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."

Comments

typical

[ginotech]

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?

[Mr.Bananas]

You want interoperability? Just dump Microsoft and use everything else.

Re:You want interoperability?

[crummynz]

Uh.

I think that was Mr. Gates point. If you dump Microsoft and use everything else, you lose interoperability with Microsoft products.

Yeah, right

[Lisandro]

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?

Re:What is this world coming to?

[danormsby]

Guess they don't attempt to interoperate between three different version of Office within their organization.

Guess they can afford the upgrade licenses!

Re:What is this world coming to?

[BoomerSooner]

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.

Yeah, funny that.

[mcc]

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.

That man is right...

[grumbel]

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:

- 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 .png or plain-text and somehow get the job done, but smooth interoperability is something else.

Re:That man is right...

[Coryoth]

As some have pointed out, some of these are valid complaints, but some are just silly.

open a OpenOffice document in AbiWord

Yes, its unfortunate that doesn't work. It isn't for lack of potential interoperability though - both formats are open and documented. The fact that the Abiword team hasn't gotten around to writing an import filter is a little disappointing, but if you're going to damn them for that:

Try opening an OpenOffice document in Microsoft Word.

Not much interoperability from Microsoft either. OpenOffice is fairly widely used and popular, and the file format readily documented. It wouldn't be hard at all for Microsoft ot be interoperable if they wanted to be.

- try to edit a LaTeX document with Abiword or OpenOffice

Try to open a QuarkXPress document in Microsoft Word. How about an Adobe InDesign document in Microsoft Word? What's that? A different application domain? Then please think again about your example. TeX is not a word processor, even if there are programs like LyX that do a good job of providing a word processor like interface for it.

- try to open a Gimp xcf in anything beside Gimp

Try opening a PSD document in anything besides Photoshop. There are actually some programs that read it (like GIMP, heh), but your remarkably interoperable Microsoft Office suite will choke on it. Likewise there are programs that will read xcf (its an open documented format after all), but most don't expect to need to, so don't bother. As to GIMP - I hear they're working on an even more open and easy to access format.

Jedidiah.

Re:He told the truth

[Aadain2001]

There is a very simple issue: settle on a set of standards that are open and free and then even if 100 different programs that do the same thing, like calendering, come out they could still all interoperate. The users would win since they could use the program that they liked the most, not the one that is holding their data hostage. Open and free standards leads to more inovation because it encourages developers to try new things and not worry about loosing users because they can't use their old data. This is what scares Bill and MS the most and why they will NEVER use open and free standards in their products. They will "embrace and extend" standards, which means making their own version and then not giving it out and blaming everyone else for "not following the standard".

Re:I got one, text of email follows

[bcrowell]

Hee hee...the Slashdot blurb is pretty misleading. The e-mail rarely even mentions Linux. In one place where it does mention Linux, it's to say that MS is trying to play nicely with Linux:

• Microsoft software can talk to mainframes and minicomputers from IBM and other manufacturers; other operating systems such as the Mac OS and various UNIXes including Linux; ...

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.

This is backfiring

[rseuhs]

Bill Gates is trying to maximize shareholder wealth.

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:

• Constantly badmouthing Linux, thus keeping Linux in the mind of decision makers
• Pushing XML which has it's roots (via SGML) in the Unix-community.

This won't work.

It will have these effects, all bad for Microsoft:

• Big customers realize that Linux is a powerful way to threaten Microsoft, thus they have much more power during negotiations which means less margin for MS.
• All customers realize that if Linux is such a threat to Microsoft, it can't be that bad.
• Customers who realize the value of an open format like XML are also much more likely to realize the value of open formats and standards in general in which open source has a big advantage.

It seems Microsoft is getting pretty desperate.

Linux is pretty bad in this regard

[Nailer]

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.

Re:Linux is pretty bad in this regard

[0BoDy]

I think you've lost sight of what Linux is, and why it's here. Linux isn't the environment. It's not even the command-line, it's just the kernel. It's definitely NOT windowing environments.

I think a lot of the misconception regard the differences between Linux and GNU software relates to what is what, and who wrote it, what they believe and if you agree with that. Whether they're written by RM Stallman et al, or Linus et al, or by distribution developers is important.

Linux is the kernel. The kernel, just like the CPU in your computer, is extremely interoperable. It works with all kind of peripheral applications, you access it using external commands, shells, etc. Linus wrote it because, to an extent he agreed with RMS ideology about software: that it should be free as in freedom, as in beer, and that you should be able to do anything with it.

Richard M. Stallman, creator of GNU (GNU's not UNIX), wrote many of the other applications terminal junkies get fired up about: bash, emacs, less, man and others. The GNU system applications and the kernel are what make up a complete Linux base system. Anything above that is written by the gnome group or kde, or someone else. These things are written for Linux but are other applications, just like null-soft winamp, AOL, Aqua, Macromedia Dreamweaver, or Flash.

On top of that, many distributions have designed "ease of use" solutions for X11-based graphical display servers. Interoperability has very little to do with configuration changes from distro to distro; that has more to do with the base OS, ifconfig, bash, sysvinit, and the flat files in /etc. Deficiencies of that software are the ones that ought to be addressed here. So if you have complaints about GUI features not being present cross-distribution: complain to Novell, Red Hat, et al that they're not supporting Linux upstream*. Distros are there so you can choose the way you want to learn to do it. Learn it once, or learn it again because you see a better way to do it. Most change isn't bad.

Also, only administrators should be worrying about interoperability, software installation, ip addressing, network configuration, boot up, accounts, etc. The "user's" point of view isn't really relevant there, a good administrator should know GNU/Linux, the base OS, configured with flat files, in terminal. It's easier anyway, once you've been trained to do it that way, because it doesn't change, because that's actually what GNU/Linux is.

I think you need to get past your bad experiences in the GUI environment and evaluate the OS. I agree there needs to be A GNU installer framework, perhaps even GNU selected GUI configuration utilities, among other things, but many distributions ideologies will get in the way. Red Hat wouldn't use it, now; Suse has YAST; Debian, Slackware, Gentoo, and derivatives use the gnome / KDE controls or else the terminal and would use them, but even so, there will inconsistency as long as Linux is free as in freedom. You can't expect an OS that's based on user input to be the same across multiple branches and ideologies; choose wisely. I choose Linux, because no matter which distribution I use, I can still fix it, rely on it, and be happy so many have put hard work into it.

*Few distros make fixes and actually let the original authors know, and help them catch all of Linux. This results in some other minor changes from distro to distribution. ** I hope this hasn't just been a big pointless rant, I've spent about an hour trying to write it well.

Re:This coming from the man...

[MemoryDragon]

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.