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Linux: Fighting the FUD of Forking
sebFlyte writes "Fighting the MS FUD machine is a full time job for some open source developers, especially now Microsoft have thrown in the issue of the possibility of Linux forking (as Unix did)... it would also seem that Gates has moved on from telling people to 'get the facts' and creating FUD around patents and IP to criticising the open source communty's ability to create interoperable software."
And MS Works, which isn't compatible with MS Office out of the box.
I've ignored Red Hat and SuSE for about 5 years now, focusing mainly on Debian, Slackware, Gentoo, etc.
Now that I've used a Red Hat system again, I was completely dazzled by how drastically different the experiences are. I expect the GUI to be more polished, naturally, but so many underlying things are different as well. All in all, they're things I can learn, and binary and source compatibility are still there, but it's the trend that's disturbing.
All of the traditional UNIX vendors forked in order to raise the barrier of exit for people who wanted to switch platforms. Sun's platform is still alive today because Solaris is such a unique beast that you have administrators trained solely in the art of this platform. All the UNIX part does is allow for some kind of source compatibility. Maybe.
Cisco took TCP/IP, which was practically invented (and perfected?) on a BSD box and threw it away to build a new proprietary OS to run specifically on their routers.
It's hard to find a major distribution shipping the vanilla kernel these days. When does, for example, SuSE decide that binary compatibility with other distros is keeping them from "enhancing" the user experience? Can they resist?
I'd like to be wrong about all of this.
Each distribution may come from a kernel with a set of customization patches, but aren't they all applied to mainline kernels? That's not quite the same thing as forking.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Does wider adoption benefit the developers of OSS, or would they be better spending their time working on the software than fighting FUD?
(I mean this as a serious question, not trolling)
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
I don't quite see the problem here.
I am not afraid of forks, if they are executed well.
Look at some examples we've had in the past:
gcc fork - when the gcc development started to slow down, a new group forked it and the primary thing it did was to speed up development.
emacs fork - emacs had had a notice for ages saying that "X11 support was coming RSN", but nothing happened for quite a while. The Lucid-Emacs (later became XEmacs) happened and within a very short amount of time there was quite a hustle and bustle of activity between the two - Yes, there are some interoperability issues here in that both designed their respective GUI concepts a bit differently. But both evolved at a much quicker pace then if we only had one. (Especially good in this case, was that the lucid/xemacs team decided that sticking to old packages like the age old c-mode wasn't a good thing and that there were better alternatives to be used, and they didn't shy away from using them - much to the advantage of the entire community.
If there should be a linux fork, I am not really afraid of it, since those who will fork it, will know that they will also NEED interoperability (an issue that emacs/xemacs didn't really have in that sense, as the files you edit with them ARE interoperable -- and I don't think a linux fork that will make the formats of binaries / shared libs different, will find much acceptance, unless they also manage to continue supporting the old formats as well (pretty much like you can still use a.out binaries, if you still have the kernel support for it compiled in).
I don't think we should just have a kernel-fork just for the sake of it - but if there are good reasons for a fork, I am not afraid of it - in fact, I'd rather welcome it.
Benedikt
Funny how someone who talks a lot about the software 'ecosystem' wants customers to invest in this one dinosaur - instead of being amazed at the natural process of species differentiation and survival of the fittest.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I think this is brillant, couldn't have come from a more knowledgable person at a better time. Especially given that in the past day or two a nice little article got published up on Groklaw about the SMB / CIFS protocol and what legnths they have to go to, to reverse engineer / pull it apart on the wire. It's essentially a slightly intelligent brute force method.
0 10415933
Take a look. I couldn't have made the timing for this article any better if I tried.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050205
I second Tridge's motion that when Microsoft really wants to come to the party on interoperability, let me know. I want to be there.
Personally, I think the major reason why they are going through what they are doing for interoperability now, it's all because of market pressure with the rise of open source, and the open standards which it follows. See what's happening with all the governments demanding open standards for documents etc?
*sigh* when will they learn?
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
It's easy to agree with the principle behind this, but one reason that Linux can pull in the support it needs to make it a great OS for all is that it is seen as having the potental for making a significant impact on corporate use. Without this potential you wouldn't find companies like IBM investing so much in improving linux, or companies like Oracle porting their software to it. If Microsoft et al. win their FUD war then corporations aren't going to pick up linux, and its not going to attract the kind of investment that benefits everyone that uses it.
Luckily, however, the linux community is diverse and it can provide people to battle the FUD as well as kernel hackers to improve the platform. We should support them all.
Gates is speaking to CIOs here. The writing is on the wall, and the change of tac, I believe is a last ditch effort to stave off the latest Apple attack (think about what most business desktop systems do, and look at the new Apple Mac Mini - for as cheap or cheaper price you can upgrade your aging windows ME and 2000 machines to something that just works - without all the problems with viruses and trojans; the added benefit is you can gather up all those old PCs and build a beowulf cluster for number crunching/modeling - a win-win situation, if there ever was one).
Of course, Gates will be happy to put the fear of god (or in this case, interoperability) in the minds of the people who make the decisions to buy or not to buy. If the CIO is not a computer guy - then he might just buy this latest broadside....
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
I am not sure if you are trolling or if you really are missing the point, so I will give you the benefit of the doubt.
;-)
Lets take two scenarios:
Scenario 1: You write a killer app. You keep it a closed source model, and some greedy big company decides it likes your software and wants to make money from it. Whats to stop them from doing a little reverse engineering, decompiling, and then "adapting" it to make it look like they wrote it? It's not very hard to do, really. And, since your source is closed, the only person that can really prove that SomeBigCo stole your software is you.
What is your recourse? You sue SomeBigCo for copyright infringement. However, you have to prove that you wrote it in the first place, which may or may not be an easy thing to do. SomeBigCo can also throw lots of lawyers at it and it will plod through the legal system. If your lucky and you win, you may see some money in a decade or so. In the mean time, you will need to spend your hard earned money on legal fees.
Scenario 2: You write a killer app. You open source it and use the GPL for the license. You are making money not on sale of the software (although that could be done), but on service, support, and perhaps customizing the software for others. Others have seen your software, liked it and have sent helpful patches and features to you, thereby enhancing your product. SomeBigCo sees it and wants it for their own. They have a choice then - they can either follow the GPL and release any changes as open source (thereby leveraging their developers to your effort), or they adapt it and try to make it their own.
If they release their enhancements as opensource, that is fine because you can incorporate it into your source tree. Since you are making money off service and support, you still have a revenue stream off of your software and that will not diminish by SomeBigCo helping your development.
If they try to make it their own, then you still have copyright law to enforce the copyright of your software. Only this time, since it is GPL, you stand a good chance of getting the Free Software Foundation's lawyers involved, rather than paying for your own. Additionally, a company may have no qualms about stealing software from an individual or even a small company, but only the foolhardy would risk a GPL lawsuit.
How does this protect you from "Open Source Vultures"? By using a service and support model, you will have a steady stream of income regardless of whether you are doing the development. No matter what, if SomeBigCo decides to try and steal your software, you still will need to litigate the issue. However, with a closed source model, your legal expenses will be your burden. Also, don't forget you will need to pay a lawyer to write your license for you, and if not written correctly it could allow SomeBigCo to take your software through a legal loophole. The GPL is a very stong license, and although it is not fully tested in court it is strong enough to considered formidable by the Nazgul of Armonk (IBM's lawyers).
Finally, think of it this way - writing software is very much like the pursuit of scientific research. The very act or reading this is a culmination of work and ideas created by others, all built upon one another to create this gestalt called slashdot
An ounce of perception is worth a pound of obscure
Nobody said that EVERYTHING is going to break on Longhorn.
But enough of it is going to break to make switching a pain in the butt, you can be sure about that. But not so much is going to break that NOBODY is going to switch.
The stupid large corporations are screwed anyway, because they have vendor lock-in due to their unwillingness to train anybody to use another OS, so they'll buy Longhorn regardless of the expense and conversion problems.
Small businesses, OTOH, have somewhat more flexibility to switch to another OS or keep using the old one. This varies by business since some businesses don't want to train or convert either.
It took three years for most people to upgrade from Windows 2000 and 98 to XP because there wasn't enough reason to do so (from 2000 anyway). Microsoft doesn't want to repeat that mistake. ALso they want to differentiate from Linux more strongly. So this time the OS will be VERY different - which will break things.
Microsoft doesn't care because they have forced the corporations into a licensing scheme that pretty much forces corps to upgrade every three years or lose money on the deal (even though they've already lost money since Longhorn is late - a major corp complaint.)
However, if the hardware upgrade requirements are as reported, Microsoft could find itself in deep crap. Which is probably why they dumped WinFS (which, BTW, is a feature they've been promising for about the last ten years - and haven't delivered on yet). I expect to see Avalon reduced in functionality over the next year as well - with the result that Longhorn will end up being just a different version of XP with some new eye-candy - and Microsoft will be back where it started with no one bothering to upgrade.
The bottom line: Windows is now so bloated and so screwed up that even Microsoft can't change it effectively.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I think it's important to recognize that Microsoft, SCO and other like minded companies will do whatever it takes to distribute harmful and baseless propaganda in order to further their cause
While that's true, there are two other things to keep in mind as well:
1) just because MS, SCO or whoever says something, does not automatically mean that it's FUD, and dismissing everything they say as such is foolish and dangerous
2) there's a fair amount of FUD generated and repeated here about MS and other such companies and their products; perhaps that's fair, perhaps it lowers us to their level. Personally, I lean towards the latter.
We all know it takes a *lot* more sysadmin time and monetary investment in hardware and software to reach the same results with a Microsoft-based workstation or server vs. a Linux or Unix equivelent.
See, here's an example. I've used Linux (Mandrake mostly, but also RedHat and Slackware) and Windows (9x, NT, 2K, XP) as my main desktop at various times over the last few years. In the hands of someone who knows what they're doing, it absolutely does not require "a *lot* more sysadmin time" and money to get the same results. If anything, for the tasks I perform daily (general computing use and programming, etc), Windows just beats Linux, but only because of software. I am required to use my company's Exchange server for calendaring, and so Outlook is a must. I can run Windows under VMWare and still use Linux for everything else, but that ups the hardware and admin requirements. If not for that, and the need to edit Word docs, I could use Windows and Linux interchangeably. (Note that OO is not an option. If Word messes up a client doc, that's one thing, but if I choose to use OO and it messes it up, it's my neck on the line)
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Well, kinda... But if you want it to work properly, well sell you a new version of your (otherwise perfectly working) software for a mere $500 a copy.
Microsoft thrives on non-interoperability. You remembe the debacle of word'97? It couldn't save properly in word5 format. Once you bought one copy of word '97 you had to upgrade every copy of word in your company or deal with unusable copies of various documents interrupting the work flow all over the place.
(yeah.. they fixed that problem a year later but by that time, most companies had paid Microsoft the billions of dollars in upgrade fees, which was the entire intention.
(it might have been word '95 that did this, but you get my point)
In any case, Longhorn is going to be different enough from current windows that it's probably going to be just about as nasty (and expensive) to 'upgrade' to the arbitrary restrictions of Longhorn as it will be to upgrade to Linux and Open Software.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.