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Microsoft & Linux Should Co-Exist In China
alabamarasta writes "In a recent report from China titled "Embattled
Linux fights back", it appears that Microsoft is just as embattled." From the article: "Citing an executive at Microsoft headquarters, Lu said Linux and Windows should co-exist. Microsoft in recent years has been struggling with an increasing number of security flaws on its Windows platforms while Linux is generally regarded as more secure. 'For users, openness increases the trustworthiness,' said Lu."
Lu, also a former senior government official, was responding to a report released by the China Software Industry Association (CSIA) in late August which called for the government to review its preference for open-source software. The government's "excessive preference" for the open-source Linux platform is harming the domestic software industry, and Linux's business model is flawed as the low, or no, charge is thwarting the profitability of Linux developers, the CSIA asserted in the report.
/.ers make a living writing code and take offense at the notion that they should have to give up a living because someone else does their job without asking for money. But consider the fact that no one charges you for the air you breathe. I'm sure that someone, somewhere, would love to charge you for that air and the fact that you get it for free means some poor schmuck can't make a profit from it. Hell, we should demand that the government get involved and require everyone who breathes to pay a toll to some company who will ensure that air is always available for us to breathe.
Now while I am not opposed to people making money from their work, nor am I opposed to people making huge profits from their businesses, I find rediculous the whole idea that government should intercede in a free market because somebody can't make money from a commodity. If you can't make a living or profit from something, then find a new line of work or business. Why should the government demand that something make money?
So what is the solution to their "problem"? Are they going to ban open source software because it drives profit making companies into the ground? Does this mean you have to get a license to write software, or work for a profit-making company to write code? Where does this protection racket end?
I know that many
What is funniest about this whole 'software industry can't make money' discussion is that no one considers the huge profit potential of every thing someone does for another person just because they like them or want to help.
Charities rob profit-making enterprises.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
If this is the spread of a flawed business model with nearly no ad budget, just think how successful it could have been if it had followed the antitrust-attracting model of some well known competitors!
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
Seems to me that the issue at hand is not the way F/OSS works, but how China can work F/OSS.
FTFA: "If China manages to set up a Linux community, it could take advantage of the talents and resources of the global community to better develop and promote Linux and foster top-notch software developers, Lu said."
While MS has had a good run of dominating the software industry, it would appear that there are those that don't want to play ball with MS, and are looking at ways to go around that little licensing issue.
Linux can milk a cow, but how do you milk an industry without a licensing scheme that fills your bank account? Is there plans for China to be the next big 'outsourcing' server for software development?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Just curious after reading your assertions. How many average families own computers? Or do you fall back on "Once...Chinese market has matured", when will this occur? Will the market ever mature while it is not a free market? Do you seriously feel that the EU and US will ever have economies on the scale of Jamaica?
M$ has been aiming at countries like china, thailand, india, brazil etc. with stripped down Win XP. Who on earth would in right minds pay $300 or so in these countries for a full fledged OS when alternatives are available for free. Even pirated copies are sold at every street corner with no watchdog around. M$ seriously needs to rethink its marketing strategy to penetrate these economies and counter growing support for OSS. Maybe a different pricing strategy or leasing out the lisence for a period of time might work.
The Chinese market will be the decisive battle ground between Linux and Windows. Indeed, whoever manages to become the leader in that market will soon become the world leader. Why is that? Because the Chinese market has the potential to completely dwarf both the American and European markets.
This doesn't make any sense at all.
Firstly, there is no single battleground between Linux and Windows. There are a number of separate battlegrounds: mobile devices, embedded systems, home desktops, corporate workstations, small servers, mid-range servers, enterprise servers, e-mail servers etc. Winning or losing in any one of these may not have much of an impact in any other.
Secondly, what happens in one area of the world in terms of OS dominance does not imply or force success elsewhere. For example, Microsoft technologies have far more dominance in the USA than in Europe.
Thirdly, there is a huge and growing market that has a tendency to appreciate open source - India.
So, the idea of there being a 'decisive battleground', and this being China, does not make sense.
Once the Chinese market has matured, investors will think of American and the EU as they today think of Luxembourg and Jamaica.
Extremely unlikely. America and the EU are far too large and skill & resource-rich by comparison.
What's to say that Linux won't take over in all those areas that you mentioned? You're assuming incorrectly that it can only "win" in one area. That's far from the truth. It could easily become dominant on all sorts of devices, for all sorts of applications, in China.
Indeed, India will also be an important battleground. However, China is far more coherent as a whole than India. India is a big locomotive, but it's not fully up to speed yet. China is just as big, and it's going far faster.
America and the EU are far too large and skill & resource-rich by comparison.
That's what Europeans said about America a couple hundred years ago. And witness how the economy of America overtook that of Europe for many decades. It happened once, and it may very well happen again. The upstart will overtake the existing economies.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
The problem is that the GNU trolls are likely to be just as opposed to co-existence on Linux's side of the fence as Microsoft are.
People continue making out that Microsoft is always the sole bad guy in any such argument...but the truth is that there are a lot of people associated with Linux who don't appreciate diversity of opinion, either. The GNU crowd want just as much a monoculture of their own as Microsoft does. Try advocating the use of *any* other license to a GNU zealot sometime and watch what happens, if you don't believe me.
I wonder how much of the Chinese determination to use open source, develop their own microprocessors, and generally make moves towards implementing an internally self-sustaining IT infrastructure may be driven by a profound distrust of Western governments and companies. After all, both have treated China pretty badly in the past, and they probably feel that we only allow them to trade with us today if they play by rules which benefit us far more than them. Add to this the fact that the US in particular has displayed a penchant for suddenly prohibiting the sale of certain technologies to countries that it doesn't like, and you have a set of very good reasons why the idea of not becoming dependent on Microsoft, Intel, or any other Western company could look very attractive to them.
It is also likely that they are telling the truth about Linux' better security being a key feature for them. Totalitarian regimes are invariably paranoid, and even if MS could prove that the versions of Windows being sold in China haven't got back doors that the US government can use to spy on them, the fact that it is rife with keyloggers, bots, etc. is pretty good evidence that the CIA or similar could infect their systems with spying software quite easily. Far safer then to use not only an OS with a pretty good security track record in its own right, but also one with source code that they can examine for freedom from back doors, and modify with their own specialised security features if they want.
Read up on the history of Sino-Western relations over the last couple of centuries, and then ask yourselves one question: if you were them, would you trust us not to totally fuck them over if there was a buck in it somewhere?
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
A little on slow side are we? Adobe and Macromedia are western companies, they dont want to buy their software either. They will develop their own solutions to these tools also.
Well, the media only reports Windows problems since most people don't even know a server from a copying machine. The market share argument doesn't hold any water -- look at apache, squid, etc. These are servers and are more targetted than simple desktop clients. Why do you think people 'own' Windows desktops? To attack the servers where the real money is controlled! Do I have to trot out the well-known numbers of httpd market share as example?
;)
Your argument to prop up Window's lack *social responsibility and inter-business policies is akin to saying 'all bridges are basically just as safe as the other'. Generalizations in reguards to comparisions show you didn't dig very deep. I think you can see why I'm underwhelmed by your reasoning. Also Firefox has a much quicker turn around on patching any issues they encounter, and you can't say that Microsoft is anywhere near on par.
Please try again.
Whether China has "killed tens of millions of people" in the past is not relevant to a discussion about Linux being adopted there today. You must be new here if you haven't realised that Slashdot is a site for technology and IT news; if you want to discuss politics or history there are plenty of other sites for that. It is off-topic here.
As for ranting about the evils of MS, the ethics of MS are entirely relevant to a discussion like this because we are talking about business deals between Chinese entities and MS. The alleged evils of MS *are* in its business dealings. OTOH alleged human rights abuses by China have no bearing on its adoption of Linux because no-one in the west, no blockade, could prevent that adoption - all China needs is one DVD copy or one phone connection to the rest of the world to download it and start distributing it anyway.
If you have an issue with China, why not approach MS youself to persuade them not to do business there? The very fact that you and others might succeed is one of the good reasons why China wants to adopt Linux.
On the other hand, I'm on Ubuntu Linux and I can honestly say that OS and application installation is trivial. Both operating systems have moved on from the historical stereotype portrayed in the grandparent.
If I were going to compare negative features these days, I'd point to Linux's lack of standardisation (binary compatibility and gui toolkits being the most annoying) and Windows' lack of command line control. A decent implementation of kill -9 would be almost enough to get me using Windows; a consistent user experience would be almost enough to make me swear off anything other than Linux forever.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!