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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."
What's next!? Cigarette companies are going to claim that they aren't harmful to your health?
I'm a big tall mofo.
who brought us Windows ME, an OS that isn't even interoperable with itself.
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
Sorry I didn't get the email, my email client thought it was a SPAM !!
You want interoperability? Just dump Microsoft and use everything else.
I love how the spyware the Windows OS attracts interoperates with other spyware on the system.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
He is the world's leading expert on lack of interoperability, dammit! He knows what he's talking about!
Bill Gates would say the human body doesn't need oxygen if it meant a few more billion dollars worth of profits. Little snide remark aside, let's ponder this. Bill says to his customers "Linux isn't good with Microsoft products." Big surprise. The real fun part though will be when the "independent" studies start confirming Bill's claims. You know, the studies done from independent research firms...that just happen to be 95% bankrolled by Microsoft...
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
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
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?
Linux and OSS are compatible with less than 1% of the viruses, worms, and trojans that have been created by third party Windows developers! If you're running Linux (or even Firefox on Windows) you're denied the rich environment of advertising available to users of MSFT products!
-- The reason it's called the right wing? Irony.
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.
I've been trying to get all these email viruses to
work on my Linux box, but it won't run them. About time
someone had to point out the poor interoperability of
these important programs. Until something is done
to make it easy to run these programs with only a mouse
click, Linux will only be second rate.
So does this mean Microsoft are going to fully adopt Open standards? Surely they aren't going to keep everything totally closed and proprietary if they are aiming for a good level of interoperability? That would be obviously hypocritical!
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.
Join moola.com, play games to earn money.
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
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
So when someone designs a virus for outlook express it can even work when opened at the hotmail website with internet explorer.
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
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
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
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.
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?
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
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!".
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.
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 mean look at all the problems people have using Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.
LAMP will never catch on. Nope. Never.
Good thing my website doesn't use any of tho... oh, wait.
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To support his thesis on how "interoperable" windows is, he also mentioned the fact that the vast majority of over 20000 worms run on ALL versions (95,97,98,ME,NT,XP...) even when windows' own software doesn't. Persistent buffer overflow is the crux of windows' interoperability.
Microsoft Windows Longhorn:
Building a marketplace that may or may not be interoperable.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
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."
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.
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.
Bill Gates Claims OSS Has Poor Interoperability
Well, that's good. But last I checked, OSS was deprecated in the Linux kernel (2.6+) and pretty much everyone has switched to ALSA.
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.
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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).
As opposed to just plain bad operability?
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
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.
Funny you should mention that,
:)
just a day or two ago, a secretary in the office couldn't open up a power-point file sent to her by the boss. They were both created on different versions of Microsoft Office, but it woud crash every time she opened it.
I had her send it to me, opened it up in OpenOffice and re-saved it in a generic powerpoint format. I sent it back to her and it now works fine!
So yes, with a little effort - different versions of Microsoft Office can interpolate
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:
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
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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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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