vested interest in making a good product.
Linux people are geeks, inherently technical people, that focus on technology. I'm not even mentionning that they might be professionals themselves. Microsoft people are professionals, driven by marketing and other business objectives.
Hence:
All of that is obviously not only true for Linux. Apple did understand that. There is a bunch of people doing a nice OS, and giving it away for free. It is not polished as we would like it to be. Ok. Let's polish it!
The point is that Apple did a nice economy of scale with relying on a nice kernel that they don't have to maintain or pay!
I think as OSS as some kind of "Public domain for software." It's just that enough people has an extensive knowledge of how a well architectured OS such as a UNIX work. When the critical mass of people is reached, an OSS software such as Linux pops up and it just reflects the materialization of the public knowledge.
A multi-task OS is so basic nowadays, ther is no way Microsoft or any one else will ever be able to make money off of it. Microsoft is still resisting because they have this huge userbase, but it is just a matter of time.
To resume my position, it is going to become very hard to make money off of a "Generic" proprietary software. By generic, I mean anything that has been around for a while and is understood by many people. OSS will represent a very nice basis for every software. A kind of public domain toolbox.
Companies will have to find their added value on top of that.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Ballmer didn't write glib and that's a fact.
The day Microsoft gets hauled in to court to take responsibility is the day the flood gates are opened on software liability in general. Say goodbye to open source. How do you think Linus or R.M.S. would fair against a volume of lawsuits that wouldn't even make Microsoft flinch? How many developers would risk open source development if there was liability involved?
I don't remember the details, but the software industry tried to get a law passed that would've voided EULAs without a piece of paper to back them up (anyone remember what I'm talking about?). Microsoft was all for the idea. I think it died (fortunately). Just remember, liability is a double edged sword.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Robert Townsend, author of "Up the Organization" and former President of both Avis Rent-a-Car and American Express, always refused to look at "presentations." He felt that if you couldn't just talk to him and lucidly explain what you were on about in one minute it wasn't going to be worth his time in the first place.
Richard Feynman held that if he couldn't explain a physical phenomenon to someone with no scientific background in plain English in a minute it meant he didn't really understand it himself.
While this may rankle some of the peanut gallery here I'd suggest that if you can't explain the most technically archane subject you deal with to a nontechnical person in plain English (or Russian, or Chinese, or what have you) in a few minutes you don't really understand it either.
Cringley's pieces may contain far more depth than they can appear to have on the surface, even if sometimes he's a little slow to "get it."
So was Feynman, for that matter, but when he got it, he got it.
KFG
Seriously: Has anyone ever been fired from Microsoft for writing insecure or buggy code? I don't think so.
I live and work near Redmond and know many Microserfs.... Both blue badges and permatemps. I've never heard any of them saying anything about anyone being fired for quality issues.
Sure there was the guy who offed himself in the 911 on highway 522 because he didn't get promoted (taking out some elderly tourists in a motor home as a bonus). Then there was the guy who stole/resold a few mil $$ worth of software that then died... of "mysterious causes."
But actually *FIRED*??? Not yet.
I think that would be a great motivator to assist "Trustworthy Computing" to live up to its name. Take the bozos responsible for the latest RPC vulnerabilities and FIRE the whole damn group in a very public fashion. Of course a public execution would be even better, but Microsoft doesn't have *that* much political clout here in Washington State. I'm sure the current administration in "the other Washington" would allow it under some provision of the Patriot Act, but as far as I know, only Boeing and the penitentiary in Walla Walla have the authority to actually kill people around here.
C'mon Ballmer! Live up to your promise and SACK SOMEBODY NOW!
the article was good, but he missed mentioning the biggest difference of all, and the most important point. probably because he thought it was obvious.
:)
but anyhow, the largest reason open source is better and more secure than closed source (or commercial software like microsoft) is because you have millions of people around the world looking at it, testing it, not just coders, but everyone.
If there is a serious flaw, it's going to be found, and very quickly, and what's more, lots of those people are coders, which means they submit suggestions and sometimes even patches and improvements to the developers. and not only that, he misses the whole culture and ideas of sourceforge, where anyone and everyone can review any project, and also development of open source projects for the ones we know most well, are not single person developments, but a team, and that team is reall cohesive, it has to be.
anyone in the world can stamp out an email to the developer(s) of an open source project and say "hey dude, there's a bug when you do this, this and this", even a novice computer user can do that.
ballmer just doesn't get it, and never will. M$ can never beat the sheer magnitude of good coders around the world, 24 hours a day inspecting the code.
the only way M$ can beat open source would be to try to open source windows themselves. but that wouldn't work. M$ has lost the respect of decent coders, and their "cool" factor a long time ago.
My bet would be open source coders would look at their code and end up vomitting the rest of the day. it really is that bad.
"I hardly think anyone would require all articles on slashdot to be written such that non-techies will understand..."
And I never suggested anything of the kind.
In this particular instance I think Cringley was a bit slow in his enlightenment. This peculiar dichotomy of society's view of the "professional" versus the "amatuer" is one I've been dealing with, and conversant with, since as long as I can remember.
To me Microsoft's position is patently like that of Starving Artists Inc. claiming they make the best art because they employ thousands of professional artists. Not like those disreputable independants Picasso, Mondrian and Matisse.
Still, it's interesting to see someone go through it, and to do so in this public manner. It can be instructive to both the technical and the nontechnical, even if only as a reminder to the technical that this is where most people's perceptions are hovering around.
While you may be someone who understands your field well enough that you can explain it simply it also has to be remembered that sometimes you have to.
KFG
I can tell you one thing wrong with working for pay: you don't get to do what you want. If you're a professional programmer, you have to work on whatever your company tells you to work on, no matter how stupid an idea it is. Even worse, you have to do it their way: you have to use development tools, OSes, etc. that they've chosen for some reason, not what you would choose. And worse yet, you have to deal with all kinds of typical corporate BS: stupid and annoying coworkers, endless meetings which kill productivity, the cold lifeless cubicle environment, people stealing your food out of the refrigerator, etc.
Not only this, but in the real world, people don't always get to work on stuff that interests them. You may have a deep interest in audio codecs, but how easy is it to get a job working on that? Not very. But if you want to play around with the source code for Ogg Vorbis, there's nothing stopping you.
The idea that stupid economists hold that people will take jobs they're best at is BS, because real economies don't work that way. Finding someone else to pay you to do something you love is hard to do, as many starving artists will vouch for. Or, you could become an entrepreneur and start your own business doing something you like, but then you'll find that you have to waste a lot of time doing all the business crap, and not the fun stuff.
Open source changes all of this. Anyone who's interested can get involved on an OSS project in their spare time; sometimes they can even turn it into a job function if their job has a need for it as some others here have mentioned. You don't have to find some company to hire you to do it, and thanks to the internet you can easily collaborate with other people on the same project. And best of all, none of it is like working in a corporation.
I think in reality, a lot of OSS programmers are also professional programmers, but the stuff they do at home is much more interesting to them than what they're paid to do at work.
A couple of points...
First, Open Source projects tend to be pretty up front about the state of their code. They'll warn people when the project is lacking in its early stages. And bug reports / tracking tends to be done on a fairly open basis. There is no marketing group pushing glossy brochures trying to paint a rosy picture of bulletproof reliability and infalability (not even touching on EULAs and business deals that forbid negative product reviews).
Secondly, if I'm supposed to be a permament beta tester for someone... why do I pay hard cash for the privilige? Open Source involves a trade in time and effort. Commercial software should be a finished product.
Not all coding goes in to a shrinkwrap. I know a good number of coders who are paid for customized code that largely stays within the confines of their employer's enterprise. In most cases, what they want to code on their own free time would never compete with what they're working on for their employer.
Meanwhile, some have created Open Source projects out of a few untilities they threw togeather to handle some internal situation - with Corporate blessings. And there's talk where I work right now to put some manhours (either from existing employees or hiring in additional help) towards extending an Open Source application management has become particularly endeared to - but doesn't quite do everything they want.
For these people, Open Source software is not a threat. I could see that if your entire focus on the industry is niche products or shrinkwrapped OS' and applications, the whole Open Source thing could be a bit troublesome. But then - if people doing something for no cost ruins your industry... you have to wonder about the viability of that industry.
Sure - the views of people like RMS may make some view Free Software as a threat to their livlihoods. But honestly, is RMS' ultimate vision really going to come to pass? Will all commercial software be replaced by Free altenatives? Look around. For every product being esentially commoditized, I bet you can find a few more that haven't been touched. That's not even mentioning how many commercial products sprang either directly from, or due to the influence of, Open Source projects.
One final thought. Competition is competition. Any given commercial software house has no guarentee to profit and success. It is just as likely that another commercial outfit will produce a killer product as it is that an Open Source project will eliminate the profit in it. And at that point, you're out of a job no matter what.
If that worries you, look in to another career. But then - don't expect much more stability elsewhere either. The world is a rough place like that.
While this is /. and many will disagree, I doubt that the heads of Microsoft are dumb. The author seems to think that they are, but I disagree:
Microsoft is a company - its objective is to make money. It does this by selling software and associated other things (part services and hardware, (Joysticks Mice etc...))
The objective of Open Source (Linux in this example) is to make the best software possible it just so happens that this model also believes that open code is the best code.
This is pretty simple. Now, the heads at Microsoft understand this - but it is their job to promote Microsoft. That is what they get paid to do. They work for Microsoft, they have Microsoft stock options - they make their living by selling Microsoft. The heads of these companies (and all companies really) are salesmen. They work to sell a product. Now, it is important to believe in your product to sell it - and Microsoft exec's clearly do.
But really, can you blame them? They are clearly worried by the Open Source model because it presents a direct threat to their Cash Flow. Buggy software requires upgrades - this is good for business because you can sell the upgrades, and make money. That is their objective. With Open Source, buggy software is bad, because the objective is to make the best software possible.
Microsoft does not want to make the best software possible - otherwise people would buy it, and once they bought it, they would never need to buy it again. Their sales would go up - and then plateau.
Linux developers want to make the best software - because that is what they set out to do in the beginning.
There are totally different perspectives at work here. If you want to understand Open Source, and Commercial software you have to understand both ideals. I think Balmer understands totally - but he can't start disparaging Microsoft. It goes against his mandate.
I think MS is scared - and rightly so. They are hitting a plateau in sales, and Open Source is a serious threat to their server sales. What comes out of this will be interesting. That much is certain.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
Well, I hope everyone understands that Microsoft probabably hasn't misunderstood anything. Not as much as it might seem. As has been stated before, those guys aren't dumb. They probably understand very well why open source works so well. But that isn't something they're telling openly. What they say is what they believe their customers will believe, what arguments will hurt the open source movement. It's all about spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt. Remember how it went when you were 13? That's this.
To be precise...
Mac OS X uses a kernel derived from Mach 3, but all that that code does is allocate RAM and processor time. Most of the kernel code in Darwin comes from various BSDs, including the IP stack, a lot of the file system code, the process model, etc.
If you want to see exactly what does what, and where it all came from, check out the darwin code at http://developer.apple.com/darwin/
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."