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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."
who brought us Windows ME, an OS that isn't even interoperable with itself.
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 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
Um... so? Don't you know the golden rule? He who has the gold makes the rules.
Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin'.
One part vodka, three parts orange juice?
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
I'm sick of Slashdotters jumping to conclusions about Bill Gate's honesty. Maybe Bill's trying to let the public know Linux isn't interoperable with his software's 13 new security vulnerabilities.
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.
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 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.
/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.
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
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.
Can I be a Luddite too?