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There Is No 'Microsoft of Linux'?
SDenmark writes "Linux Format has an interview with Greg Mancusi-Ungaro, the director of Linux and OSS marketing at Novell. Asked if any company can become the 'Microsoft of Linux', Greg responds "Well, if we ever woke up one day and said 'Wow, Novell is the Microsoft of Linux' or 'Red Hat is the Microsoft of Linux', then the Linux movement would be over." Is he right -- is the open source world free from such possibilities? Greg also discusses the internal Novell migration to Linux."
It's just an OS.
There won't be a Microsoft of Linux until Microsoft decide to release a Linux distribution of their own, which is extremely unlikely to happen. Ever.
Is he right -- is the open source world free from such possibilities?
Yes.
Silence is golden... and duct tape is silver.
what exactly is Microsoft(TM) the microsoft of?
It's like slashdot's turned into some sort of linux site.
No Apple stories in three days
This is a tragedy!1!!!!1!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
I predict Microsoft will make a move to become the "Microsoft of Linux"
Then it stagnated and died, at least on the desktop. The beauty of Gnu/Linux is that it evolves and other distros are taking RH's place.
We are never safe from a company with the look and feel of Microsoft, but we are quite safe from a 95% monopoly.
I'd say that it depends on the definition of "Microsoft" in the context of "The Microsoft of Linux". The answer is yes and no, depending on what's being asked.
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Well, it depends what you mean by "Microsoft of Linux".
:: Microsoft:bar
Essentially, the problem with this is its an analogy with too many unspecified terms
foo:Linux
There is no way to know what "the Microsoft of Linux" is supposed to mean.
What exactly does "the Microsoft of ..." mean? Does it mean you own IP rights to all of your major product lines? Does it mean you are the driving force behind the look and feel of your products? Does it mean you are the only one who decides what features go into your product? Or does it simply mean you have the biggest share of your particular product?
That's very true. And it's probably best if we keep it that way.
This guy's the limit!
Asked if any company can become the 'Microsoft of Linux', Greg responds "Well, if we ever woke up one day and said 'Wow, Novell is the Microsoft of Linux' or 'Red Hat is the Microsoft of Linux', then the Linux movement would be over." Is he right -- is the open source world free from such possibilities?
Linux is only a subset of what open source has to offer. There's much more to open-source than Linux. A pedantic note, maybe, but I'm tired of the "open source = linux" thinking that pervades the business realm and even leaks over into the IT realm.
I pity the foo that isn't metasyntactic
It depends on what part of Microsoft you are comparing it to. If you are talking about their monopoly, probably not. However, if you are talking about their operating system loaded with a bunch of crap, ultra-slow, difficult to use, full of bugs, prone to viruses, then yes, there can definitely be a Microsoft of Linux. I think there already are a couple, but I'll leave the naming of names to others.
A linux company can certainly become huge, like Microsoft. But they'll never get the same level of control. One vendor can remain far ahead of the rest on features and support, but a competitor can easily appear with a completely compatible product.
The only issue would be for proprietary software sold on top of Linux. That would hinder competition. But there will probably never be a proprietary killer app only distributed by one linux vendor on their own distro. And even if there was competitors today will be quick to create a similar application. Today it's not like the environment Microsoft grew up in.
Developers: We can use your help.
If any company starts making enough money by selling Linux distributions, that's not an indication that the movement is "over." It's an indication that the movement is "complete."
By calling somebody "the Microsoft of Linux", perhaps they mean that one vendor is dominant enough to dictate industry standard practices, such as it once seemed would be the case with the Red Hat package manager. While it would certainly be possible for somebody to come along and push things in a certain direction, standards-breaking usually works against your best interests.
Besides, the Linux desktop revolution is pretty much over anyway, isn't it? The vast majority of those who want a *nixy desktop can just buy a Mac these days. There will still be a large cult of die-hards runing Gentoo as their day-in and day-out personal workstation OS, just as there were those in the late 90's who would cling for dear life to their OS/2 and Amiga boxen, but it seems like it's been a couple years since there has been any real appearance of growing momentum behind putting Linux on everybody's desk.
Linux these days is an incredibly well-respected enterprise OS... to the point that it has driven several "real" POSIX-compliant Unices out of existance. But as a desktop solution, it never really advanced beyond the playgrounds of serious geeks, and it doesn't really look to me like it ever will.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I hope one day there will be a Linux based software company that can boast 90% market share. As long as Linux remains OSS, what's to complain about? The Linux Massive company wouldn't be able to do stupid things like forego the inclusion of ODF in "Linux Word".
Oh You POS
Really, because I tend to think of IBM as the Microsoft of Linux. Or maybe the McDonalds of Linux. In any event, they've got the problem solved: There's not much money to be made in putting together a distro. On the other hand, they're raking it in on hardware and services.
Not to point a finger at RedHat... Hell, why not... Anyway I felt RedHat was moving to a point where I felt it was pulling too many proprietary stunts (the updater, the "enterprise" crap, the fragmenting with Fedora, etc) so I switched to Debian. [Disclaimer: this is not a denouncement of RedHat, this was my personal choice, RedHat is still cool, but my leanings are to Debian right now]
I don't know when or how, but if Debian ever starts to lose the balance I like, I'll just switch to Gentoo, or something. Or my own distro, or whatever.
It's not like we're literally going to wake up one day to find that the Kerel has been made proprietary and all the software we use will suddenly become closed source.
Microsoft of Linux as an analogy does not work.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
It's not going to happen. Microsoft manages to keep its position by keeping the barriers to entry high through a bunch of approaches: aggressive marketing, bundling, tying, loss leaders, proprietary formats and APIs, and monopolistic practices.
Open source is about keeping barriers to entry low. If a Linux company had 90% of the market, it would be because 90% of the market actually chose them freely, and they'd only keep that market share as long as they did a good job because anybody can take the system, fork it, and compete.
(I know that Microsoft advocates often argue that people chose Microsoft freely, too, but it's clear that that's not the whole truth. The great majority of their users probably doesn't have a choice, either because they don't know anything else, or because they are locked in in some way.)
The reason that Apple and Microsoft are so much more successful is that there is a single place to go to for Windows or OSX. There is no distribution, just one company. It's not perfect, as witnessed by the upgrade paths of their platforms, but try explaining to a soccer mom or country club dad why you can have two distributions with nearly the same kernel and library versions and yet the software isn't guaranteed to just work.
The idea that a Microsoft of Linux means the end of the 'movement' and that Linux, or the OSS movement is immune to monopoly domination and its attendant arbitrary actions and pricing are NOT the same. Linux could become ( in some mythical future world after Linus Torvalds passes the torch, or with corrupted governments injecting laws to halt open software, or whatever) an OS dominated by one monopoly player. And that would mean the end of whatever 'movement' existed. So it can happen, but it probably won't ( absent that corrupted government thingy, which is obviously possible, since they seem so clearly to want to ), because openness itself is a hedge against it. As long as source is available domination is difficult for one group.
I have nothing to hide. So, why are you spying on me?
Who is the Linux of Microsoft?
.....why do people keep comming up with these silly ideas?
Do they not understand the purpose of Free Software (in the flavor of the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman)?
http://www.mslinux.org/
Can a company use monopoly tactics to artificially raise the price of a product, beyond its natural pricepoint, when that exact same product can be had for free (or by a competitor cheaply) with a bit of extra work?
If you answer "YES" then you believe that a company could monopolize the Linux (or FOSS) market, regarless of free market competition. Somehow, I suspect that outcome borders more on impossible than highly unlikely. --M
linux or windows will become irrevalent in the future
.net where it does not matter any more
people will be using stuff like ajax, java or
I don't think Linux is ready for the mainstream desktop environment, specifically office functions. The desktop environment is still clunky whether you choose KDE or Gnome. It's improved incredibly, even over the last year or so. The pathetic (and sad) part of this effort to gain market share on the desktop means mimicking Microsoft® Windows. Perhaps the solution lies in finding a new and innovative way of handling the desktop. The status-quo is really starting to suck.
Now, instead of being annoyed by the counter-intuitiveness of a UI on Windows, I'm annoyed on both platforms.
Thank goodness for Enlightenment.
My ZooLoo
First off, Microsoft gained their monopoly through questionable and illegal means. They've locked customers into using their products (not just their products, but their LATEST products).
.doc and .xls files the company is pretty much stuck with using Office for the rest of time. OO.o is great, but it doesn't exactly render .docs flawlessly.
If a company has 5,000 users and untold TB of
Linux is, by its very nature, incapable of enforcing such a thing is it not? It's open source, uses open standards (documents, protocols, software). If one day Ubuntu was running with 95% of Linux users all of a sudden broke itself and disappeared off of the face of the planet its users could simply install any other flavour and freely work with their files.
No one should ever be LOCKED IN to a Linux distro like they are Microsoft, and should a given distro reach Microsoft's dominance, it's more than likely that they did it by offering a vastly superior alternative to all other distros and not through shady dealings.
With all of that said, I'm a n00b in the Linux realms so I could be way off.
"Microsoft of Linux" is a vague phrase. What does "Microsoft" mean in that sentence? A distribution that's usable by the masses? A monopoly? Crappy software? Great software? A distribution that's hugely successful? Evil?
There's a strange error in the summary. He doesn't say that it isn't possible, he says that if it happens Linux is pretty much doomed. That doesn't mean it couldn't happen. He's talking about the results, not the possibility, of one company rising to dominance.
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...or at least they want to be. Specifically, the group formerly known as Ximian, who for all practical purposes are in charge now.
Look at their long list of projects that were started because of "Not Invented Here" syndrome, a known Microsoft tactic: GNOME, Mono, etc. etc. the list goes on and on.
Ximian (Novell) are megalomaniacs and they want to take over the Linux space. Let there be no doubt about it.
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Bill Gates: How do you build Linux?
Boy: You cannot build Linux. That's impossible. You can only realize the truth.
Bill Gates: What truth?
Boy: That there is no Linux. It is not you who builds Linux. It is Linux who builds you....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
Sounds like a Borg name.
Microsoft is the microsoft of software, obviously. What does it mean to be the "microsoft" of something, though? I think it means to provide a very specific service: hiding complexity. I'm reminded of Neal Stephenson's analysis of what the Windows startup routine looks like to the user, as against that of Linux. If you're used to a blue screen that says "Here comes Windows! Aren't you happy?" then the screen output while Linux starts up is going to look broken.
What would it mean to hide the complexity of Linux? Ubuntu, Linspire, et. al. sorta do this, but note:
Hidden Linux is not Linux. It's very nature is to be transparent. Linspire and Ubuntu are still Linuces b/c it is still possible to get in there and fiddle with the code. What they hide (or rather, de-emphasize) is simply the 'invitation' to come in and fiddle.
So if being-microsoft means "making it easy to do the lowest-common-denominator things with software" then there will be one of those for Linux.
But if it means "achieving the above by limiting what the user can do, and what she can modify" there cannot be one.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Steve Jobs has not farted in three days. Mac zealots dismissive of investor concerns.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Ponder on that one.. :P
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
events like the kernel panic (sorry, I had to) that was all over this forum earlier this week. How would a truly major period of instability in the kernel affect any potential "player" vendors. Yes, of course, they'll be sticking to older, stable and in-house customized versions. But what if the kernel simply doesn't take the paths that are deemed to be required by corporate vendors? ("You're not implementing that sort of boneheaded thinking into MY precious kernel.") One can imagine the wholesale vendors developing their own unmergable forks. (Think it can't happen? Look at *BSD.) Imagine Novell, Redhat and Google Linux (???) all strutting their stuff about who has the most bad-ass, but bastardized faux-Linux.
Or am I being paranoid?
If we ever get to the point where one company has the level of control over Linux that Microsoft currently has over Windows, then yes, the Linux movement will be over. But it will only happen after all of the active developers have abandoned the OS for something better. That could only happen after a new processor supersedes the Von Neumann architecture.
Commercial customers can bring intense focus on customer needs and an understanding of what mass market consumers want (and of how computer literate they are). In this sense, Linux could do with a sharp dose of the Microsofts if it wants to be more than a small niche on the desktop. Anything rather than the sense I get with some distros at the moment of navigating around a huge building site where everything is in beta and the place is run by whingeing developers who gon't give a stuff about Joe User. The "community" this breeds is hopelessly unrepresentative of the vast mass of computer users and often seems to put a higher priority on simply shipping code than asking what kind of code is being shipped in the first place. As for all the other er er aspects of Microsoft, no thank you. I think you can have one (respect for and focus on the customer) without the other (monopolies and bullying).
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
There isn't now but if a huge concern like dell just stopped farting around and just picked a distro and made dang sure that the printers they bundled or offered for it worked and the monitors were adjusted correctly and the video and sound cards worked out of the box correctly, etc on Linux, that particular distro would start to become the really big dog. I know I would be tempted to get a bundle at a reasonable cost whenever I went to upgrade if the thing worked 100% out of the box, no tweaking needed, and was in the low cost affordable range, to support the notion.
If the games makers saw that dell was serious you would see a lot more linux ports. If the other peripheral vendors saw that Dell was serious you would see drivers that actually worked for most add on doo dads, and etc.
You would have to see them on the shelves right next to similar versions with windows at a *lower* price. They would have to have them prominently displayed on their website, and be more than two token models.
Something like that would work. Waiting for the community to elect a distro "winner" will never ever happen,it just won't, the vast majority of people out in the real world will always just use whatever OS comes pre installed for them whether they purchase it themselves or get it as a gift or get it assigned at work. that's just how it goes now.. And I dare anyone to dispute that assertion.
So, it really is up to the big vendors now. They need to make an executive decision on the matter. And linux being linux I actually don't care which distro they pick, I have come to the conclusion there isn't a whole hell of a lot of differences out there now. You can pick any of the top ten or 20 currently running distro favs and make them work. The differences have gotten to the point that it is minor now.
If Oracle were to buy Novell or Ubuntu or some such, would that make them the "Microsoft of Linux?" My thought is no, not immediately but possibly over time, assuming they didn't botch the merger and stifle the creativity of their Linux team.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
In short, there will never be a "Microsoft of Linux" because the two ideas aren't even comparable. Microsoft is a corporation and Linux is an OS. Since Linux inherently exists in opposition to closed source software products developed by companies such as Microsoft, I don't see a comparison. Furthermore, Linux is just an OS, it's not the Open Source movement, which would only be the other possible comparison to Microsoft. That is, Microsoft is this huge international corporation with dozens of widely used closed source products. The Open Source movement is a international movement with thousands of widely used open source products. The main difference between the two is where the control of the product lies. Microsoft controls every aspect of each of their products. Open Source software control is mostly decentralized. And, if a product reaches a point where there is too much control and not enough freedom with that product, a new open product is generated. Case in point, RedHat was free, and then became commercialized. However, Fedora was the offshoot.
I use Ubuntu Linux on a casual basis. It's nice; 90% the apps I could want, works with 100% of my hardware; no real complaints there.
However, I believe I could sum up my feeling on this subject by outlining a common issue I run into...
A classic conversation could be something like (not reproduced exactly):
Me: "How do I get my back/forward mouse buttons to work in Firefox (like it does in Windows)?"
Friend: "Er, what distro are you running again?"
Me: "Ubuntu...whatever the latest is"
Friend: "Ah. I don't know that one too well...try editing the X-config files"
Me: "Ah, that big scary file that if you screw up renders the pretty GUI bit useless?"
Friend: "yep."
Me: "Well, never mind. I'll pass."
I mean, just give me the one control-panel for crying out loud?! As much as I appreciate the freedom that comes with linux, sometimes it's just not just not worth the hassle! Maybe I'm not l337 enough when it comes to Linux, but I happen to also like standardisation when it comes to some things; system configuration being one of them.
So there you go. Rantings of a Windows boy. Maybe one day I'll "make the switch", but not until I get my god-forsaken 5 mouse-buttons working without manually having to edit random config-files.
Apart from that, it's all dandy! Thanks for listening.
throw new NoSignatureException();
What does it truly mean or what does the author think it means. It obviously is used in a negative context in the article so in that case I think the author means a company which controls the development process resulting in a less innovative, but more financially successful Linux. (lets just put all stupid 'what is Linux' debates aside for a moment).
Who will become the Microsoft of Linux?
The answer is simple, Novell.
Any questions?
I've often said that Debian is the Linux of Linux distros. In other words, it's built very much in the same way that Linux is. No one entity owns it, it has a very distributed and open development process, and it's "more free" than most of the other popular alternatives. So I think in the end, Debian will be at least the basis for the majority of GNU/Linux deployments.
That said, I'm not sure what the Microsoft of Linux even means.
If he means having control of Linux, then I think he's right. A single company having significant control of GNU/Linux would be a bad thing, because it would imply less control for users and customers. And I think control is the real reason why so many people and companies have moved to Linux and Open Source.
If the Microsoft of Linux means having a large market share of commercial Linux deployments, then I think that could be OK. Although I wouldn't expect it to ever get to 90%. For one, I expect the no-cost GNU/Linux distros to remain popular. (Or at least one of them.)
If it means THE company that people turn to when they need Linux expertise, Red Hat was close to being that a few years ago. I saw that as a positive; I'm sorry to see that they've lost a lot of that prestige, relative to other Linux companies.
Anyway, I don't think there will ever be another Microsoft. Just like there will never be another Beatles, despite what had been predicted about the New Kids on the Block, or any other band. The ingredients for their creation within society as a whole just don't exist anymore.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Ponder this if you will...
Microsoft has already said it plans on embracing some level of virtualization. I suspect this will be some form of "Vmware built into windows" approach. They do this and people want to migrate servers onto this platform (Why? Because they will offer amazing price incentives to get people on it of course) and start moving servers. They want to move linux and other *nix servers to it. Microsoft wants this to be easy for them so includes a linux distro they like and probably tailor to the host OS into the VM package.. This way you click a button and POOF linux server on your virtual server architecture box.
Poof, you have Microsoft Linux.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
I've always viewed the term as describing someone as "The evil empire of ..." For example, using it to say that Novell has bastardized the ideas behind Linux to a point where their quasi-mainstream distro contains major parts which are not open source. SUSE no longer offers some of the essential reasons to use and open source distribution: Freedom from vendor lock-in for example.
Novell is the Microsoft of Linux.
Microsoft is the Microsoft of Windows naturally.
I think what you want to be is, in effect, like Switzerland - you want to be the people of unquestionable integrity.
You want to be the people with the technical precision, the people who are neutral, but who are leaders.
You don't want to stand on the sidelines; you want to take positions and take on issues, but you want to try and do it as an ambassador to the community.
All Novell can do, and all Novell really wants to do, is state the facts of the situation, and advocate.
Um, what is this guys stance? I mean really.
A large company who advocates a desktop is most certainly going to influence the direction adoption goes in, is it not? He said it himself, the default is Gnome.
OK, but that's not very neutral. Basically that says to me "we don't care about tailoring to your needs, if you don't know what you want we'll give you Gnome because you can't tell the difference anyway."
How is that any different than Microsoft's customer stance?
as someone else posted earlier in this thread, they should have focused more on their migration methods. If you really want to get businesses motivated to swithing away from MS you need to upfront about the facts of the transition. Tell them what hurt and what was pleasantly painless.
Businesses run by intelligent people will make decisions that may sting in order to get a better position in their marketplace. A company wide transition to another OS is not ommited from that pool of decisions, but no smart company is gioing to make a decision like that without information on what the change entails.
Another thing that bugs me, not just with this article but with all articles of this type, is the marketing analogies of who they are as a company. Businesses have marketing departments. So if your trying to influence a business, tell them the TRUTH, not marketing fluff. It's like these companies keep feeding themselves each others shit and wonder why they have a bad taste in their mouth.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Now if you are talking about Microsoft's marketing only, then that is a different story. I think that is Microsoft's big forte. Bill and Steve could sell two milking machines to a farmer with one cow and take the cow as a down payment. But, then they'd deliver the machines years late, which would just be two fat, ugly milk maids from Poland with big strong hands. It would get the job done, but you'd never want to actually use them.
--
Don't hate me just because I'm right.
Microsoft's ability to maintain it's monopoly derives from it's proprietary API and file formats, not the NT kernel. Microsoft could even swap out the NT kernel for Linux and keep the rest of their OS proprietary, and it wouldn't make life any easier for us Gentoo/Ubunto/RedHat/Suse/Debian/etc users trying to deal with .doc and .xls files. So as far as Linux per se goes, then yeah, some future company could have some kind of Microsoft-like monopoly over computing and incidentally run their proprietary system on top of the Linux kernel.
Now, as far as FOSS in general, it's much harder to envision how a single company could have the same kind of status that Microsoft does today if it's entire system were open source. The only scenario I can think of is if they had some kind monopoly on the hardware or physical network. So, a Verizon/SBC or Intel/AMD monopoly could let you run whatever OS you want so long as you pay them for access or for the processors. I'm not sure that anyone would call either one of these monopolies a "Microsoft" since the nature of it would be so different.
KTHXBYE
I don't think I could count the number of linux gurus I've talked to that praise Nintendo for creating games that are accessible and fun for everyone to play, and then turn right around and complain about linux not penetrating the common at-home user market... and all I can do is blink in astonishment. C'mon guys, would it really kill you to have at least one distro that only required the user to pop it in the CD drive and answer a few simple questions?
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
Why does this come across as similar to "Locutus of Borg"?
Why is Novell choosing Gnome over KDE? Not trying to start a war, but looking for objective answers.
Back in the day, when Red Hat was just talkng about going public, I always wondered why Microsoft never did a port of MS office to the LINUX/UNIX Patform. They did it for MAC and figured they had enough R&D money to be present on every OS of the day. I even thought "MS Linux" was just around the corner. I figured Bill Gates would be everywhere to take advantage of innovation from wherever it would emerge.
Sigh....
Linux Users... Rebel Scum!
--Fan of the Evil Empire
Gates Private Licence that is.....
GUI LINUX (aka SUSE) is moving towards Windows without DOS every day. No CLI. In the end the article headline is correct and Novell are doing just that. SUSE IS the WINDOWS of the LINUX World. ... that is why we use SLACKWARE or FREEBSD.
I read this on the web so it has to be true. http://www.mslinux.org/ I am so glad that there is a version of Linux that most IT managers will embrace without question. Happy Days!
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
Strangely enough, just yesterday I changed my sig to a rant about a group of reasons why Novell pisses me off. Couple that with this article, and the gist is that Novell doesn't give a shit about their customers, so they certainly would be the... wait... Microsoft? Hmmm... maybe they ARE the MS of "Linux."
How can there ever be a microsoft of linux?
Free Linux(Ubuntu, etc.) is as good as money linux(Dont Care, etc.) and money linux doesnt even cost that much.
The question is, wheres the GOOD free windows?
Oh wait..............who needs windows when theres linux?
Will there be a Microsoft of Linux? That depends on your point of view. Is the "MoL" the company or the distributer of software? For the prior, I can not see any company behind any Linux distribution going out to crush any other distribution just because they can or to make billions more dollars. The "distributer of software" could be split up as the "distributer of operating systems" or the "distributer of general software." The latter, there will never be a MoL as that is against open source and all it stands for. For the prior, the closest there will be to a MoL is a dominant distribution. Red Hat was there a few years ago, with as I understood it approximately 80% of the installs Red Hat. I do not know where that stands now. And that is why there can not be a MoL any more then there will be a "Microsoft of Ice Cream": No one knows what flavor the public will be hungry for next.
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Spoken as a true GNU/RMS zealot. Linux is *not* a kernel. It was one in 1991, today it is a system, composed by a kernel and a huge lot of applications and drivers that were laboriously adapted to run around that kernel.
To all the people who think Linux is just a kernel, I say, have you ever tried to migrate a large application, let's say, from HP-UX running csh to AIX running ksh? I have and I know how hard it can be. If it were easy, then why do configure files in automake routinely top one megabyte in size? Now try to migrate every one of the 17828 packages that are available in the standard Ubuntu repositories to some other kernel. Not to mention all the device drivers that have been built in the last 15 years to get hardware to run in that kernel.
No, Linux is not a "kernel". Linux is an Operating System, composed of many different parts. One of those parts is the kernel, another is a set of device drivers, another is the user command shell, etc.
OK, sorry about the rant, I guess I have seen too many Debian user lists... Anyhow, I do agree with you when you say that "There's absolutely nothing stopping a large company from putting a proprietary desktop on to". This fact is evident when you consider that there are several different desktops that run on Linux: Kde, Gnome, WindowMaker, etc. So, why not the Microsoft desktop, with DirectX? After all, the final "X" is already there to prove it's a Unix thing!
Firstly, you could try running a version of Linux that's less than 3 years old, but as the comparison to the now 5 years old XP will be made, I'll grant you that one.
Mostly though, you should understand that compiling programs from source is simply a stupid idea in both Linux AND Windows. No one in their right mind would try to manually compile Firefox for Windows and then try to sort out dependency issues by hand - unless they specifically wanted to spend the time you obviously don't want to spend (neither do I, for the record).
In Windows, you'd download a binary installer, which contains what you need in order to run Firefox. Guess what? The exact same creature exists in Linux. For your RedHat system, it's called an RPM. No unzipping, no untarring. You install software in the exact same way that you would in Windows - either double clicking what you've downloaded, and letting the system handle it all, or you go through a control panel type applet (in Linux, this is your package manager).
You can whine about the "usual replies" all you like, but the fact is, if you can't install Firefox on any recent (last few years) Linux system, you're going out of your way to do something wrong. RPM/APT/YUM/whatever work for major software. They also work for very obscure packages only 5 people on the planet use. You *might* have to play around with source/dependencies if you're trying to run Joe Bob's Personal Fun Program, but again, guess what? Software like this exists for Windows too. Source only, and here's a how-to for compiling it, and here's how you resolve DLL requirements.
I've never seen anyone run into a "graphics lib" requirement for Firefox that hasn't been handled in the background by the package manager, unless they're a) running Gentoo, or b) trying to prove a point that "Linux is hard" by intentionally doing things the wrong way.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
More seriously, this guy is too stuck on the MS commercial model of selling commoditized code. He doesn't "get it". Few biz/commercial people do. The code has a life of it's own, as untameable as the wind.
His argument would have been more convincing 5 years ago when ReadHat was bidding fair to become the MS of Linux. Now he's just 'way late to the party.
this article is not about "what if a linux distro is like windows" but about "what if a linux distributor becomes very powerful, almost a monopoly and starts suppressing competitors?"
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
> I think what you want to be is, in effect, like Switzerland - you want to be the people of unquestionable integrity.
Ahh yes. The unquestionable integrity of hidden bank accounts, tax shelters, war profiteering and Nazi gold. What a jackass.
I read every RH related comment roughly as "See what we want to do is be *exactly* like Red Hat, all the while bashing Red Hat" (e.g. "influence but not own Linux, switch to Gnome default, Burlington Coat Factory customer references" etc).
Also, I doubt there's any such public proclamation of Red Hat aspiring to be the M$ of Linux that meant "the unstoppable soul swallowing juggernaut whore goddess". They probably meant "successful". And analysts need a metaphor of success, so they don't have to think so hard.
These guys should worry about being the "Novell of Linux", whatever that is beyond a cautionary tale, But it will at least be *their* tale.
...would be that copy of the Windows 2k source code that is running around freely on your favorite p2p network !
Humour apart :
ReactOS and Wine would be closest thing to a Linux of Microsoft (namely an opensource implementation of a NT compatible system).
But they aren't done by Microsoft.
Note: I didn't check the ed2k links, I don't know if they are fake or guenuine
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Depends on what kind of revolution you are thinking of. There is the cuban or russian-type revolition, which happens quickly. I never believed that Linux will do huge leaps in market share, within a time-frame of only a year or so. It is however true that many Linux zelots hoped for such a revolution. One of the reasons, I don't believe in an ambush-lite takeover of linux, is a fellow mac zealot I know. He is totally convinced that real soon, people will finally see the light and will buy Macs. He is informing me of this gospel since 1990. It is always some new innovation or new product linup that is supposed to spark the revolution. But it never happens. The same is true for those who have promised "the year of linux on the desktop" every single year since 1998.
But there is another type of revolution, like the industrial revolution or the sexual revolution. Such revolutions are often only recognized in hindsight, since they take decades to complete. And this may very well happen with free software in general.
What if Micrsoft chucked NT Kernel and built an OS using the Linux Kernel?
\
I even has it's home edition called ubuntu, and is way more stable on server and destop versions, has way faster development, and the support is quite good when you are polite enough and ask the right person.
Thanks for giving linux the credit it deserves by admiting that having our on M$ is what makes us better
I'm positive, don't belive me look at my karma
That's it. Redhat has always been the Microsoft of linux.
It has been a while since I checked up on the GUI of those distros, but then again, my point is that the typical slashdotter greatly overestimates the computer literacy of the general populace; I have enough trouble explaining the fisher-price interface of Windows to family members. I checked some recent screens and it looks fairly intuitive, aside from the initial installation... but then again, even if it seems intuitive to me, I'm certain that many of the people in my family would find ways to become confused by it.
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
I've got all my Unix boxes at work joined to our AD 2003 forest.
And I've got Unix boxes emulating hybrid NT4 DC/Sun NIS domains
My Evolution talks to the Exchange server... and our intranet is firefox friendly.
So uh... why do I need Microsoft again?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I'm sick of the people saying that we should just switch to macs when Apple treats their fans like garbage. Some of us are looking for something other than a new pimp. Apparently appreciationg your freedoms is zealotry and caring about your rights is unfashinable.
But... the future refused to change.
The Microsoft of Linux is obviously Red Hat. Also obviously, Novell would pretend not to know this. Of course, Red Hat's supremacy is dependent on Oracle (and the other major applications) continuing to make it the only supported Linux distribution -- as Mr. Ellison knew when he threatened Red Hat with making his own.
I didn't mean to sound confusing.
The NT4 PDCs are used for small ad-hoc networks not part of the corporate LAN (lab facilities).
The nice thing about Samba is that you can do things like force NTLMv2 even if NT4 didn't support it, for extra security.
Its great when we can have a single-signon type password for Windows, Linux and Solaris in a lab environment.
What's really wicked is that you can also do a Windows 2000 PDC-like thing with LDAP and Kerberos if you're feeling real adventurous, but the extra effort probably isn't worth it since they don't got much in the way of Group Policy editors for the benefit of the Windows boxes. It's an interesting excercise if you want to really "scale up" or muck around with lots of extra LDAP schemas to do other things... but uh the NT4 emulation is good enough for a less than 100 computer, 100 user setup.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
"Make no mistake, X11 is super-duper fast; that's one of the reason it's ran on a variety of systems far, far before Windows was a gleam in Bill Gate's eye"
X11 appeared in 1987, Windows in 1985.
I always find it amazing that people can carry on singing the old song "Linux isn't ready for the desktop". I have installed Linux on at least a dozen home PC's in my town for people who know absolutely nothing about computers, and they all use it without problems every day. I have set KDE for them to look like Windows 98. The really funny part is that they are all just so relieved NOT to be hassled by MS bug-invested OS.
Linux on the desktop? Old news around here.
....publishers begin forcing unsuspecting hardware buyers to use their software. And of course, this would be breaking all theorys based around open source, gpl, gnu etc etc.
g00p.