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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.
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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?
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Microsoft have been incredibly slow to realise that Windows can always go back to being what it was when it first got really successful at version 3.1, a GUI. Most people don't know what an OS even is, and wouldn't be aware of any difference (except increased stablility) if what they bought from Microsoft was a GUI for Linux instead of an actual operating system with GUI built in. Taking this approach (albeit with a Unix core) hasn't hurt Apple's OSX.
AS soon as Microsoft realise this, they can cut their development costs massively, and keep the same sales figures. I have no idea why their shareholders are not demanding this already!
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
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.
IMO, it is currently very difficult to make a profit selling software (or indeed anything distributed digitally) in the Chinese market. Protections against illicit copying (which is rampant) are rarely enforced, and black-market copies are ubiquitious (this goes for Windows, DVDs, music CDs, other software titles). As China evolves these protections will have to be developed and enforced; they'll need them to protect their own content-creators, not just foreign ones. Only then will it make sense for Microsoft to aggressively pursue the Chinese market. Until then, "co-existing" with Linux is the smart strategy to adopt.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
Hell, most of the networks I encounter have Linux and Windows co-existing. Sometimes even interoperating!
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It depends on what regions you're considering, with respect to how many families own computers. Not as many people in the rural areas have computers, but that's offset by them being very prevalent in the cities. Of course, the population of just the cities of China are several times the population of the entire United States. But then again, individuals and families aren't the only computer users. Businesses also require PCs, and operating systems to run on them.
Remember, China is just beginning its growth as a modern country. It's perhaps where the US was in the mid 1800s. It's transitioning from basically a slave-based economy towards a true enterprise economy. It'll be a mature market before you, the US and the EU know it.
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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.
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Easy: Ballmer dance.
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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 2003 Chinese directive that government ministries must use exclusively locally developed or open source software was not just based on perceived better code quality or cost. The Chinese authorities at the time (and probably still now) were very concerned about possible backdoors for US security agencies in US closed source products. IMHO, their concerns have some merit. A Google search for "Lew Giles" is interesting.
Lu Shouqun, leader of a Linux advocacy group believes the Chineese govt should make more use of Linux and open source.
The CSIA (an industry group, likely funded in part by Microsoft) claims (in a "report") the govt preference for open source is harming the software business.
Lu says open source is high quality, low cost, and can coexist with Microsoft, openness is good. Lu cites (but no actual citation info is given, no link, no name, no exact quote, no date, nothing) that someone at Microsoft said Linux and Windows should co-exist.
CSIA says GPL destroys profitability. Lu says they misunderstand the GPL, admits China linux businesses are unprofitable, and claims that community and international collaboration is needed.
CSIA spews FUD... patents might destroy linux. Lu replies that proprietary software faces more patent risks.
Lu says community in China is needed.
.
The other article is pretty much the same thing rehashed and edited down a little.
Pretty much more of the same. Linux/open source/free software advocates say one thing, Microsoft shills say the opposite.
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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.
As of writing, Internet Explorer 6 has 20 unpatched vulnerabilies, one or more of which are marked as highly critical. Firefox has 3 vulnerabilities, with one or more marked as less critical. So yes, Firefox is more secure than IE.
I would not rate a 30-40% webserver marketshare as 'incredibly tiny', and yet Red Hat, the most popular Linux distribution for servers has 0 unpatched vulnerabilities whilst Windows Server 2003 suffers from 8 unpatched vulnerabilities and Windows XP Professional suffers from a full 26 vulnerabilities one or more of which are marked as as highly critical.
How can claim that Linux is less secure than Windows, when it has less unpatched vulnerabilities?
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.
It sure looks as if Microsoft is faced with a lose-lose in China and most likely the other major developing powers. Essentially it boils down to the fact that those powers use piracy as a political tool. The argument is really "Let us use Windows on a pirated basis, or at least a token-cost basis, until our economies are stronger otherwise we will take up Linux en masse and you will lose this huge market forever." What is left unsaid is that as soon as their economies are stronger, these powers will take up Linux or something else en masse anyway. They are never going to make themselves dependent on a US corporation. In the meantime, Microsoft is left doing darn near give-away deals (as in Indonesia) or issuing dinky cutdown editions for these markets that fool no one.
Perhaps what we are really seeing is the beginning of a Microsoft withdrawal from swathes of the world that will accelerate in the years ahead. Microsoft's bastions are North America and Europe. The colony in China turned out to an expensive venture that led nowhere. The locals had other plans. They decided to produce not merely their own software but their own computers too.
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