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Bill Gates Claims OSS Has Poor Interoperability
XeRXeS-TCN writes "In yet another example of Bill Gates seemingly 'not getting it' (or getting it just fine and spreading FUD), he has sent out an email to all MSFT's corporate customers, stating that if they are looking for interoperability, they should not look to Linux or OSS software. What he really means of course, is free alternatives trying to interoperate with Microsoft's non-documented proprietary standards."
Every day, businesses face an ongoing challenge of making a wide variety of software from many different vendors work together. It's crucial to success in streamlining business processes, getting closer to customers and partners, or making mergers and acquisitions successful.
This email outlines some of the work Microsoft is doing to make its products interoperate well in a diverse IT environment; it is one in an occasional series of emails from Microsoft executives about technology and public-policy issues important to computer users, our industry, and anyone who cares about the future of high technology. If you would like to receive these emails in the future, please go to *link removed* to subscribe. We will not send you future executive emails unless you choose to subscribe.
Whether you are connecting with partners' systems, accessing data from a mainframe, connecting applications written in different programming languages or trying to log on across multiple systems, bringing heterogeneous technologies together while reducing costs is today a challenge that touches every part of the organization.
Over the years, our industry has tried many approaches to come to grips with the heterogeneity of software. But the solution that has proven consistently effective - and the one that yields the greatest success for developers today - is a strong commitment to interoperability. That means letting different kinds of applications and systems do what they do best, while agreeing on a common "contract" for how disparate systems can communicate to exchange data with one another.
Interoperability is more pragmatic than other approaches, such as attempting to make all systems compatible at the code level, focusing solely on adding new layers of middleware that try to make all systems look and act the same, or seeking to make different systems interchangeable. With a common understanding of basic protocols, different software can interact smoothly with little or no specific knowledge of each other. The Internet is perhaps the most obvious example of this kind of interoperability, where any piece of software can connect and exchange data as long as it adheres to the key protocols.
Simply put, interoperability is a proven approach for dealing with the diversity and heterogeneity of the marketplace. Today I want to focus on two major thrusts of Microsoft's product interoperability strategy: First, we continue to support customers' needs for software that works well with what they have today. Second, we are working with the industry to define a new generation of software and Web services based on eXtensible Markup Language (XML), which enables software to efficiently share information and opens the door to a greater degree of "interoperability by design" across many different kinds of software. Our goal is to harness all the power inherent in modern (and not so modern) business software, and enable them to work together so that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. We want to further eliminate friction among heterogeneous architectures and applications without compromising their distinctive underlying capabilities.
This may seem like an obvious approach, but the desire for interoperability is sometimes mixed up with other issues. For example, interoperability is sometimes viewed merely as adherence to a published specification of some kind, either from one or more vendors or a standards organization. But simply publishing a specification may not be enough, because it overlooks much of the hard work it takes to successfully develop interoperable products - namely, ensuring that the "contract" defined by a specification is successfully implemented in software and tested in a production environment.
Sometimes interoperability is also confused with open source software. Interoperability is about how different software systems work together. Open source is a methodology for licensing and/or developing software - that may or may not be interoperable. Ad
He also brought us Microsoft Word, so uninteroperable with itself you sometimes have to use OpenOffice Writer to recover its documents.
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
Most of the people that I know who work on somewhat substantial OSS projects are paid to work on those projects too. The only real difference is that the companies paying them for the work also release that work to the world-at-large, and take things one step further by building their own distributions that are designed to bundle well together.
Take SuSE for example. They built on work from RedHat, who built on work from Slackware and "roll your own" distributions, who built on the straight GNU toolset and the raw kernel. SuSE has evolved things to where they have a nice installer and maintenance system on top of the GPL stuff. YaST wasn't too bad back when I ran SuSE, and since YaST wasn't yet GPL (and it didn't depend on anything that was, it just allowed for configuration changes to GPL programs to be made easily) it was all to SuSE's advantage because they worked to help the cause of OSS. They did write most of those fancy video drivers that we had in the very late nineties and early noughties, after all.
Since the code is open, a company can either buy their package from a vendor to obtain support, or they can download the source, hire someone to make the modifications that they need, and use that. The thing that people seem to continually miss is that changes made to GPL code only have to be distributed if the binaries compiled off of those changes are distributed. If you rewrite a significant portion of "df", you can keep it all to yourself so long as you don't go sending around the binary executable without the source. Companies can use OSS internally and never reveal what they've done to it if they play by the rules.
That make OSS valuable.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
While interoperability with Microsoftware is sometimes difficult due to their use of proprietary technologies, a pure Microsoft environment is generally better in the interoperability department than a pure Linux environment. MS Office is integrated with IIS which is integrated with the OS which uses the MMC for a variety of administration tasks (including those outside of IIS), etc. Even under the application level, the GUI is integrated with the OS (it's part of the kernel).
All this comes at a price, however, because extremely strong integration (Microsoft's method for implementing interoperability) means that removing certain pieces is difficult to do. Servers usually do not need a GUI, because they sit there and run headless, doing their thing for years at a time with little local interaction. A GUI uses memory and adds a great deal of running code and therefore bugginess. In Unix, to rid yourself of the GUI, you simply never start X. In Windows, it is sort of possible to never start the GUI, but it is very difficult to do and the aforementioned integration of everything means that even if you do manage to accomplish this feat, you will have limited power over the system since at its core, Windows is designed to be administered with GUI tools.
Unixy OSes, Linux and the BSDs in particular, can be stripped down so thoroughly as to run on a wrist watch or low-power PDA. In order to run on PDAs at all, Microsoft had to develop an in-house custom Windows system, CE, in order to operate under the constraints of a limited system, and it is still far more resource intensive than a Linux system can be.
Granted, Linux has to be stripped down to run on such hardware as well, but since the source code is available, it can be done. You won't find any companies selling custom imbedded copies of Windows made by anyone but Microsoft.
That said, the use of open standards is a system that will eventually overtake even the best fully integrated but proprietary system because any company or group can work on improving the system, products, and ideas, to differntiate themselves. No matter how many resources Microsoft or any other closed company has, "not microsoft" has more.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Maybe on your machine. I have run into a couple of missing .so files but it's usually because of some poor compilation options, which is easily remedied. I would compare DLL hell more closely with RPM hell, although I haven't used RPM's in a while so I'm not sure if that problem still exists.
Time makes more converts than reason
try to copy&paste some webpage in a Office application and get something more then plain-text
I just pasted your comment into OpenOffice writer, and it came across with formatting and links intact. The only thing missing is your friend/foe/neutral icon.
BTW, if you want image editor interoperability, The Gimp can save in 36 different file formats (count 'em!) including Adobe PSD.
0 1 - just my two bits
Allow me to quote Ian Hickson, who was commenting on this specific topic. Hickson works for Opera, and should be nearly as bitter as they come.
In other words, Microsoft is probably guilty of deliberate neglect in the past few years with IE, but don't be so quick to attribute to malice what can be explained otherwise.ALSA is the current driver infrastructure in the Linux kernel. OSS was the previous driver structure. ALSA has an OSS emulation layer.
ESD (The enlightenment sound daemon) is a software mixer that was also used in Gnome but isn't anymore. ARTS is the basically the KDE version of ESD but it also being deprecated in favor of ALSA's built in abilities like dmix.
I don't see your point.
Time makes more converts than reason
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from the menubar, select "tools" then "options" (it's the last item in the tools menu). A popup opens, click the plus next to the "load/save" category in the left side pane. Select "general" under the load/save category, then check the box next to "AutoSave every" and pick a frequency to suit your preferences. You can select whether you want a box to popup and ask you if you really want to do the save.
Hoping that helps out.
From Grendel by John Gardner: "A small bird lands feet up in my path. With a crabby laugh I let him lie, kind nature's merciful bounty to some poor sick fox." Or thereabouts - who is Grendel Drago? Guess I'll go google...
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
et's put 8 different versions of OpenOffice Writer on millions of machines (10% of which have defective hardware, viruses, etc), and see how well works.
... something Microsoft can't do, with its own products, on its own platforms.
I know you're implicitly shilling Microsoft's shoddy products by implying other folks work is equally bad, but I hate to break the news to you: it isn't.
To take your example, I've what you're suggesting (on hundreds of machines, not millions, but the point remains) and guess what? They all read, write, and exchange one another's openoffice files perfectly...even the crappy windows boxes which do, from time to time, get hosed by the trojan, virus, spyware, or worm du jour.
Version deployed among colleagues, freinds, and relatives include:
OpenOffice 1.0 (Linux)
OpenOffice 1.1.1 (OS X)
OpenOffice 1.1.2 (Linux, Windows, OS X)
OpenOffice 1.1.3 (Linux, Windows)
OpenOffice 1.1.4 (Linux)
OpenOffice-Ximian 1.1.53 (Linux)
OpenOffice-Ximian 1.3.5 (Linux)
OpenOffice-Ximian 1.3.6 (Linux)
OpenOffice-Ximian 1.3.8 (Linux)
NeoOffice/J 0.8.4 (OS X)
NeoOffice/J 1.1 Alpha 2 (OS X)
NeoOffice/J 1.1 Beta (OS X)
Platforms include assorted versions of Windows, numerous distributions of GNU/Linux ranging from Debian, Red Hat, and Suse to Source Mage and Gentoo. Mac OS X Versions include 10.2.x on iMacs and 10.3.x on assorted systems, including my powerbook 17".
It all works and interoperates flawlessly
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Most linux beginners are not compiling their own software. I don't recall having many .so problems with precompiled linux distributions. I do remember having RPM hell though but like I said I haven't used an RPM distro in a while.
Time makes more converts than reason
Yes, the same company that spouts endless FUD about the viral nature of the GPL distributes GPL'ed code. The list includes gcc and gdb. Among the benefits they tout is "Unify data sharing and enable integrated, cross-platform file systems through the Network File System (NFS) client, server, and gateway." Windows can't interoperate without OSS. And the only way they can handle portable code is with SFU. They say so: "Avoid having IT staffers rewrite applications from scratch. Interix subsystem technology saves development time by making it easy to transfer existing UNIX applications to Windows."
It wasn't all that long ago that the official MSFT web site wouldn't open in Opera unless Opera sent the MSIE header. Then it worked just fine.
I am one of the thousands of folks who were 'on the spot' to test this behavior and KNOW it to be true from personal contact and experience.
It wasn't a sabotage of a standard, it was a perversion of one.
- open a OpenOffice document in AbiWord
This will work in the future. Both OpenOffice and AbiWord will adopt OpenDocument standard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument
Microsoft is free to adopt it too, but dont hold your breath. MS could at least IMPORT it into Word but I doubt they will even do that.
Yeah, I've seen their "compatibility." Basically, you have to put an underscore before most of your function calls, and half of them don't work correctly. Running a formerly Posix app on Windows still requires a great deal of porting.
Anyway, SFU doesn't provide any more Posix support than the already bad support included with Windows. SFU is mostly for horrid implementations of NFS and NIS. (Seriously, I spent a long time once trying to get Windows to work as a client on a NIS network. It has got a lot of problems.)
Didn't Microsoft pull the entire TCP/IP stack from BSD?
Uh, er, how about taking it out since it does not have interoperability!
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