Interview with Tony 'Say No to Windows' Bove

An anonymous reader writes "XYZ has an interview with Tony Bove, author of the upcoming book, "Just Say No to Microsoft". From the article: 'With this book Bove intends to help readers rid Microsoft from their life- this is easier said that done, but it is certainly possible. The book goes on to list alternatives to the Microsoft programs on which people have become dependent and probably think they cannot give up.'"

Comments

Re:the one thing you won't find in his review

[brunes69]

What's your flavour?

There's Novell-backed OpenExchange

There's Germany-backed Kolab

There's RedHat-backed eGroupWare

There's all-open OpenGroupware

And that's just the tip of it. There are also commercial products.

Seriously - if you think there are not alternatives to Exchange out there, then either you have not done your homework or are seriously misinformed, or both.

Not more political motivations!

[ficken]

I really wish that the Linux community wouldn't sink down to the level that Microsoft has reached. Releasing subjective papers on what works and what doesn't will not do anything for people except cause political arguments. Since most TCO and benchmark data is skewed one way or another, releasing whitepapers and books becomes irrelevant. Most budget managers and IT managers realize this. The people in charge (given that they know what they are doing) researches data from other companies. They ask questions like it worked for Company A so could it work for us? They do not look at opinions and unreliable sources. IMHO, this is one reason why Linux has not made it to the desktop - many companies are scared to move their user base over to a radically different interface. Not many companies have made the move, so everyone else is scared to jump first. They are not scared to move their servers over, since only a small handful of people interface with it - provided the services retain a high level of reliability.

Re:adbsurd

[Yahweh Doesn't Exist]

>Most of us can't...

I think you'll find the point is that most of us CAN. "Most people" use Word to write lists, and if the list needs 2 columns they use Excel. It doesn't have to be that way.

And it's not just about linux, his favourite OS is Mac OS X.

If you *need* MS, you probably made a poor decision somewhere along the line. If you have a free choice but choose to stick with MS that's fair enough. There's nothing about being a doctor or lawyer that intrinsically requires a MS operating system or software.

Re:2 Problems

[stlhawkeye]

2) It assumes that it's the MS programs holding people back, when many desktops are tied because of third party software. For example, in my every-day job, I support dozens of workstations with Macromedia and Adobe software installed - neither of these run natively under Linux, and they run horribly under emulation. Yes, you can find replacement photo editors, but not really replacement video editors that are on par with After Effects, or replacements for Flash that have 95%+ installation base.

Exactly. Ever try to hire a graphics artist and tell him, "by the way, you'll be using GIMP on our Fedora Core 3 installation"? It's harder than it sounds. Yes, you can all rain down here with THOUSANDS of examples of YOU and YOUR FRIENDS and people YOU KNOW who not only can use GIMP but PREFER it to expensive alternatives. If the sample of Slashdot and its immediate social clique were the norm, we'd live in a pseudosocialist utopia in which all of us are gainfully employed and paid a hundred thousand dollars to work 30 hour weeks developing beautiful open source software that we give away and nobody buys, and all music and entertainment is produced through the honest labor of talented people upon whom we benevolently bestow voluntary payments for their work, and whose labors of love are distributed for free through the software channels that we were paid lots of money to develop. Oh, and Bush isn't president. And global warming stopped. And we all ride bikes to our jobs. And there's no McDonald's or suburbs. And soda is free. So is beer. I could go on, but I moved into the TrollZone about 5 minutes ago.

Tell me About It

[th1ckasabr1ck]

There was a /. story a while back requesting comments to answer the question: "Why do you still use Windows?". I posted that I still use Windows because Visual Studio is the best IDE I have ever worked with, and since a huge amount of my time is spent programming, then Windows is the best platform for me.

The damn thing got modded +5 Funny. Some people just refuse to believe that Microsoft makes good products I guess.

Re:2 Problems

[cbiffle]

Security is close, but as we've seen with recent holes in Firefox/Mozilla, as other tools get popular, their security will come under attack, too.

I'm not particularly anti-Microsoft, though I choose not to use it for myself. However, I had to take issue with this, as I've been hearing this statement more and more lately.

There is such a thing as designing for security. Postfix is an excellent example of this; whatever your feelings on DJB, djbdns and qmail are also good examples. These three packages are rapidly growing in popularity, without showing the same security problems as the tools they replace (namely, sendmail and BIND). This is because (filesystem hierarchy restrictions aside) they are quite simply designed better.

Firefox, and Mozilla in general, was not designed with security in mind in the same way as Postfix. So, yes, it will show some correlation between popularity and exploits. However, even if IE and Firefox achieve equal popularity, I doubt Firefox will show the same consistently poor long-term track record as IE, for three main reasons.

1. IE has at least one designed-in security hole, ActiveX. Signed code is not a security mechanism, it's an authentication mechanism, and a user-driven one at that; sandboxing would be better.

2. Members (past and present) of the IE team have acknowleged that the IE codebase has grown to the point that it's difficult to maintain and patch. This suggests a poor initial design (compare Postfix's heavily compartmentalized code), but also explains some of the security problems of late.

3. IE is not written with Least-Privileges in mind. I can drop Firefox on the desktop without admin rights and use it, confident that an exploit in Firefox cannot nuke my machine (assuming the underlying OS is not also exploited). I cannot be so confident about IE, tied into the OS as it is. Too many IE bugs have allowed SYSTEM-level privilege escalation on NT.

Now, Firefox may well grow into problem #2, but I think #1 and #3 are unlikely.

End rant.

Re:sub-title: how to spend more money

[mcrbids]

If someone's going to do a new application, it's much more likely to be a Windows application.

I disagree. Look further up the food chain - if somebody's going to do a new application, it's much more likely to be in an environment where the OS is irrelevant.

Who wants to limit their marketplace to the Windows desktop, when there are so many mobile devices out there now?

Or, put it like this: What OMFG killer appz have you seen in the last 5-10 years that have been Windows only? Games are moving to gaming consoles, Word Processing is moving with surprising rapidity to OpenDocument, and most all the new cool stuff (Google, Ebay, Yahoo, Amazon, etc) is web-based! (or, at least, is open-protocol)

If someone's going to offer technical support services, they're much more likely to focus on Windows support.

Hmmm. Partly because it needs so *much* support just to stay functional? Obviously, that's where the money is...