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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."
OSS can't work with MSFT stuff for the same reason that some websites only load in IE...microsoft doesn't like to follow the rules
You want interoperability? Just dump Microsoft and use everything else.
I'll accept that the day Office doesn't have problems opening .doc files from different versions.
PS: It's all marketing, that's what Microsoft's about. Can we please move to something else?
Gates is telling the truth here. If the whole world standardized on one set of standard software, it would (obviously) make interoperability a lot easier. That's common sense. And we can understand why this vision would appeal to him, especially if the world decided to standardize on his software.
However, there is far more to choosing software than just that. OK, so we work harder to make interoperability work between software. It's worth it so people can have choice.
Guess they can afford the upgrade licenses!
Omnis amans amens
Then how come M$ not keen on using open standards?
Take Outlook for instance.
Works great with M$Exchange, but how about the support for SyncML, iCal, vCard and so on?...
-Nybo
Bill Gates is trying to maximize shareholder wealth. When you find an honest publicly traded company let me know (mind you I used to work at arthur andersen and most private companies aren't honest either).
...
Gates makes his money by selling, pushing & shoving his inferior product on everyone. If he truly wanted an interoperable system he'd open up those undocumented api's etc...
I personally like windows but I also like OS 9, OS X, Linux, BeOS, Solaris,
An OS should be like a screw driver. It does its job and doesn't need to be redesigned every week.
I find that every single product I could possibly use or buy has wonderful interoperability, except those Microsoft makes. I even find every operating system I could possibly buy-- from Apple, from Sun, from Redhat-- natively runs the same (POSIX) programs... except the ones Microsoft makes.
Bill Gates is right, of course, that switching away from all-Microsoft products makes interoperability with Microsoft products harder. After all, he specifically engineered things that way. It's too bad the antitrust "settlement" a couple years ago was an absolute sham; if something like that settlement's "document your protocols and formats" clause had actually been enforced, Gates wouldn't be able to engineer them that way anymore, and interoperability would no longer be a problem anywhere.
Anyway, this is a common tactic in advertising. Attack your competitor for flaws you have but they don't; that way you tie up your competitor's ability to attack you on that grounds because they're too busy defending themselves, and you lessen the impact when people point out your own flaws since there's a perception your competitor has those flaws as well. Like, say you're a political candidate with a disreputable and possibly illegal military history? Get your supporters to pay people to claim your opponent has a disreputable and possibly illegal military history. Works like a charm.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
...that OSS is sometimes playing catching up with proprietary protocols and file formats, trying to find a way to be interoperable with something that is perversely designed to deliberately be hard to work with in order to lock in customers, and re-inforce monopoly status.
So in that respect, what he says is true. Much like a robber slowly pulling the knife out of his victim, while muttering "this street has become too dangerous".
That man is right or at least not totally wrong. Just because you have the source it doesn't automatically make your software work together. Simple examples:
...
.png or plain-text and somehow get the job done, but smooth interoperability is something else.
- open a OpenOffice document in AbiWord
- copy&paste between different applications
- embbed an Gnumeric chart into some OpenOffice document
- try to edit a LaTeX document with Abiword or OpenOffice
- try to open a Gimp xcf in anything beside Gimp
- try to copy&paste some webpage in a Office application and get something more then plain-text
-
None of this works or only in a much less smooth way then it does under Windows or MacOSX with similar software. Free Software has improved a lot in these regions in the last years, but there is still lots and lots of software floating around that doesn't operate much with other software at all. Sure, you can always export to
Any mention of Linux? Nah, some noserubbing on the Great Forking Problem.
*Yeah*, let's all use microsoft office because that's the only way to achieve interoperability between different parties!
.NET. i can assure you that interoperability is NOT the reason!
unless i totally misunderstand that word, aren't open standards BETTER in terms of interoperability than closed, proprietary ones??
i say we publish official and open standards, protocols and file formats for all major interactions and make it everybodies choice whether they like to have an open client for the standardized communications or if they'd rather take proprietary tools!
obviously, not every program can be delivered with full source, but if a vendor wants to reach various platforms, there is either a common standard in place (like POSIX for example) or some porting is in order *tough luck*.
why did mr. gates fight java as language and instead went with
why would a quasi-monopolistic company preach interoperability when this can only weaken its own position???
jethr0
According to Bills dictionary:
The ability to read, and only read, old data formats into new versions of software from the same vender. The aim of interoperability is to simplify upgrade from one version of software to the next.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
This letter amounts to a veiled threat: Use our software or someone might get hurt. Gates and company plan to make it as hard as possible to prevent interoperability with OSS. If you use OSS they will make as life as difficult as possible for you. They've engaged in this sort of behavior before and are doing it again.
And Mr. Gates is doing everything in his power to see that Linux/OSS remains as uninteroperable with Windows as possible- let alone other competing interests.
In addition, we removed all checks between these integrated parts, so while each of the holes in our product by themselves wouldn't let the hacker own your box, our integration allow hackers to own your box if you read the wrong forum or email.... Protocols? We don't really follow the standars so everthing else won't intergrate with our product. LDAP? No, no , no... What you mean is Active Directory. That LDAP stuff is non standard.
You only live once, so you might as well have fun before you die.
The only thing that even remotely sounds like the Slashdot blurb is this:
- Additionally, the open source development approach encourages the creation of many permutations of the same type of software application, which could add implementation and testing overhead to interoperability efforts.
Translation: being interoperable is easiest when you don't have to interoperate with more than one implementation.Find free books.
How about I give you the finger...and you don't tell me how to run my operating system?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I think they are failing at that.
IIRC the dollar lost 26% of it's value in 2004 (compared to Euro and Yen), so the 6% increase in revenue (10-12 2004/2005 in dollars) don't look so great anymore.
Sure, they have cut 1.5 billion of R&D costs, which is impressive, but only revenue can keep a company alive.
Currently Microsoft's anti-Linux strategy seems to be:
This won't work.
It will have these effects, all bad for Microsoft:
It seems Microsoft is getting pretty desperate.
I like two parts vodka and one part vodka, but that's just me.
Microsoft Windows Longhorn:
Building a marketplace that may or may not be interoperable.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
My law office runs on Openoffice. Let's see, it prints my pleading paper when I need it. Fills in templates from my database for all kinds of documents. Spell checks. Does outlining. Makes spreadsheets when I need to do some calculations. How is it inadequate compared to MSoffice?
When I worked for the state, we used MSoffice to the exact same things. But there isn't anything I did in my old job on MSoffice that I can't do on OpenOffice. For 1% of the world, MSoffice might offer some crucial feature, but the rest of us can't figure out what that might be
The truth is, MSoffice is fatally flawed for my use. While I haven't had crashing problems with OpenOffice, MSoffice has F****ed me over plenty. For example, I once lost a day's worth of writing at my old job using MSoffice. It's automatic backup feature failed me so all my work was completely gone. When working on a deadline, a loss like that can really piss you off (as in bouncing around your office swearing like peg-legged-pirate). In contrast, Openoffice offers a timed autosave feature - I won't lose more than 5 minutes worth of work unless my entire harddrive bites it. Yessiree - MSoffice is not nearly as functional as Openoffice.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Microsoft's claim is of course, absurd, and the exact opposite of reality. Windows is one of the most un-interoperable operating systems avialable, it doesnt support well and clearly documented standard APIs, rather it seems they intentionally design the APIs to be hard to duplicate. A key ingredient in OS interoperability is a well documented API, such as POSIX and Single Unix Specification Unix APIs which ought to be supported by Linux, the BSDs, Darwin, AmigaOS, Solaris, AIX, etc. Furthermore the nature of open source software lends itself to interoperability far more than proprietary software, since the actual code used to implement the APIs is avialable for all to see and is avialable for re-use in other implementations, making it far eisier, along with good documentation, to build a independant compatable implementation.
What is particularly important in good OS interoperability is source compatability, via the standard programmer interfaces (APIs), and standard suite of command line and a standard base graphics system ( X Windows). This is to assure that an application can be recompiled on any OS that supports these standard APIs. The APIs however define the standard programmer interfaces in the human readable code which is then compiled into machine code, the APIs being substituted with ABIs, the Application Binary Interface is the actual low level interface between the software and kernel and it is inserted into compiled code at compile time, via the C and system libraries. This allows a standard API to be provided by all OSs, while not affecting underlying OS design at all, since the APIs are abstracted from the underlying OS architecture by the compile step, an OS canimplement its own ABIs for communication between programs and kernels while providing a standard API.
Let'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.
This really seems like a "grass is greener" issue. MSOffice has been everywhere for a long time and of course problems sometime crop up. But nobody really knows if OpenOffice interoperates better with itself because it has never been tried.
(And yes, I know about the XML format, but that doesn't prevent intrepetation/implementaiton issues.)
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
For those of you new to Slashdot, here it is again to put this story in perspective:
First they ignore you
Then they laugh at you
Then they fight you -- OSS is here right now
Then you win.
Ruby on Rails Screencast
Interoperability may not exist between certain OSS products; but, because they're Open Source, they can be made to interoperate without encumbrance - and you can be sure that this won't change.
Can the same be said for Microsoft software? Can developers 'freely' interoperate with all Microsoft software? Does Microsoft give assurance that developers can continue to freely interoperate with its products in the future?
Additionally, the open source development approach encourages the creation of many permutations of the same type of software application
In layman's terms, this means that Open Source encourages that evil thing called 'competition'.
Has Bill Gates ever said anything positive about Open Source Software?
I wonder why not?
Linux/Open Source/Anti Microsoft News
I don't like Microsoft's business tactics any better than you do but this point from Billy is dead on. He is NOT refering to OSS interop with non-OSS software. OSS applications do not interoperate with other OSS applications. I won't bother to post a list as you can pick just about any application and find that importing and exporting data from it is highly application specific. This is just the cost of a distributed development model and why open standards are so important to OSS. Unfortunately there is very little activity on open standards for many critical things - particularly on the Desktop (e.g. COM style discovery).
I hate to defend this guy, but there's other things you should be attacking him over. From a user point of view. Different Open Source distros are really like different Operating Systems.
How do you install software in Red Hat? Debian? Windows 95? Windows XP?
How do you change what IP address will be used for eth0, in Red Hat or Debian? Windows 95? Windows XP?
In both cases the 6 years different versions of Windows are more similar than the latest versions of both.
Actually that would still work better, see the doc format is an undocumented mess with memory dumps in it, while OpenOffice uses plain clearly readable and well documented XML. Besides that Microsoft constantly altered the doc format to break the revers engineering efforts by the competition, and thus broke constantly its own compatibility between versions.
I don't remember where I saw this quote, but I've had it here in my logs for awhile, and I think its relevant here:
Anybody who's been to college knows that it's not a proper screwdriver without at least equal parts vodka and oj. 100 proof, if possible.
You people make me sick. Leave it to dumbass Americans to dilute perfectly good vodka with fruitjuice.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
He's doing what he can because the laws in the USA allow it, and sometimes don't. It's not about making the best software, it's about making the most $$$
No it is not.
Sigh, this explains the strange "signals" I have gotten the last few days about migrating central systems at work to MS even though they have nothing to do with the problems they want to solve.
To some, MS is the bible. To reuse a old sentence "You can't get fired for choosing Microsoft".
There are tons of clueless managers that happily will "upgrade" working UNIX/mainframe systems to MS. And when the new system crumbles under the load, and doesn't deliver the rock solid performance of the old systems, the remaining UNIX/mainframe gets the blame instead of the new, MS based, systems lack of ability to communicate with these systems. No, don't blame the poorly designed connectivity of the new system. Blame the UNIX system for being UNIX.
They are also more than happy to buy products from companies that ties you to MS because they clearly
could not develop their product properly so that fx. it could run on anything else than MS-SQL.
It is an uphill battle every day. I don't hate MS as such. I hate the entire culture surrounding them. There seems to be no lack of low quality developers in MS world. Most of them I wonder why they choose to work with computers since they have so little passion for what they do.
Mr. Gates, could you tell us what are the interfaces/protocols that aren't working when talking to OSS?
Microsoft supports open standards RIGHT?
Alternatively, Microsoft does now offer a package manager for Windows, but I'd be surprised if many people are using it with Windows 95; it'd be like alien on Debian.
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