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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."
Yeah, if you want Windows interoperability, you should just go with Windows. Just make sure you have the exact same versions of everything you want to have interoperate.
A while ago I set up a home network. Linux gateway/fileserver running Samba, other boxes on the network running Linux, Win98, WinME, WinXP Pro & Home. Everything could see & use the Samba shares on the Linux fileserver. All the WinXP Pros could see & use shares on the other WinXP Pros. Trying to access shares between WinXP Pro & WinME - no can do.
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OSS has an excellent interoperability with anything that doesn't try to opt out of interoperating or even doesn't try hard enough. And Microsoft is pretty much the only company that really cares about preventing that -- Apple smells like they deliberately made the DRM the record companies demanded weak, so Apple attempts to avoid being evil.
So, according to MS, who is the epitome of good interoperability? Uhm, let's see... isn't that the main culprit itself?
Come one, this is a criminal act. False advertising and deliberately defaming your competition by spreading things that you know are false.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Free Software has always been about open standards.
/dev/stdout and /dev/stderr.
.doc file extension a non-open standard.
Let me give you just one example: Back when Usenet was still bigger than the www, I remember a heated discussion on one of the awk newsgroups because Gawk (GNU's version of Awk) had the non-standard shortcuts
I remember the open source community for attacking Netscape for adding new tags to HTML that were non-standard; to this day, anyone who makes a HTML rendering engine has to deal with the legacy of the mess Netscape made of HTML in the late 1990s (Gecko is apprantently nay-to-unmaintainable because it has to deal with so much cruft in HTML).
And, of course, the open source community has always attacked Microsoft for making the
Anyway, in the Halloween Documents, Microsoft admits to deliberately making non-open standards in order to make things harder for the competition.
PDFs are backward compatible. If you are using new features that weren't available you might need to upgrade your (free) reader. However you can print to PDF from any Mac application (I haven't tried the Linux alternatives) and the FDF Libraries are available for using for free from Adobe. Not too difficult if you ask me.
Adobe isn't the nicest company to deal with either but they are a hell of a lot better than MS.
Note: I'm an MSDN subscriber and I develop for Linux, Windows, Mac and *nix systems.
All you need to know about the difference between Adobe and Microsoft is that Adobe Type Manager is now free - at least, as much of it as you really need. And, of course, so is Acrobat Reader. Therefore anyone can get at the information in their documents, security settings permitting. The Adobe postscript printer driver is also free, although frankly it doesn't seem to be very good.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, do we have a case of complying with the letter of the law but crapping on the spirit of the law?
Any CTO who is worth the paper on which his/her stock options are enumerated, should see it the same way. Unfortunately, as we've seen, there are many in upper echelons of management that are quite clueless. All anyone has to do is ask, "How much choice do I have using Microsoft products? Let's see...there's Microsoft, Microsoft.....and Microsoft!".
"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."
Uhm, yes. Interoperability takes adherences to standards and a lot of testing and work. If we all use the same software, that's not interoperability, that's software hegemony. Silly.
I'll tell you about Microsoft's interoperability. It's Apache Axis having to add an API just because the MS libraries don't send information about a SOAP call's return type. That's the true meaning of interoperability.
Check here for the real story.
Easily remedied how? If you're a Linux guru? Well, guess what, if you're adept at all with Windows, then, "I have a couple missing .dll files, but it's likewise easily remedied."
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
This is probably the line that's causing the most knee-jerks. Everything else in the article is just so much marketing bullspeak, and can be safely ignored by anyone who knows what they're talking about.
Maybe he's talking about linux in particular, though I doubt it. Perhaps he's picked up on the "interoperability" problems caused because I can't install a slackware package on my Mandrake machine, and I can't put a RedHat RPM into a knoppix install, and this is a problem because grandma only knows that she has "linux" on the box, and that stuff written for linux should work on linux. But that's another can of worms.
What I think he's talking about, however, is a variation on the age-old problem of feature creep. Where I work as a software tester, when we write out a test plan, we have to build a matrix of all possible inputs, and either test each one, or justify why certain ones don't need to be tested. Obviously, the amount of work that goes into testing depends largely on the size of this matrix. Every time you add a feature with N inputs to the product, your matrix grows by a factor of N, growing exponentially. The time required to get a reasonably complete integration test suite is a very significant consideration for a product's time to market.
Somebody else in this thread commented that gimp can load/save in a large number of different formats (23, I think?). Does it have a complete test suite that verifies, on each build, that each format converts successfully to each other format? When people code plugins to add a new format, do they necessarily add the (24*23)/2 new entries to this integration test matrix? How many cases go untested?
Microsoft, historically, has tended to go to the opposite extreme, removing interoperability between versions of the same software (Office, Visual Studio, etc), but any responsible tester will be aware of the problem, and any responsible program manager will seek to limit feature creep, if they ever want to be able to ship the code. And being a business, a product is only useful to a company like Microsoft when it ships.
Of course, if this is indeed his point, I don't know what business it has in an essay about interoperability. Increased "interoperability" necessarily creates the kind of problem I'm describing, and is most certainly not unique to any particular license or development methodology. I'm probably completely wrong in my supposition. Bill's mail is probably in its entirety, like I said before, marketing bullspeak.
What's next!? Cigarette companies are going to claim that they aren't harmful to your health?
I agree with the statement, but I think its more akin to one cigarette company making claims that another cigarette company is less harmful to people's health than their brand. Buy Microsoft brand cigarettes today, guaranteed 10% less lung cancer victims than open source alternatives.
From the article:
.NET is a system for compatibility at the code level, and is exactly a "layer of middleware" to make all systems look and act the same. Remember that part of .NET was to supposedly take some of the wind out of Java. Also, the interoperability and openness were the reasons that it was so quickly embraced by Ximian.
.NET, so that no one is upset when they start adding proprietary, poorly specified extensions and possibly a proprietary licensing system for 90% of third party components will only work with Microsoft Windows. This will be done at a rapid fire pace that will require herculean efforts (on a par with Wine) to reverse engineer and keep up with. They control the vast majority of the .NET marketplace and certification programs, and in reality (based on my experience consulting for small/medium sized companies around the US) most in-house developers are into .NET because it's the new thing from Microsoft, not because it's better technology (on paper .NET itself ain't half bad). I doubt Microsoft will lose a significant amount of .NET adoption by effecitively destroying interoperability part of it.
.NET the day they decided to entice them with ECMA standardization and open specifications of internals. Microsoft isn't run by complete idiots.
"Interoperability is more pragmatic than many 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 makes all systems look and act the same, or seeking to make different systems interchangeable," the email says.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned this. Basically the original idea for
I have a feeling that Bill Gates and Microsoft PR are trying to drum up a FUD campaign for their own platform:
Microsoft has certainly been plotting ways to undermine the potential open implementations of
Very true. Pretty much any service I need on my network will authenticate via Kerberos, except my Windows workstations. I know it can be done, but not without buying a version of Windows 2000/2003 server and doing some trusted realm stuff with AD.
Microsoft should not speak to loudly about interoperability before starting to share more APIs and providing better support for other peoples formats in their own software. Billy Boy seems to forget that interoperability, like trust, is a two way street. Right now Microsoft expect all others to conform to their specification (without revaling the specification of cause) and to trust them, while providing nothing in return.
Sure, XML can make information more self-describing, but:
- Microsoft doesn't even do that. The MS Office XML Schemas are about as non-descriptive as is possible with XML.
- Self-describing information doesn't mean interoperability. Just because the information tells you what it is doesn't mean you will no longer need an adapter to get it into your system. In BizTalk, Microsoft talks about using XSLT to convert XML schemas used in one application to the ones used in another. Honestly, just because the adapter is written in XSLT instead of C doesn't stop it from being an adapter.
- Even disregarding the two previous points, self-describing information exchange has been available since at least the 1950's as LISP s-exprs (which are also more capable than XML, for that matter). Even disregarding s-exprs, it's not as if ASCII files (as so often used in POSIX systems for configuration) aren't self-describing.
The only thing that using XML provides is that there is are already-written parsers for most languages that are ready for use.And honestly, no matter how great XML is for describing documents, it's among the most awkward formats I've ever seen for describing arbitrary data structures, so the fact that there are parsers available just isn't worth it. It's like as if, when the cars were first invented, people would ignore them and keep on using horse carriages just because "there are already horse carriages, so if we use them, we won't have to manifacture new cars".
Great...
Historically MS has spent a ton of money developing dead end products just because someone else was and it might be the "next big thing". Paranoia.
But, if you are Microsoft, there is no "next product" that will ever equal Windows or Office. If they lose the monopolies, they'll never recover with or without R&D. Even pretty successful products like SQL Server are a drop in the monopoly bucket.
"Guess they don't attempt to interoperate between three different version of Office within their organization."
My previous company had a mixture of Office 97, Office 2K, and Office XP running all at once. There weren't any interoperability problems. (On a side note: There wasn't much difference to upgrade past 2k, either.)
"Derp de derp."
You're post is somewhat of a flame, but I agree to some extent, so I'll reply.
.TMP every 3 minutes. Windows will crash and fail to boot on a reset after this, if you're unlucky.
.doc format, as pervasive as it is isn't the anchor that keeps businesses on Office. I used RTF & PDF for an entire year at my previous employer to communicate and nobody even noticed or cared.
I've used the Word autosave for the first time in 1997, comming from WordPerfect 7. I had two problems with it:
- Autosaving a file larger as 720kb that's stored on a floppy corrupts the floppies entire file system.
- Autosaving a large file (20Mb) every 3 minutes as I was used to do on WP, fills up that 500Mb HD space FAST as it creates a new
My most recent experience with Word is from 2004, and some things have improved since 1997, but:
- The equation editor is still horrible.
- It will randomly loose entries from the TOC. Oh, and you have to tell it to update the TOC!
- References to other chapters/pages, links, automatic numbering, captions on figures and equations, are cumbersome at best.
Some other points I want to make:
1) I use WordPerfect. Check out http://www.wpvsword.com for a comparison.
2) MS Office killer feature is Outlook+Exchange, not Word, maybe a little Powerpoint & Excel. Most users have everything they need in Wordpad.
3) I use OpenOffice on Linux and as a speadsheet (quatro pro s****) but I find it to much an MS-office clone on many occasions.
4) The
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
But thats the point of different distros, and even linux... You can do shit any way you want, or pick a distro that does it the way you want...
In some cases, yes. But in many, ask yourself the following...
Is there a practical advantage to how Red Hat and Debian store the IP address of eth0?
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.
Well, they are. The only thing they share in common may be a version of the kernel and the user tools.
How do you install software in Red Hat? Debian? Windows 95? Windows XP?
If you want to make an apples-to-apples comparison, then compare Mandrake 7.2 to Mandrake 10.1 versus Win98 to WinXP. Software installation is essentially the same accross the board except that Mandrake won't install something just because you put a CD in the drive.
I must have missed it when the law of computer usability was written. Who said everything had to work according to the Microsoft way? I guess that OO should break the document format with every new release if that's the standard.
Well, it was the standard. However, that standard has now been upgraded and is not backwards compatible. The new standard is to just pay Microsoft money. However this standard is unfortunately incompatible with many slashdot users and is currently being rewritten to be as inclusive as possible.
Stop the Slashdot effect! Don't read the articles!
Amazing! I guess when I submitted this article a full day earlier it wasn't biased against MicroSoft enough to suit whichever O.S.S. sycophant reviewed it.
There's pattern developing here...curiouser and curiouser.
slashdot: A failed experiment.